It is, I know, a statement of the bleeding obvious to say that we must get rid of food poverty. It’s perhaps a little less obvious to argue that one of the key ways of doing so will be to stop using the damn phrase “food poverty” itself. This seems nonsensical, doesn’t it, at a time when the Trussell Trust is reporting that it handed out a record 1.6m emergency food packages in 2018; that it saw a 19% increase in the number of people needing its help.

And yet it’s so. We need to stop treating a lack of access to good food as some discrete disease. We need to start talking simply about poverty.

For the latest issue of Observer Food Monthly I have been investigating the world of so-called social supermarkets: shops selling surplus from mainstream food retail and production at a massive discount to those in dire need. This looks, at first glance, like a case study in food poverty. But, as it was put to me by Gary Stott, who set up the Community Shop group, a prime example of a social supermarket model: “Food poverty creates the idea that there’s just one thing that needs fixing.” Give people an emergency food package, and they can eat. When of course it doesn’t deal with the underlying problems of social exclusion and low wages.

What’s more, the conversation around food poverty is a block to us fixing our broken food supply chain. The fact is this: we pay too little for our food, just 10% of disposable income , down from 20% in 1970. We also expect to continue being able to do so. It’s why our agriculture sector has withered to a point where only 50% of the food we eat has been produced here. (Another 10% is exported.) If we don’t start paying more, allowing our agriculture sector to invest and expand production, we will end up paying so much more in the future, when we are held to ransom by the international markets.

I’ve made this argument to two Labour shadow ministers for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Both said the same thing: we can’t argue for more expensive food, because of all those people using food banks. That’s both cowardly and simplistic. If we engineer a food system to be accessible to those in poverty, then it will become only more deformed and economically unviable. Then we’ll all be in trouble. Instead, we need to get the economics of food in the UK right, while also dealing with the obscenity of poverty.

An example: one reason mainstream supermarket food is so cheap is because the government literally subsidises the cost. Too many employees of the big food retailers are on such low incomes that they have been eligible for working tax credits and now the incompetently managed universal credit; the same universal credit that the Trussell Trust cites as a cause of the explosion in food bank demand that we are now witnessing.

During my reporting for this month’s feature, I came across multiple stories of mainstream supermarket employees who were forced to use social supermarkets to top up their shop because they couldn’t afford the prices being charged by their own employers.

This is madness. It’s also poverty, pure and simple. Don’t get me wrong: this doesn’t mean we need to close down food banks now. But we do need to start seeing them as an emergency way to deal with the brutal symptoms of a disease, not as a cure for the disease itself. It’s not easy. And simply modifying our language by abandoning the phrase food poverty won’t sort it. But it’s a very important start.

• Read Jay Rayner’s report on social supermarkets in the latest Observer Food Monthly, out on 19 May.