SIR – Do those modern day Gradgrinds John Hall and Philip Bird really think people would choose to turn to foodbanks for help if they had an alternative.

As to Mr Bird’s description of a mother wanting milk for her child’s cornflakes as a ‘silly woman’, words almost fail me.

Of course she could make porridge with water, but has he never heard of growth deficiencies in children like rickets? Mothers know what he clearly does not – that the cause is a calcium deficiency which is most easily remedied by a regular intake of milk.

Messrs Hall and Bird remind me most of those Victorian moralists who criticised the victims of the Irish famines for dying of hunger when all the time they could have survived on a nourishing soup made from the rotting remains of blight afflicted potatoes.

Brian Holmans, Langley Road, Bingley