Paula described going from what she called a ‘normal life’ to not being able to buy a birthday present for her granddaughter after her husband suffered a brutal attack that left him unable to work.

Then she said this:

‘By the first Christmas after the attack, we were on our knees. I remember we had a loaf of bread and a packet of chicken crisps for Christmas dinner.’

What struck me about Paula’s story is how quickly an ordinary life can become fragile.

I’m a geographer at the University of Sheffield, and my work looks at how food insecurity is experienced in everyday life — not just as hunger, but as pressure, instability, and the erosion of resilience over time.

For the research with Comic Relief and Sainsbury’s, we surveyed more than 14,000 lower-income households across the UK to better understand the role food clubs play in people’s lives.

And what we found was that food insecurity is rarely a single crisis.

More often, it is a slow wearing down of people’s ability to cope.

A bereavement.
A health problem.
Rising costs.

Hours being cut at work.
Caring responsibilities.

And slowly, the foundations underneath everyday life begin to weaken.

One woman we spoke with —Donna — was in her forties. Her husband died the previous year, and she described struggling deeply with her mental health afterwards. Her adult son had moved back home because he was undergoing cancer treatment. They were both working, but things were still incredibly tight.

Donna also has Type 2 diabetes and needs to eat regularly because she takes insulin.

She talked about how, before joining the food club, she would skip meals so there would be enough food for her grandchildren, who live with them part of the week.

And then she said something very simple:
‘Kids come first, definitely.’

I think that sentence captures something very important about food insecurity in Britain today.

A huge amount of hardship is hidden.

Parents and grandparents absorb it quietly.
They stretch food.
Skip meals.
Keep the heating off.
Manage debts.
Make impossible calculations about what can wait and what cannot.

Donna carefully timed her heating so that when the children were there, they would at least be warm.

She talked about how transport costs could wipe out the money she needed for food.

She talked about making meals stretch with potatoes and soups.

That is not simply budgeting.

That is survival planning.

Again and again in the research, people demonstrated enormous skill, care, and resourcefulness.

One of the central findings from the study is that food insecurity is not simply about a lack of food.

It is what the report calls an ‘architecture of hardship’.

Housing.
Transport.
Health.
Energy costs.
And the constant struggle of trying to hold everything together.

These pressures interact and accumulate over time.

Importantly, the research also challenges a lot of assumptions.

First, people often imagine food insecurity as something that affects people outside of work.

But we heard from nurses, carers, pensioners, parents, and people working multiple jobs.

Second, the issue was not that people did not know how to cook or budget.

Many households experiencing food insecurity were already highly skilled at coping.

The issue was that people were trying to manage impossible pressures for prolonged periods of time.

One of the important findings from the research was that food clubs and food banks are not the same thing — and they are not competing with each other. In the report, I describe this through the Food Ladders approach: different forms of support helping people at different moments of hardship and recovery.

Food banks provide emergency support during an acute crisis.

But food clubs often operate differently.

They provide continuity.
Choice.
Fresh food.
Routine.
Social connection.
And importantly, dignity.

Donna described how the food club meant she no longer had to skip meals herself because there was enough food in the house for everyone.

And because she was eating more regularly, she was better able to manage her diabetes and be there for her son’s children.

That is important.

This is not just about food parcels.

This is about people’s physical and mental health.
Their capacity to cope.
Their ability to care for others.

Another woman, Amy, described how the food club helped her multigenerational household of five women, ranging from aged 8 to 82, maintain access to vegetables and fruit that would otherwise become too expensive.

She talked about cooking collectively, sharing responsibility but also sharing food with other struggling families in the village.

What comes through is not dependency, but active care, skill, and mutual support.

That matters because resilience is social.

One of the strongest findings from the research was what we described as a buffering effect.

Food insecurity damages wellbeing across the board — physically, emotionally, and socially.

But people actively engaged with food clubs often appeared less isolated and more supported than we might otherwise expect, given the pressures they were under.

Both Donna and Amy described the people at the food club as becoming ‘practically a family.’

And I think that language matters.

Now, I do want to say something important here.

Food clubs are not a silver bullet.

No community organisation can solve poverty on its own.

No volunteer network can compensate for inadequate incomes, insecure work, rising housing costs, or weak social safety nets.

And this room reflects something very important: there is no single model that solves food insecurity.

Emergency food aid matters.
Community food projects matter.
Advice services matter.
Schools matter.
Local authorities matter.
Retailers matter.
National policy matters.

Different organisations are responding to different parts of the hardship equation.

But what food clubs help us see is that resilience is not built through food alone.

It is built through relationships.
Through continuity.
Through dignity.
Through creating spaces where people feel recognised and supported rather than judged.

And one of the findings I found most hopeful was that people who engaged with food clubs more regularly and over longer periods were more likely to be food secure.

That matters because it suggests we are not simply seeing emergency relief.

We are seeing the possibility of stabilisation.
Of recovery.
Of rebuilding.

And this matters enormously for children.

Because ultimately, well-fed children depend on well-supported adults and well-supported communities around them.

They need adults who are not constantly exhausted, anxious, isolated or forced into impossible trade-offs.

And that means tackling hunger is not just about responding to emergencies after they happen.

It is about building the conditions that allow people to live with dignity, stability, connection, and hope before a crisis becomes catastrophic.

That is why campaigns like Let’s Put Hunger to Bed matter.

Not simply because they help people eat tonight — though that is vitally important.

But because they help create the foundations from which people and communities can begin to rebuild resilience itself.

Thank you.