The government has 5 missions:  Kickstart economic growth, Take back our streets, Break down barriers to opportunity, build an NHS for the future, and Make Britain a green energy superpower.  Food security is imbricated with all these pledges. 

Economic growth means good jobs and good jobs need people who can do them. This means having healthy people and being healthy rests on being food secure.

If you are food insecure, you are also isolated.  In communities where people are isolated, there is also greater fear of crime, disaffection and anti-social behaviour.  If we are going to take back the streets, we need to make spaces for communities to grow within them.

We know that children learn better when they are nourished.  Yet too many children live in families struggling to just eat, let alone provide the nourishment needed to build healthy bodies and minds.  It isn’t right that in a country as wealthy as this, so many of our children do not have the best chance that this wealth offers. 

Too much of NHS resources are taken up with treating diet-related illness and the issues linked to social isolation.  People with healthy diets and strong social networks live better and independently for longer, even with underlying health conditions.

If we allocate farmland to producing green energy, we are not producing the food that sustains us all.  We must ensure that we take a systems view so that our energy needs do not undermine our food security in the long term. 

Food insecurity in the UK is at an astonishing rate.  According to the FSA government statistics, in autumn 2022, 1 out of every 4 adults experienced low or very low food security at some point in the previous 12 months—meaning they were frequently cutting back on portions, skipping meals, or in some severe instances, skipping meals for whole days. Nearly half, 46%, of people with household earnings of less than £32K are food insecure. More than 1 in 3 adults, 36%, who have at least 1 child are food insecure- This vulnerability increases for those with 3 or more children. In areas in the most deprived quintile, two out of every five, 40% of adults are food insecure. 

My research focuses on improving people’s ability to have the food they need to live their best lives and how places—the communities where people live—can foster health and well-being or create barriers that isolate and disable. 

With this in mind, and building on the UN’s 4 pillars of food security and resilience theory, I have created a framework called food ladders to help structure how people and organisations (public, private, and third sector) can collaborate in local places to increase the resources that are needed to be food secure.  (hand out materials).

The UN sees food security as more than just a financial issue.  Food access is financial, but it is also linked to legal and structural barriers.  Food security is also about availability—the food people need for a healthy and fulfilled life, which is available where they live without undue stigma, stress, and struggle.  It is also concerned with utilisation—do people have resources, including money, knowledge, know-how, tools, and mental and physical states, to utilise the available food they can access?  And fourth, is this all consistent and sustainable for the future?

When you are wealthy, you can have healthy meals delivered, but this is not an option for most of us all the time. We need other resources like having a shop we can walk to, an able body that lets us carry our food home, a home with a kitchen and tools that work, knowledge about what different foods are and how to cook them, and the head space to be able to do all that. 

Health is negatively impacted when people are food insecure, leading to a downward spiral of deeper food insecurity.  Repairing is much easier when people are not in crisis or have never been. 

How we organise food support makes a big difference to who and how people use it and what they can get from itFood gets people in the door.  When they come back, more support will be provided.  So many of the organisations I have worked with talk about how this.   Yet, we know that one of the most significant barriers is getting people the support they need, and there is a lot we still don’t know.  But what I do know is that there is a big difference between a food club and a food bank or a social eating space and a soup kitchen, and this has to do with how values are expressed through the ways that food is made available.

The Food Ladders offer a three-rung approach to capitalise on these differences. 

1. Catching for those who need immediate support, but we don’t want people to keep coming back to this rung. What we want is for people to move to rungs 2 and 3. 
2. Capacity building enhances the assets and resources people and communities already have and contributes to those that they don’t
3. And finally, self-organising activity that increases sustainability and removes or redistributes vulnerability to make a fairer society. 

One organisation (of many) I work with, TBBT, facilitates food clubs across 124 community locations, mainly in the north of England.  We did a survey with members that resulted in more than 9k responses.   We found that as a result of using the club, people reported

1. Increased fruit and veg uptake
2. Cooking more healthy food at home
3. They also get involved in food talk with club members and build friendships.  The majority say they feel less alone and feel more involved in their communities. These friendships turn into mutual aid. During lockdown, people shared advice and checked in with each other through WhatsApp groups. 
4. The majority had not used any food support before using the food club, but of those who had said they used a food bank, most said they used them less frequently or stopped using them altogether. 
5. We know that when we have thriving communities, the fear of crime decreases.  Food activities such as food clubs and social eating spaces support thriving communities.  To take back our streets, we need to make space for people on those streets to intermingle and eat together.  

Despite this and the increases in these activities, our communities are dominated by interventions that do not increase food security capability.

To facilitate food ladders, we need:

1. More resources and industry collaboration for community food programmes that don’t reinforce the status quo but instead build capabilities at rungs 2 and 3. 
2. A national mandate and funding for local food strategies.
3. Investment in social development programmes to ensure that people have the capabilities to live a healthy life.
4. Adequate incomes that offer living wages and advancement opportunities, with a safety net for those who cannot access work.
5. Free school meals for all children in state schools would be great, but at a minimum, lifting the earnings threshold should be a priority.
6. A review of business rates such that those businesses that predominantly offer healthy foods are not disadvantaged because they have more risk compared to those who offer few healthy foods. 

And finally, I offer a plea for better data with larger sample sizes.  Without understanding, we cannot produce insights that lead to change.