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Evidence submission to the Right to Food UK Commission

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Yesterday the Right to Food Commission in the UK published its report for 2026. There is a lot in the report to encourage and much of it supports what my research shows. It was nice to see my Building Resilience report and the evidence I submitted referenced in the final document. I am sharing my evidence submission here (RTF106). I am particularly pleased to see the themes of dignity and the interconnectedness of conditions that shape people’s ability to have the food they need to live their best lives.

Submitted by: Dr Megan Blake, School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield
Evidence base: Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security, commissioned by Comic Relief as part of Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation Programme.

Summary

This submission responds to the Commission’s questions on food insecurity, food support, community-based solutions, social protection, policy duties, monitoring and accountability. It draws on a large-scale independent study of 14,156 lower-income households across England and Scotland, showing that food insecurity is not a series of isolated emergencies but a condition of structural precarity that erodes household resilience over time.

The central argument is that a right to food law must guarantee adequate income, prevent food insecurity, invest in dignified community food infrastructure without substituting for state duties, monitor progress effectively, and ensure that people most affected shape accountability.

1. Introduction: who is submitting evidence and why?

I am Dr Megan Blake, a geographer in the School of Geography and Planning at the University of Sheffield. For more than twenty years, my research has focused on food insecurity, community food systems, poverty, resilience and the everyday conditions that enable or prevent people from accessing the food they need to live well.

I am submitting evidence because the Right to Food Commission is asking not only how people are fed in moments of hunger, but how the UK can reduce hunger and make the right to food a reality by 2030.

This evidence draws primarily on research I completed for Comic Relief, as part of Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation Programme: Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security. Based on a survey of 14,156 lower-income adults across England and Scotland, the report shows that food insecurity is more than a moment of crisis. It is produced through the interaction of income, housing, care, health, transport, local food access, diet, wellbeing and social connection. The report therefore does two things: it diagnoses the conditions that make food insecurity more likely, and it shows why interventions such as food clubs can help when they support capability and infrastructure over time, while remaining secondary to adequate income and statutory protection.

2. Commission question: Food insecurity in the UK — what are the challenges?

The main challenge is that food insecurity is often treated as a temporary emergency, when for many households it is a prolonged condition of structural precarity.

Food insecurity is not only hunger. It is pressure, instability and constant calculation. It is parents and grandparents quietly absorbing hardship so children can eat. It is people stretching food, skipping meals, keeping the heating off, managing debts and making impossible decisions about what can wait and what cannot.

In the survey, more than one in five respondents were either worried about having enough food or were actively food insecure in the three months before the survey. Among those classified as food insecure, 66% reported feeling hungry because they could not afford food and 42.9% reported skipping meals for a full day, not by choice.

However, the challenge is not only economic. Food insecurity is shaped by whether people have the conditions needed to turn food into a secure, healthy and dignified life. Money matters, but so do health, housing, transport, time, care, energy, social connection and the local food environment.

This matters because the ability to eat well depends on more than being able to buy food in principle. People need shops nearby that sell affordable, good-quality food. They need transport to reach those shops when local provision is poor. They need housing that enables food to be stored, prepared and eaten: adequate kitchen space, a working cooker, fridge and freezer, enough storage, safe appliances and manageable energy costs. They need the physical and mental health, time and caring capacity to plan, cook and eat. They also need local community infrastructure that provides support before crisis becomes catastrophic.

Rural respondents reported particularly poor access and lower perceived quality, showing that people can live in regions associated with food production and still be poorly served by the food system.

Food insecurity is also shaped by the conditions inside the home. The report shows that food-insecure respondents were much more likely than food-secure respondents to report poor mental health, poor physical health, being unable to work because of a long-term health condition, and full-time caring responsibilities. Food-insecure respondents were almost three times as likely to report poor mental health and twice as likely to report poor physical health as food-secure respondents. They were also more than three and a half times as likely to be unable to work because of a long-term health condition.

This is why the report describes food insecurity as an ‘architecture of hardship’. The problem is not simply that people lack food, money or skills. It is that low income, weak financial resilience, poor health, insecure housing, transport barriers, caring responsibilities, poor local food access, energy costs and social isolation interact over time and erode people’s ability to cope.

A right to food law must address the wider conditions that make food insecurity likely, rather than treating hunger as an emergency to be filled after it appears.

3. Commission question: What is working to improve access to food? Capacity-building and community food infrastructure

The evidence suggests that what works is not simply the distribution of food, but support that builds the conditions through which people can access, use, share and benefit from food with dignity.

The Food Ladders framework demonstrates how different types of support do different work and must not be collapsed into ‘food aid’: catching people in crisis; capacity building with people and communities; and transformation, where communities reshape local food systems.

The research focuses on food clubs as one important example of capacity-building provision. However, the wider point is not that food clubs alone are the answer. Food clubs, pantries, social eating spaces, community kitchens, cook-alongs, shared cooking facilities, community growing, local voucher schemes and food co-operatives can all create practical routes through which people obtain food, use food, build relationships and participate in local food systems.

These activities matter because food resilience is not only about whether food exists in the system. It is also about whether people have the money, time, transport, energy, storage, equipment, health, confidence and social support to turn food into meals, nourishment, care and everyday security.

The report found that regular and sustained participation in food clubs was associated with better food security. It also identified plausible mechanisms through which food clubs may operate as ‘more-than-food’ interventions: affordable food, social connection, wellbeing, confidence and routes into wider support.

The Commission should not treat access to food as a question of emergency supply alone. It should also ask what infrastructure enables food to become meals, nourishment, care and everyday security. Community food projects should not become a substitute welfare system. Properly resourced and publicly accountable, they can form part of the social and public health infrastructure that makes the right to food real in everyday life.

4. Commission question: Experiences of seeking support from food banks, food pantries and other food services — what works, and how?

Food banks, food clubs and dual use reflect different experiences of hardship, so they should not be collapsed into one ‘food aid’ category.

Free food support, including emergency parcels, cash handouts and food vouchers, remains essential in acute crisis. It provides immediate relief when households have no other option. However, it is not designed to rebuild the foundations of everyday life after prolonged hardship.

The report’s comparative analysis shows that food banks are more closely associated with acute crisis, while food clubs are more often used by households managing chronic precarity from a position of slightly greater stability. A third group, using both food banks and food clubs, appears to be experiencing compounded hardship, including in-work poverty, caring responsibilities and multiple pressures at once.

Food clubs, pantries and similar models appear to help where they provide continuity, choice, routine and a less stigmatising form of support. For households living with ongoing pressure, regular access to affordable food, including fresh and varied food, can help people plan, stretch budgets and reduce uncertainty.

The evidence also shows that these models work socially. Food insecurity is isolating and stigmatising. It damages mental health, social connection and people’s capacity to care for others. The report identifies a ‘buffering effect’: while food insecurity damages wellbeing, active engagement with a food club appears to weaken the relationship between hardship and poor physical health or social isolation.

Food support should not be assessed only by how much food is distributed. We also need to ask what hardship a service responds to, whether it is dignified, whether it improves stability, health and wellbeing, and whether it helps people move away from crisis. Food clubs and community food projects cannot substitute for adequate income, secure work or social protection; their role is to complement statutory provision by helping repair some of the damage caused by prolonged food insecurity.

5. Commission question: What is not working?

The current system is too reliant on emergency response. Emergency food aid cannot, on its own, address the conditions that make people food insecure in the first place.

Food insecurity cannot be solved by handing over food, vouchers or advice and assuming that people’s capabilities have been restored. Many households are living within conditions that repeatedly constrain what they can do: inadequate income, insecure housing, poor transport, limited time and energy, ill health, caring responsibilities, weak local food access, poor cooking or storage infrastructure, social isolation and limited trusted support.

The system also treats food insecurity as an individual problem. This can lead to responses focused on budgeting, cooking skills or behaviour change. The evidence from the report challenges this framing. Many people experiencing food insecurity already demonstrate considerable skill, care and resourcefulness. The issue is not that people lack capability in a simple sense. It is that their capabilities are being worn down by systems and circumstances that make secure, healthy and dignified food access difficult to sustain.

A right to food approach should avoid treating charitable food provision as the solution. It should ask why people are being made reliant on food aid, which state and market systems are constraining capability, and what duties are needed to prevent those constraints from recurring.

6. Commission question: What is the role of social protection, income support and a living wage?

Adequate income is foundational to the right to food.

The research shows that food insecurity is strongly linked to financial fragility. Households unable to afford an unexpected £100 expense were far more likely to be food insecure. This matters because shocks do not have to be large to be destabilising. A broken washing machine, school shoes, a transport cost, a late payment charge or an unexpected bill can push a household into crisis when there is no financial buffer.

The evidence also shows that work is not a guaranteed route out of food insecurity. People in work, including people in full-time work, are using food support because wages and household income do not reliably meet the cost of living. Food insecurity is therefore not confined to people outside employment.

A right to food law must therefore be connected to adequate social security, decent wages, secure work and household costs. Food support can help people cope, stabilise and rebuild, but it cannot substitute for income that is sufficient to live on.

7. Commission question: What policies affect families’ ability to feed themselves and their communities?

Policies affecting food insecurity extend well beyond food policy.

The ability to feed oneself and one’s family is shaped by social security, wages, employment conditions, housing, transport, childcare, disability support, energy costs, local government funding and the availability of affordable nutritious food in local places.

This is why a right to food law should include a duty to assess the food security implications of wider policy decisions. A policy that reduces household income, increases debt, limits mobility, cuts local services, weakens disability support or increases housing costs can also reduce people’s ability to secure food.

The right to food should therefore be treated as a cross-government responsibility, not as a narrow issue for food charities or local community organisations.

8. Commission question: What solutions reach those most marginalised?

The research points to the need for layered, local and dignified support. Some households are in acute crisis and need emergency help. Others are managing chronic precarity and need continuity, affordable food, routine and wider support. Others need opportunities to rebuild confidence, connection, community power and local food infrastructure.

The Food Ladders framework helps identify these different needs and avoid a one-size-fits-all response. It also highlights the importance of ‘rails’: the partnerships, anchor organisations, local authorities, funders, food networks and advice services that hold local support systems together.

For marginalised groups, access must be designed around real lives, including stigma, disability, care, transport, opening hours, cultural appropriateness, rural access, digital exclusion and awareness. People should not have to prove desperation before they are treated with dignity.

9. Commission question: How could a right to food law work in the UK?

A right to food law should not simply state an aspiration. It should create clear duties to prevent, protect and fulfil the right to food, with national government carrying primary responsibility.

This means recognising that food security depends on both household resources and local conditions. People need enough income, but they also need access to affordable nutritious food, transport, time, suitable housing, cooking and storage facilities, social support and services that do not stigmatise them.

The legal framework should include duties across national and local government, with adequate funding and powers attached. Local authorities and community organisations should support delivery but not carry responsibility without the resources or authority to act.

10. Commission question: What should government duties include?

Because food insecurity is produced across systems, accountability must also be cross-system, while remaining clearly anchored in statutory responsibility. Duties should focus not only on responding to hunger, but on building the conditions through which people can access and use food with dignity.

First, a duty to prevent food insecurity, including assessment of how policies affecting income, housing, welfare, wages, disability support, childcare, transport and energy shape people’s ability to secure food.

Second, a duty to ensure adequate income, through social security and wages that meet the cost of living, so that people are not forced to rely on food aid to meet basic needs.

Third, a duty to protect children, carers and people facing compounded disadvantage, including year-round nutritional support and tailored support for households whose caring responsibilities, health needs or living conditions constrain their food security.

Fourth, a duty to invest in publicly accountable local food infrastructure, including food partnerships, affordable food clubs, community kitchens, food co-operatives, growing schemes, advice services and other models that strengthen local capabilities and access.

Fifth, a duty to address unequal local food environments, especially where people face poor access to affordable, nutritious food or lack the transport, services or infrastructure needed to use it.

Sixth, a duty to ensure dignity and reduce stigma, so that food support is accessible, culturally appropriate, non-punitive and designed with those most affected.

Seventh, a duty to support a continuum of provision, recognising that crisis response, capacity building and community-led transformation all have a role in preventing hardship, repairing damage and building resilience.

11. Commission question: How could we monitor the impact and progress of a right to food law?

It is not enough to count emergency parcels. Many people experiencing food insecurity do not use food banks, and some use other forms of support.

Monitoring should include regular national and local measurement of household food insecurity, using robust and comparable indicators with large sample sizes. It should also include measures of diet quality, access to affordable fresh food, wellbeing, social connection, use of different support models and barriers to access.

Monitoring should also examine where local food infrastructure exists, who can access it, and whether it is sustainable. The question is not how much emergency support is provided, but whether people and communities are moving towards stability, dignity, health, connection, adequate income and reduced reliance on crisis provision.

12. Commission question: What accountability mechanism would ensure the voices of those most impacted are collected and acted upon?

People with living experience of food insecurity should be involved in defining problems, designing responses, reviewing progress and identifying unintended harms.

Accountability should not mean listening politely and carrying on as before. It should require institutions to show what changed: which priorities shifted, which harms were recognised, which decisions were amended, and how people’s everyday experience of food insecurity was acted upon.

Local food partnerships could play an important role, but only if properly resourced and connected to statutory duties. Community organisations hold deep local knowledge but should not be expected to carry responsibility without funding, authority or support.

13. Conclusion

The right to food will not be achieved by food parcels alone, nor by assuming that people simply need to cook better, budget better or make better choices.

The evidence from this research shows that food insecurity is a condition of structural precarity. It is produced through low income, insecure work, inadequate social security, housing pressures, caring responsibilities, poor health, transport barriers and unequal local food environments. It damages bodies, minds, relationships and communities.

A right to food approach must prevent hardship, repair damage and build the conditions that allow people and communities to live well. That starts with adequate incomes, secure work, strong social protection and decent housing, alongside accessible local food environments and accountable community food infrastructure.

Food banks save lives in moments of acute crisis, and they remain essential. But we cannot ‘catch’ our way out of food insecurity. A right to food law should be judged by whether it reduces the need for crisis food aid while creating the conditions for people to access food with dignity, stability, connection and hope.

Urban food infrastructures: some reflections and notes

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In early september I attended the RGS-IBG meetings in London. The theme of the meeting was inequalities. it was an excellent theme. So many geographers consider this topic in one way or another.

I was asked to be on a panel discussion. It was a challenge for me. I would not consider myself an urban food infrastructure theorist, necessarily. I have taught urban geography in modules, though not recently (I may add a session on this topic into my master’s food security module this year).

I wasn’t the only panel member, and the audience drove the discussion in new and different ways. I am going to share my notes from the discussion here and end with a few thoughts that came from the discussion and are even less organised.

I wanted to consider three related questions in my opening gambit.

  • First, what comes into view when we approach urban food infrastructure from the perspective of people trying to feed themselves and others?
  • Second, how are these infrastructural relationships and enablements geographically produced?
  • And third, what is specifically urban about them—and who has the power to change them?

So first, what comes into view when we begin with people trying to feed themselves and others?

Eating is not simply an act of consumption. Feeding ourselves and others is part of social reproduction: the continuous work required to sustain people, households and communities. Cities do not reproduce themselves. Urban life is reproduced every day through acquiring food, preparing meals, caring for others and maintaining households.

Much of this remains invisible within urban food policy, where food may appear as retail, land use, economic development or public health. This obscures the work required to turn provision into meals people can eat.

To address this, I want to consider how social reproduction theory and theories of practice may contribute.

Social reproduction fixes our gaze on the multi-scalar connections, power relations, differences and absences through which life is sustained—and what is at stake when that becomes difficult or impossible.

Practice theory helps us understand how it is accomplished. It brings us to the intersections where bodies, materials, meanings, competencies and other practices must be coordinated, showing how infrastructures become usable or unusable and where they might be reconfigured.

Let me explain.

Eating requires people to acquire food, get it home, store it and prepare it around employment, care and health needs. The infrastructure of eating therefore extends far beyond shops and markets.

Nor do these infrastructures enable people equally. They assume money, time, mobility, secure housing, adequate kitchens and the capacity to absorb disruption. Those unable to meet these assumptions must compensate through additional labour, travel, debt or going without.

This is where combining practices and social reproduction matters. Inequalities do not simply affect infrastructure use; they are produced through its organisation. Some lives are supported while others absorb the costs of failure within their bodies, households and communities.

Beginning with people therefore reveals a different problem. The issue is not simply whether food moves through the city or is physically present. It is how infrastructures distribute the resources, labour and capacity required to turn food into meals and sustain life.

It also reveals different possibilities: how food, transport, housing, energy, welfare and care infrastructures might be reorganised together, and the labour of feeding distributed more justly.

This brings me to my second question: how are these infrastructural relationships and enablements geographically produced?

A foodscape does not simply contain food. It is a geographically produced arrangement that organises encounters with food and shapes which forms of provisioning become possible.

Foodscapes are made through everyday practices, but carry the sedimented effects of decisions about investment, land use, transport, housing, retail and welfare. Some actors have considerably more power than others to determine what food is present, where it is located, and for whom spaces of provision are designed.

This means that systems not conventionally recognised as food infrastructure are nevertheless part of the foodscape. Transport, housing, energy, welfare and care all shape how food is encountered and made usable, even though they are usually governed as separate policy domains.

Together, these material, social and institutional infrastructures produce the foodscape itself: what people encounter, what appears available, and what remains absent or hidden.

The food desert debate provides a good example. If the problem is defined as the absence of a supermarket, the obvious response is to introduce one. But this may not provide access to healthy, affordable or culturally appropriate food. It may displace independent retailers or leave underlying inequalities untouched. The map may now show the area as provisioned while the conditions producing injustice remain—or become harder to see.

Foodscapes can also be remade from below. Community organisations and informal networks can reorganise encounters with food, creating trust, knowledge and connection. But they often repair gaps created by markets, welfare systems and public institutions, revealing both infrastructural failure and displaced responsibility.

Infrastructure as assemblage is useful here—not as an inventory, but as a historically and geographically produced set of relationships. It asks what holds them together, whose labour maintains them, whose interests they serve, and who can assemble them differently.

This brings me to my third question: what is specifically urban about these conditions, and who do we mean by ‘the city’?

Infrastructure does not become urban simply by being inside a city boundary. Urban foodscapes are produced through supply chains, labour markets, welfare and financial systems connecting urban lives to other places and scales.

Nor is the city a single actor, and many institutions shaping food infrastructure do not understand themselves as food actors. Local authorities do so through planning, transport, housing, procurement and public health; businesses and property owners help produce the foodscape; and national governments shape welfare, income and regulation.

The power of the city is therefore distributed, relational and constrained. What makes these conditions urban is not simply their location, but the particular ways that density, distance, connectivity, governance and political visibility are assembled in place.

This connects food justice to the right to the city. The issue is not only access to the existing foodscape, but whether marginalised groups have the recognition, resources and power to produce a different one.

Food makes visible how political economy and urban governance enter into bodies, kitchens, care and everyday life. It forces us to ask whose lives and foodways urban infrastructures enable, who can shape them, and what, exactly, makes them urban.

This leaves me with a further question. If the infrastructures that reproduce urban life are assembled across multiple places and scales, but their failures are lived with and repaired through everyday labour, what would it take for the people undertaking that repair to gain the power to remake the foodscape—rather than simply holding an unjust arrangement together?

And then the discussion started …

We had questions about what distinguishes an infrastructure approach from a systems perspective and as assemblages . We also questioned the perspective’s utility for action and change.

I reflect on that here.

For me, a systems view is the god’s-eye view. What connections and elements do we see when we look down from above? This is important. It brings everything together. But systems can also feel natural and predetermined. It is hard to consider how we change a system.

An assemblage is a bit of a hybrid between this and the infrastructure perspective. It focuses on the connections and linkages between nodes; it can blur boundaries between where one part of a system sits and another. Assemblages can draw our attention to connections that may not sit adjacent in a systems diagram. It allows for both sequential and non-sequential happenings and for teleological (ordered) cause and effect, but also for aspects that exist at the same time and create something in that existence that is not there without the connection. It is probably where I would sit (I used the term in my discussion above). But it is a term that is harder for people to understand; it is hard to see. How do you convince people to create new assemblages?

I think an infrastructure view is different from the systems perspective and has different utility. It is a landscape view. From different perspectives, we see what matters in wider systems for different people, and we can more easily consider how that landscape has changed over time and how history is sedimented in it. We can see and feel how it has been designed, and so can be redesigned. We can see how our collective values are materialised in that landscape through the material and immaterial infrastructure we have built and how that may create difficulty for some that is not experienced by others. This is often hidden in the other ways of understanding urban (food) space. This perspective brings the assemblage into view, including what is present and absent.

This framing gives the infrastructure perspective further utility that the other two ways of thinking I’ve touched upon do not have. When you can situate yourself, or someone else, within a landscape, they (or you) can begin to see how we are all part of that landscape and what our roles are in remaking it through our everyday actions and decisions as we navigate it. It offers a way to create change.

At the end of the session, further questions came to mind. I keep hearing the term food as infrastructure, and a panel member used it too. I began wondering if we need to distinguish between food as infrastructure and infrastructures of food.

The latter seems easier to grasp; these are the infrastructures that enable food to be eaten. These are the elements that shape how we get and have food, and the inequalities that can emerge from them.

Food as infrastructure makes me think more specifically about questions concerning what food is. Is it nutrients and calories, a commodity to be sold and profited from, a connector of people, a way to express care and other values such as thrift, environmental concern, or something else? Food-as-infrastructure thinking, I think, can make us consider how we ontologise food. This matters because connected infrastructures then reflect, inhibit or enable specific ways of living.

Launch of ‘Lets put hunger to bed’: A new campaign from Comic Relief and Sainsbury’s

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Since 2022 I have advised Comic Relief and Sainsbury’s on the Nourish the Nation Campaign. This campaign has now ended, but been replaced by ‘Let’s put hunger to bed’. I was asked to speak alongside Simon Roberts (CEO, Sainsbury’s) and Samir Patel (CEO, Comic Relief) at the celebration event hosted at Sainsbury’s headquarters. I wanted to share my talk.

Paula’s story is one covered in The Bread and Butter Thing’s podcast. These stories from real people who use their food clubs cover a range of topics and are very insightful. The other people mentioned are from interviews being conducted as part of a current research project looking at the impacts of climate induced price inflation on UK households who are already struggling to have the food they need to live thier best lives.

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.

Here are the links to both Sainsbury’s and Comic Relief’s materials about the new fund.

You can find the research here, and another blog post where I talk about it a bit more.

Building Resilience: UK Food Clubs and Food Security

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I’ve been poor for so long that I’ve learned to live on one main meal plus one snack a day. I think most people would class that as ‘skipping’ a meal, but for me that’s just normal, and has been for many years now.’ (Non-Food Club User, YouGov survey, 2025)

In May and June 2025 I worked with YouGov to conduct a suvery of more than 14,000 UK households with earnings of <£40K and who lived in areas of greater deprivation (IMD quintiles 1-3). Comic Relief, as part of Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation Programme, funded this research (UoS Project 12570).

The report of the findings, titled Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security, is published on Comic Relief’s website.

This video, produced using Notebook LM, covers some of key highlights from the report.

In addition to specifics about the survey and methodology and recommendations, the report contains five substantive sections. These are:

  1. Analysis of food insecurity among the respondents.
  2. Analysis of food club use and survey respondent engagement.
  3. Analysis of the impacts of food clubs.
  4. A comparison of food club users to those who use no services, food bank users, and those who use both services.
  5. An analysis of why people stop using food clubs

Coverage of the report has included BBC radio interviews highlighting what food clubs are, an article in The Grocer, and two linked articles in The Guardian by Patrick Butler. These later highlight the elements of the study that demonstrate the difficulties rural people on low incomes face in accessing food.

The study makes recommendations for the government and provides evidence that local authorities can use when planning and implementing the new three-year Crisis and Resilience fund. Councils are now producing plans to implement the fund, and some have begun to signpost its resources. See, for example, how Sheffield City Council is implementing both the Crisis and Resilience (through Welcoming Places) elements of the funding.

The report’s findings are also likely to be useful to charities as they consider how to help their communities. This campaign raised over £26m and supported more than 2.4m people facing food insecurity, of which £7.7m went toward supporting 598 food clubs (see the impact report for more detail and this report by the Tavistock Institute.

The food club model is widely seen and experienced as impactful and life-changing, providing preventative and reparative support for households experiencing ongoing food insecurity as a result of financial precarity. It successfully assists those in need, while complementing, rather than replacing, emergency food banks. Food clubs help households stretch limited budgets, improve access to nutritious food, provide a welcoming space for social connection and create pathways to wider support services. (Tavistock Institute, 2026).

Examples of food clubs that were funded through the Nourish the Nation funding and how they are drawing on the Food Ladders incude:

Sainsbury’s and Comic Relief have launched a new campaign, Lets put hunger to bed, that builds on the foundations of the Nourish the Nation campaign and was informed by findings from this report. According to Comic Relief:

Our aim is to help end child and family hunger, ensuring families have the stability, resources and dignity they need to thrive. We will do this by supporting community-led organisations, with the aim to:

  1. Improve children and families’ health and wellbeing through access to good, nutritious food
  2. Strengthen family resilience to crisis and hardship through wraparound support
  3. Support longer-term change by bringing together communities, funders and decision-makers, and by advocating for policies that better support families.

This programme recognises that child food insecurity does not exist in isolation. Families are affected by wider pressures such as low income, insecure housing and rising living costs. Alongside practical support, the programme aims to improve the systems and policies that shape families’ lives.