Category Archives: Geographies

Blog posts by geographical focus

The living wage? A view from a discussion.

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What are your thoughts? I have some views, but I am curious about what the hive mind thinks. I recently engaged in a thought-provoking discussion with charity trustees focused on supporting struggling individuals. Our conversation centred around the challenges related to wages and their broader impact.

One trustee highlighted the charity’s struggle to maintain wages in line with the cost of living to ensure employees earned the minimum wage. This led to tough decisions such as cutting back, making redundancies, and reducing certain services to cope with financial constraints, hindering expansion and sustainability efforts. Most funding comes from grants, yet providers often prioritize immediate costs over long-term sustainability in funding decisions.

Another trustee, a company’s managing director, shared concerns about the constraints of the minimum wage. They expressed a preference for employing more individuals at a lower rate to bolster the company’s future prospects.

Both trustees emphasized the importance of not increasing taxes and suggested higher earnings thresholds in the benefits system. They proposed the idea of paying lower wages to employees, with earnings supplemented by the benefits system, aligning their perspectives despite leading different entities—a business and a charity.

These insights shed light on a pressing issue: a significant portion of working adults—25%—struggle to afford sufficient food regularly, leading to food insecurity. Work status no longer guarantees food security, with negative health outcomes stemming from stress, isolation, and poor diet exacerbating the situation. The resulting health challenges further complicate maintaining food security and stable employment, consequently increasing reliance on charitable services.

The dilemma prompts reflection on sustainable solutions that address employee well-being and organizational viability, underscoring the intricate interplay between wages, social support systems, and community welfare. I’ll keep my views to myself for now, but please share your thoughts.

Ultra Processed Food, Stomach Share, and the Problem of Food Contexts

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Ultra processed foods are in the news more and more. A recent meta-study found there are a myriad of health issues linked to diets comprised primarily of such foods. When thinking about the level of processing, foods are typically categorised into 4 groups: unprocessed or minimally processed, processed culinary ingredients, processed foods and ultra-processed foods.

Processing is not a bad thing in and of itself. Pickling, fermenting, canning, even chopping and cooking are processes. We process things to turn them into food at home, in restaurants and in factories. Ultra-processed foods are distinctive in that they change the nature of the original ingredients, such that very little of the original whole food is left, and they include chemicals that you would not find in an ordinary kitchen. These include emulsifiers, artificial colours and flavours, stabilisers, sweeteners, and other additives to make them taste better and last longer. They also are fatty, salty or sugary and lack dietary fibre. What we might think of as empty calories.

Ultra-processed foods are also less expensive and, because they last longer than fresh foods, are less risky for a tight household budget. But we pay for this low cost in other ways. Individually, we pay for this food with our health. We also pay collectively, if somewhat unevenly, for it with the environment. Ultra-processed foods drive mono-crop production that undermines ecosystems and harms biodiversity. The processing is also energy-intensive and dependent upon petrochemical inputs, thereby contributing to climate change.

We can tell people to stop eating these foods, but educational campaigns won’t work on their own. People need to have the capability to eat differently. If those foods that are better for you are not available in the place where you live or they are too expensive then all that the education will do is create further feelings of guilt.

Ultra-processed foods are a key part of a system that rewards producers for creating these foods in the form of profits now, whilst undermining our global food security now and into the future. Because this is a systemic problem we need systems solutions that intersect at all points of the supply chain and operate at different scales. Introducing disincentives for the production and sale of ultra-processed foods, shifting to agroecologiecal farming practices, and re-introducing these better foods into neighbourhoods all need to be considered.

I recently participated in a webinar by Healthy Diets Healthy Life (HDHL) as part of the European Commission’s Bioeconomy Changemakers festival. In addition to learning about HDHL and hearing two other speakers talk about ultra-processed foods from a bio-economy and a nutrition perspective, I talk about the contexts within which people access and purchase food. My section starts at about 38 minutes in.

webinar on ultra-processed food

So what can we do right now? We can pressure government to put constraints on the way those in the food sector operate and provide incentives to act in a way that is better for both health and the environment. Individually, we can also try where we can to introduce more foods into our diets that replace the ultra-processed foods we currently eat. As a society, including commercial organisations, we can also support initiatives that help people by expanding their access to and knowledge of those foods that are better for them, which do so in non-stigmatising ways. I talk about two such initiatives in the video.

Let’s talk about Food Deserts.

Video

I am frequently asked to explain what a food desert is. I thought I would make this short video to provide an understanding of how I approach the issue of food deserts. I have written more about them in this post about a report I was involved in, and this post is an extract from an Encyclopedia chapter that I wrote concerning food justice and foodscapes.

A short video about food deserts and how they come about from a consumption perspective.

People make rational choices within the constraints of their choice sets. Choice sets are constrained by the resources they have at their disposal, such as skill, time, mental and physical health, and money. These choice sets are also constrained by the physical and social conditions of the place in which they live, broader institutional contexts and their own social positionalities.

When there is a concentration of people making similar decisions based on similar circumstances, demand for an item, such as healthy food, decreases.

At the same time, food retail operates within a system where profit-making is the main priority. When an item ceases to have sufficient demand to maintain its profitable status, it is usually dropped from the range of products offered. Shops close when the ability to profit at the store level is insufficient compared to other store locations.

Slide demonstrating the effects of living in a food desert

What happens is that places become hollowed out, and foodscapes are degraded. For those who live in these places, the struggle to manage increases. When people are facing a struggle, their physical health suffers, but so does their mental health.

There is much a supermarket can do to support people to access the food they need. For example, be willing to take a loss on some food items because they are important, keep a location open and provide low-cost but healthy food items because that is what people need and consider not the profitability of a single store or product line. This might involve asking what level of growth or profit is enough? Importantly, supermarkets have recently made decisions to limit their profits due to the cost of living crisis, so there is room for manoeuvre in this space.

Source: This is money. 7 May 2023

But this is not something we should just leave to the supermarkets. For a transformed food system, we also need to generate diverse foodscapes. This means providing multiple avenues for accessing food that extends beyond and reduces our dependence upon supermarkets.

Reparative Horizons for a food secure future: Call for abstracts RGS-IBG annual international conference

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We are requesting expressions of interest to join a paper session at the RGS-IBG sponsored by the Food Geographies Research Group.

How do we make reparative horizons visible for communities and households in food crises?

The current contexts within which people eat, survive and support each other are structured to reproduce the inequalities that produce vulnerability to food insecurity. While we cannot undo the past, we must learn to identify these structuring features and envision reparative horizons characterised by imagination, aspiration and social justice.  To move between the present and the horizon requires an active mapping of the spaces in-between–or transitional spaces– that allow people to navigate toward those horizons.

To ensure that these futures are socially just, those vulnerable to food insecurity need to be included in the visioning and production of these horizons. Yet placing additional demands on those who encounter issues with food security and its associated isolations introduces further burdens in an already over-burdened and under-resourced life experience. As a result, the immediate occupies the mental and physical spaces of survival. As such, these individuals and their communities often struggle to envision their participation in a good food future. This affects both those living with and those supporting issues surrounding food security. In this session, we ask how we can envision, reveal and create those paths and maps that allow socially just visions of sustainable and food-secure futures to take shape and take place.

We invite empirical, theoretical, and conceptual papers around the following questions, although other ways of approaching the subject are also welcome.

  • What is the role of imagination and creativity in producing these horizons and the landscapes that lead to them? 
  • What role do intermediate spaces play in creating transitions toward socially just food futures?
  • What is holding people and places back from envisioning these reparative horizons and producing the interstitial spaces between the present and these futures? 
  • How can isolation be a barrier to envisioning food-secure futures, and how might the community be mobilised to materialise reparative horizons and the spaces between the here and now and the there and then? 
  • How might we rethink our approach to researching in and with communities to understand and co-create these interstitial and horizon spaces and the maps that help us navigate between them?

We are hoping for 15-minute, in-person presentations with plenty of time for discussion. Please send a title, 250-word abstract and your full contact details to Megan Blake m.blake@Sheffield.ac.uk and Ollie Chesworth ochesworth1@Sheffield.ac.uk by 16 February. Please include “RGS reparative food horizons” in the subject. We will aim to inform those accepted for the session by 23rd February and will send you the link you need to submit your abstract.

AC2024 will take place in London at the Society and Imperial College London and from Tuesday, 27 to Friday, 30 August 2024. 

Please note the RGS participant regulations:
“Delegates will be limited to ONE paper presentation and ONE panel/workshop contribution, OR, TWO panel/workshop contributions. The role of discussant is included as a panel/workshop contribution”  https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/call-for-sessions-papers-and-posters/guidance-for-presenters