Category Archives: UK

Food insecurity is not a competition.

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I give a lot of talks and interviews about food security. Last week I gave 2; the week before, I gave one; and at the beginning of January, I gave another. I am grateful that people what to hear what I have to say and that it is, hopefully, helping in the fight to get people to listen to the issues that people are facing around food security.

Food insecurity exists in wealthy economies where there is enough food to feed everyone, but it is not available to everyone. Food insecurity is not just something that people somewhere else experience, be they in war-torn or poor countries or places where there has been a disaster. I am not trying to diminish the experience and trouble people in these “other” places face. Indeed, their trouble is awful.

But food insecurity is experienced in bellies and in minds and in bodies. It is personal. Food Security becomes geographical when multiple people from the same place are similarly impacted.

Saying that support should go to the “most needy” creates an insidious competition. To get help, you have to prove you fit into this category. Many people don’t see themselves that way–there are always others we can point to who are worse off. Many don’t want to participate in that competition because of the stigma of failure surrounding it–you win but lose simultaneously.

Some who provide help get worried that they are not reaching the “most needy” and create all sorts of barriers and demands for proof. The logic is that if we give this thing to you and someone needier comes along, we won’t have any for them. At the same time, there are worries about “foodbank tourism”, where people go from location to location to get help. They have “won” the race to the bottom and are using this success as a survival strategy. And then are stigmatised and denied because they have successfully proved their need. Note that success here is encouraged and created by those most worried that the “most needy” won’t get what they need. In the meantime, people don’t get the help they need. Some of whom may indeed be the neediest.

This competition is also something that involves judges and competitors. You cannot be both, but you can undoubtedly become one or the other if your circumstances change. But who are we to judge? Food insecurity is experienced individually.

So what do I propose? Let’s stop with the competition. Mutual support recognises that giving and receiving help is not a competition and that everyone can participate equally and in multiple roles.

If you are interested in hearing more. The talk I gve in early January to Gather Movement is here:

Talk about food scapes and food support

The talk I gave about my Food Ladders approach to the EU Joint Health Initiative: A healthy diet for a healthy life can be seen here:

Webinar for @JPI_HDHL

The interview was included in a BBC radio 4 broadcast as part of the Inside Health programme. The interview is available here:

The radio show is really well done. It highlights the advantages of pantries. The women interviewed highlight the stress and anxiety of food insecurity, but also the belief that projects are not for them. Pantries, and now some food banks, provide fruit and veg, bringing in additional support to help people move on from their food services. People are also introduced to new food. These women also demonstrate just how capable they are. These women are not failures. They have strategies and capabilities. They want to feed their families well and can do so.

The data I discuss–and more analysis–is provided in this report I wrote. You can download and read the report here. It also provides some further detail about different forms of support.

Presentation for Gather Movement on Food Security and Asset-Based Approaches

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Presentation to Gether Movement

In early January, I gave a talk to Gather Movement about food security in the UK and how to embed asset-based approaches into food support for communities. Asset-based approaches (or Asset Based Community Development–ABCD) focus on and develop the resources (or assets) that are already within a community before going out to secure additional resources that might be needed to achieve outcomes desired by the community.

Gather Movement is a collection of charities and churches aiming to achieve transformation in thier communities.

After the presentation, there were reflections from food security experts, including Dr Dianna Smith from Southampton University and Danni Malone from the Trussell Trust.

Food for thought: FSA seminar about the food ladders.

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I was invited to give a talk about food security and the food ladders framework to the FSA recently. The seminar was recorded.

The current state of food insecurity in the UK and why we should stop asking “what can people do?”

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I was invited to participate in yesterday’s BBC Radio 4 show Money Box Live. The show included people struggling to make ends meet and worried about what the autumn and winter will bring as the cost of living increases. Front-line service providers talked about what they see on the ground. It was an interesting show with a strong reminder of the struggle that people face. The guests told their stories with dignity, truth and openness. These stories are not, sadly, unique. I have heard them before. We are a wealthy country, yet this is where we are.

This is in a context that is illustrative of our current situation. Dad’s House, which is one of the interviews, is a bit worried about how they will meet the increased demand and continue to provide the great range of community support that is so needed. On the other hand, today’s news reported that the owner of British Gas, one of if not the UK’s major household energy providers, posted billions of profits and are paying dividends to shareholders. One of the interviewees told us, with clear anxiety, how difficult he was finding it to feed his family and how his energy bills have exploded in the recent months and are only set to increase further in the autumn and winter. This is appalling.

The interviewer, like so many do, asked me at the end, “What can people in this situation do?” I knew she was going to ask this question. I was encouraged not to be ‘political’ and just provide advice that households might be able to utilise. I understand where this comes from. There is a clear desire to be helpful and to give people encouragement.

And there are practical things individuals can do. My advice is: Ask your neighbours if they have any tips for how to manage. If you are part of a food club, ask others who are part of that. Share what you do with them. In my research experience, the people living at the sharp end have developed brilliant budgeting strategies and crisis management skills that are effective within the constraints imposed by the wider context and where they live. They know what it is like and have the answers. We should listen to them as they are the experts.

These strategies will help with the stretching, but people and money can only stretch so far. There is only so much elasticity. If the gap is too wide, the money won’t reach and the people will break. This is happening now. I fear for the winter.

When discussing wider contextual changes or ways to intersect with opportunities, that is where academics, service providers and industry experts can provide advice. Martin Lewis is an excellent example. Some of what he says will be relevant, and some won’t. Just take from his toolbox and tell your friends.

The point of this blog post really is to interrogate that question just a little bit more.

This question always makes me uncomfortable because I see it as individualizing what is now largely a social-political-economic problem. It somehow implies that people should be doing more to make their money stretch in this time of a cost of living crisis.

What I want to say in response to this question is:

Push back. Write to your government representative. Join a union if you can. Support the unions if you can’t. Organise one if your sector does not have one. This collective engagement is the opposite of individualization. If we collectively demand better wages and better working conditions, our lives will improve because that will become normal. If we stay quiet or divide ourselves, things will only get worse. Don’t believe the hype. Trickle-down does not ever work and failure is more common than success in business. Very few are actually, truly self-made. Believing you will be the one to succeed where others have failed is highly unlikely. Good on you if that happens, but in a socially just society, it should happen anyway if you have aspiration and drive, regardless of what wages are being paid. So why not live a better life along with your neighbours than suffer on your own? There are clear examples of people achieving individual success in places where the safety net works as it should and where wages and services are sufficient (see for example Sweden).

Individualisation is a neoliberal tactic and, as such, is just as ‘political’ as statements about collectivization. But individualization has become normalised and is perceived as a-political. It is absolutely not. Individualisation is also harmful. It breaks people down and isolates them. It makes them vulnerable to crisis. It creates division and then imposes hierarchies that stigmatise and cause shame. This settles into people. It makes them physically ill and contributes to a further cycle of food insecuirty.

Collective action, mutual support, and community are not the same as state control of everything. It is not communism as far-right cheerleaders would have us believe when they tell us we must sacrifice for the ‘common good’. There is no freedom in hunger.

I always find it ironic that those who dogmatically subscribe to neoliberalism make the arguments about sacrifice and common good. What they are saying is go it alone–survival of the fittest, where the fittest are those who have the most money. Most of whom were born into this wealth. I don’t see those who are advocating this stance making any meaningful sacrifice. Instead, they make more money while those who can bear it least carry all the risk and sacrifice (remember dividends while people starve).

Let us stop asking that question–what can people in those circumstances do? In the current context it is not appropriate. Let us instead ask what needs to change? How is the system creating the conditions of hardship and want? What can we collectively do about it? We are a wealthy country. We have the resources.

SusSEd Talk-Surplus super powers: The social value of suprlus food in community settings

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Every year at The University of Sheffield, the Green Impact team organises the Sustainability Skills and Education (SusSEd) programme, a collection of free lunchtime talks open to all staff and students. These talks are delivered by academics from across the university and provide an opportunity for attendees to learn about the fantastic research and work taking place to advance sustainability. 

This year, the theme is ‘Cities of the Future’. I gave a talk about the social value of surplus food and how it links to the sustainable development goals. The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. You can watch the video of my talk here.

A bit more about the talk:

Food project that uses surplus food

We often think about surplus food as waste, as the disregarded food that didn’t manage to get sold or for some reason did not make it to the supermarket at all.

However, surplus food has other values that, when enfolded into community activity, go beyond nutrients, calories and financial savings or charity. In these contexts, surplus food can help diversify diets, empower people to eat and cook better food at home, connect communities, and re-establish local markets for healthier food by stimulating demand. When we make this change we can move beyond victorian forms of charity toward approaches that enable people to build their capability to live their best lives and have positive relationships with food in ways that are socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable.

In this talk, I discuss the capacities of surplus food and consider how community-based redistribution of surplus food when organised differently has the ability to feed into how we can meet the sustainable development goals.

Millions are hungry in the UK, Here is where they are.

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While it is not right that anyone should go hungry, this new map of local authority estimates of three measures of food insecurity for the UK shows that it is much worse in some places compared to others.

Three measures of food insecurity in the UK. Data from January 2021 drawing on one month recall questions.

Click here to go directly to the map.

Click here to view the methodology briefing document.

In the UK many are not food secure. Food security is the ability to consistently afford, access and utilise the food needed to maintain good health and wellbeing.   When we think of food insecurity, we tend to think of it in relation to low-income countries.  More recently, however, as a nation we are beginning to recognise that a significant proportion of the UK population is not food secure.  Much of this awareness raising has been as a result of efforts by food charities and campaigns such as that spearheaded by Marcus Rashford.  

While this awareness raising has been welcome, the focus has been on those who are at the sharpest end of food insecurity; those who are going hungry.

Food banks have been set up in communities where people have recognised this problem of hunger with the intention of meeting immediate food need.

Hunger is understood as having been hungry at least once in the previous month but were unable to get food. This is our first measure.

We identify two further measures. 

Those who struggle include people who have cut back on food or skipped meals.  In addition they have received support from their community with food essentials or they indicated they could not get to the shops, could not get a delivery, or were too ill to get food.  Those who experience these additional indicators of food insecurity are not typically included in the statistics, which tend to focus on financial reasons for food insecurity.  

A further measure are those who worry about being able to adequately supply the food they need for their families and themselves. This latter group are typically considered marginally food secure because they have enough food. However, they may have traded down on the nutritional quality of the food they purchase (Drewnowski 2012). We have included this category because there is firstly, LLP a mental stress associated with food worry. Secondly, these are people who are at risk of having low or very low food security, for example through an unexpected expense, illness or relationship breakdown. We have seen many people over the period of the pandemic who have fallen from this group into the other types of food insecurity.

The burden of these forms of food insecurity includes immediate threats to health and wellbeing (Blake 2019).  This burden includes the stress of trying to manage a budget that may not extend sufficiently, the worry about providing adequate nutrition, and the mental load associated with trying to navigate limitations imposed by transportation, inadequate equipment, cost, physical ability and household food preferences.  Trading down on food quality and nutrition extracts a price to physical health in terms of diet related illness but it also results in narrower diets and the loss of understanding about what certain foods are and how to cook them.  Finally, research demonstrates that those who struggle to access food are also isolated, which has an impact on quality of life and wellbeing (Blake 2019).  

Food insecurity is concentrated into places. What this means is that cumulatively the effects of food insecurity include reductions in the ability of a community to be resilient in the face of crisis because community based social networks have been lost.  Local foodscapes have become food deserts because the demand for and the supply of healthy food is not present in the place where people live at a price they can afford.  The burden of food insecurity also means that people in these communities struggle to see how they can contribute to achieving wider social and environmental goals that shape life in the UK today and help define us as a society.  

Many local governments have spent considerable time and resources enabling access to food by supporting food banks whilst also moving those using foodbanks onward.  Many are also looking at ways to support those who are moderately food insecure and those who are worried about being able to purchase food that contributes to their health, social and local economic wellbeing.  Until now, however, there has not been an estimate of these three levels of food insecurity at the local authority scale across the whole of the UK.  

The UK Local Government food security estimates were developed to help provide local level benchmarking. The purpose is to inform the types of services and support that are needed to achieve food security for everyone and to move beyond a focus on food banks. 

The data sources and methodology used to create the estimations are briefly outlined in the briefing document. Further background, context, results and implications will be shortly published in the academic literature and this document will be updated with references to those publications. If, in the meantime, you have further questions, please do contact the research team.

Contacts

The research team would be delighted to hear how the UK LAFI estimations are being used and can be contacted via our emails listed on the briefing. This map was a collaborative research effort between Angelo Moretti (MMU), Adam Whitworth (Strathclyde) and Megan Blake (Sheffield) drawing on survey data supplied by the Food Foundation.

If you would like further information about the Food Foundation data, please contact office@foodfoundation.org.uk.

Data File

An excel file of the estimates is available upon request.