Food insecurity is commonly understood through the lens of individual or household poverty. This approach assumes that food insecurity can be tackled by simply providing food or money to those individuals or households that need it. Often, the approach sees blame and responsibility as lying with food-insecure individuals themselves. Such an approach is limited and unable to properly account for the systemic causes of insecurity, the varied circumstances that people of different communities face, or the myriad ways (beyond base nutrition) that food can enrich our lives. To address this, Food Ladders draws on two key theoretical approaches: capabilities theory and practice theory.

Practice theory

Rather than fixating on individuals and their identities, practice theory is instead concerned with the situations those individuals are in. The theory centres on the importance of everyday ‘practices’ in analysing society. These are things that people do or say regularly and commonly. Practices are repeated with some regularity and by multiple people to varying degrees of normativity. For example: going to the supermarket, having a TV dinner, allotmenting. Practices are seen as a product of and constitutive of societal structures. By paying attention to people’s practices, we can see how many different social structures and fields interact to shape the human experience. Crucially, a practice approach is always grounded in specific places and times, lending itself to the analysis and design of interventions in specific local communities. 

Through practice theory, we can see that food (in)security is not a fixed state or identity but rather a changing set of circumstances and activities, which change depending on their occurrence in specific times, places, and communities. For example, we know that asylum-seeking communities experience food insecurity differently from those with secure status; food charities in urban areas work differently than those in rural ones; and people’s circumstances change over time, always becoming more or less food secure.

Food Ladders is grounded in this approach, with each rung detailing different practices rather than organisations or policies (receiving food parcels, shopping in social supermarkets, growing one’s own food). When thinking about food security, we can think about the everyday practices we might want to achieve for our communities – shopping locally, eating well, and engaging in social activities with others.

Capabilities

We know, however, that it is not as simple as suggesting new ways that people can engage with food. People face many barriers to achieving the things they need and want. This is where we can supplement the practice theory approach with capabilities theory. The theory understands that for people to fully flourish in society, they require a range of ‘capabilities’. These are the opportunities, abilities, or freedoms needed to achieve certain ‘functionings – what a person is able to do or be’ (Sen, 2005, p. 153). Capabilities are seen holistically, expanding conceptions of well-being beyond limited measures such as income or happiness to include a broad range of factors. 

In the context of food security, a capabilities approach can help us to recognise that being food secure requires more than a person just having adequate amounts of food or the money needed to buy it. Food security will depend on individuals and communities having a wide range of opportunities (to access, source, and grow the food they need), abilities (shopping, selling, growing, cooking, campaigning), and freedoms (to shape their own relationships with food).

Practices and capabilities intersect. The ways that individuals engage in practice are based on their resources, motivations, understanding of what is a normal or the right way to do something, and their affective responses to that activity. Many of these resources are situated in and dependent on specific places (e.g. land, access, availability, permission). Practices are not closed – people have choices to make regarding how they go about completing a practice – however, these choices are constrained by local, place-based factors and elements at other scales, such as national policies. People’s ability to participate in and shape certain practices is limited. 

Capabilities theory has been criticised for being too individualistic and for using the language of neoliberalism when it discusses freedom and choice. These critiques have been challenged by various scholars. Briefly, the counterarguments are:

1. Too individualistic. Capabilities is a theory that recognises both human agency and social constraints. People make choices from a limited set of possible choices. The potential choice set is infinite, but their choice set is not. This varies for different people. Some of these constraints on possible choices arise from their personal situation and circumstances (e.g., how much money they have, their ability to absorb nutrients, individual knowledge and skills, other demands on their time that they may prioritise or individual health needs). Other limitations arise from wider social relations (e.g., what is understood as possible, right, moral, appropriate or, for example, what counts as food within thier cultural milleaux) and contextual situation (e.g., what resources that enable functionings that are available within the places where they live (e.g., the presence of a shop that sells healthy food, a functioning transport system, or land that is available to them to grow their own). Deprivation in capabilities is not signalled by a lack of functioning; it is signalled by a choice set that deprives them of being able to choose to function in a way that they value or have reason to value.
2. Choices. Linked to this, in capabilities theory, choice is not unfeetered choice but instead freedom to choose. Social norms about which functionings are deemed to be valuable and which are not in a particular socio-cultural context play a role in shaping the values that a person will use in the screening process, and thus in determining the capability set. Likewise, in most societies, one would not expect the freedom to commit murder to be available to anyone because in those societies, one does not have a rational expectation to be able to value the choice to commit murder.
3. Freedom. The wider the set of pathways to achieving functioning, the greater the freedom. Sen uses the example of the saint and the peasant. One chooses from a range of options to fast, whilst the other has no choice but to fast. The saint has a wider capability set in this example and, as a result, has more freedoms compared to the peasant. A socially just society means having the opportunity to do one thing today and another tomorrow, but this does not mean that everyone acts on those freedoms. In capabilities theory, it is enough to be able to act on those freedoms. Sen also makes a distinction between positive and negative freedoms. A positive freedom is the ability to pursue an option. Negative freedom is the freedom from others stopping you from doing something. In neoliberalism, negative freedoms are an inalienable right (e.g., the right to pursue profit maximisation without constraints imposed by legal frameworks or the state). Within Capabilities, freedoms are not an inalienable right, but instead, freedoms are acknowledged to be within the constraints of social values, which everyone is subjected to equally.

For further reading on how Capabilities theory addresses these critiques, see Osmani 2016. The Capabilities Approach and Human Development. UNDP.

Intersecting Practices and Capabilities within Food Ladders

Food ladders aim to give structure to the activities and resources available in a place, and seeks to build in firstly the ability to expand those resources that people can access such that they can widen thier choice sets (Rung 2 activity is capabilites enhancing) and then consider how the local social system can be colllectively altered to enable a more socially just and environmentally sustainable array of choices that community members might have reason to value (Rung 3 is about transforming). The model can help identify gaps in available resources and suggest different ways of designing spaces and places, reducing vulnerability and enhancing capability by identifying and removing barriers or suggesting areas where new capabilities may be generated. 

Food Ladders seeks to create varied landscapes of food activities, which would introduce a range of opportunities to communities at a range of levels: for those in crisis, Rung 1 activities offer stability for people to find their feet whilst meeting their basic needs; Rung 2 offers capacity-building activities, giving opportunities for people to develop skills and relationships; finally, activities on Rung 3 provide a platform for people to pursue their collective interests and define valuable relationships to food and one another.

For the Food Ladders model, food is more than a source of basic nutrition; food insecurity is more than a lack of funds. Food is a key part of our social and cultural lives, capable of creating deep, positive relationships with ourselves, our friends, family, neighbours, and the natural world. Food Ladders approaches food insecurity with this understanding at the forefront, creating opportunities for people to practise beneficial food activities grounded in and connected to their local communities. Through recognising the ever-changing circumstances people live in, the model shifts focus from the identities of individuals to the infrastructures of practices and opportunities that can create resilient communities over time.

An open-access academic paper where I set out the theory in more detail is Blake, M.K. More than Just Food: Food Insecurity and Resilient Place Making through Community Self-Organising. Sustainability 2019, 11, 2942. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11102942

This book chapter, written during the COVID pandemic, also provides further elaboration of the framework. Blake, M, Building Post-Covid Community Resilience by moving beyond emergency support, in Living with Pandemics: People Place and Policy ((Eds.) (2021)
Publisher: Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, DOI: 
10.4337/9781800373594.00014