I have been playing around with Google’s Notebook LM. One feature is the audio overview option. This produces a podcast-type audio discussion that reviews the documents that you ask it to. For this podcast, I asked it to do this for my paper, More than Just Food, which I published in 2019. I was really impressed with the outcome. The podcast lasts about 16 minutes. Have a listen. What do you think?
Tag Archives: food
Food clubs and their social impact
Many of you will know that I do a lot of research focusing on Rung 2 of the Food Ladders. One of these organisations is The Bread and Butter Thing. I’ve known Mark and Jane since they founded the Food Club in about 2016. In 2019 we did our first member survey. I was a bit tired of the narrative around saving money. My view is you can’t save what you haven’t got in the first place. I wanted to explore the extent to which some of the benefits I had heard about qualitatively were being experienced (A classic example of the benefits of mixed methods or combining intensive and extensive research see table on page 14).
That first survey was the first one to highlight the social benefits attributed to food clubs and the extent to which members experience them (a report is available here). At the time there were just under 8000 TBBT members located in sites primarily across Greater Manchester. And although you won’t see references to this report in the reports from other food club umbrella organisations, the report was shared with them and makes up key impact measures for the sector.
Since that initial survey, TBBT has done an expanded annual members survey. From fairly humble beginnings of a survey that included about 300 responses to just a few questions, the 2024 survey has about 9.5K responses (from a population of about 80K) to a wide range of questions about people’s circumstances, how they are getting by, and how they percieve the impact of joining TBBT has been for them (Some highlights are here). This remains the only large-scale data source that is collected directly from to food club members. I have been proud to have been able to help with this and provide some analysis of the data. I have never managed to find the time to pull out all the rich insights that are buried within. One day, hopefully.
Mark and Vic recently asked me to join them for a podcast (which turned into two!) to talk about the results of the survey for this year. Vic joined TBBT toward the end of the lockdown period. Prior to that she worked for Manchester Council and when the pandemic hit she coordinated their food response brilliantly. Mark introduced me to Vic and we had many discussions about how best to meet the needs of people in Manchester depending upon their circumstances. I have written about that work in a book chapter about food security resilience under Covid 19 that appears in a book called Living with Pandemics.
The podcast, called a Slice of Bread and Butter, usually involves a conversation with a member and then a bit of discussion. These are fascinating insights into the determination and buoyancy of members in the face of struggle. They demonstrate how precarious life can be and how vulnerable most of us are to finding ourselves in similar situations. I encourage you to follow the podcast. They are available on all the major podcast sites and also on the website linked above.
Here are both episodes where we talk about just a tiny proportion of survey findings and how they reveal just how much food clubs, like TBBT, that are carefully curated, organised and managed can make a difference.
Episode 1: Revolutionising Food Support
Episode 2: Affordable nutrition for thriving communities
The Rise of Food Insecurity in England: Using Food Ladders to overcome the barriers
The full report is available to download here.
I was recently invited to present at a parliamentary breakfast. In fact, it was to be this morning. But a general election was called, so the breakfast was cancelled. I wrote a report to be handed out at the event about the state of Food Security in England and how it has increased alarmingly. 2018 before the pandemic, the rate was about 1 in every 10 adults. In the summer of 2020, the rate increased by 50%. The situation in 2022 was 1 in every 4 adults.
Vulnerabilities have also shifted over time. In 2020, gender was not a predictor of food insecurity. It now is. Women are more vulnerable compared to men. Those who are most vulnerable earn less than £32K (46.4%), those who are not in paid work (44.8%), and those living in the most deprived areas (39.9%). The groups with the largest percentage increase are those that earn less than £32K (20.5% increase), those not in paid work (16.5% increase), and those in the non-white British ethnic group (14.4%). The groups that showed the highest rates of growth, albeit starting from a lower base, are those who earn more than £32k per year and those over 65.
There are things we can do to address this increased barrier for many. We can work locally to help build the capabilities people need to be food secure, which means improving not just the financial resources people clearly need but also the other resources that facilitate food security in the longer term, such as health, well-being, community connections, and local access to good food. This is what the food ladders aim to do.
Other things could be done at a larger scale as well.
- Those who fund community interventions can provide adequate funding to enable these interventions, which includes helping to cover the longer-term costs of paying staff a living wage and providing funding that helps to cover running costs. There is a lot behind offering a service that needs to happen, which is not directly part of the service itself.
- The food industry can help organisations with food costs. Asking them to pay full price to offer food at a discount or for free is not sustainable for the organisations doing this work.
- In-store, offering incentives to purchase healthy food and making these foods less risky for customers is important as well. The Food Foundation has done some research that explores key metrics supermarkets are doing on this front. Some do better than others. The report has some good ideas.
- The government can empower local authorities to develop and deliver food strategies. This will require funding. This was a recommendation in the National Food Strategy, and it should be taken up. The government can also consider and support the need for social investment in levelling up strategies.
- Ensuring that people have an adequate income with opportunities for advancement and progression is also needed. Being food insecure should not be reserved for the wealthy. To have a workforce that is able to work in the long term requires that they be able to eat a healthy diet. Without this, health suffers ,and the need for support services increases.
Acknowledgements: This research was funded in part by a UKRI HIEF Knowledge Exchange grant. Special thanks to Isaac Tendler for his work interviewing local authority officials and for the cover artwork. Thank you also to Nicole Kennard for the interview material with people struggling in 2020.
Ultra Processed Food, Stomach Share, and the Problem of Food Contexts
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.
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.
GeoFoodie 
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