Tag Archives: Health

*New* Food Ladders Toolkit Launched

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On the 10th of September 2024 we launched the Food Ladders Toolkit. The event was held in Lambeth at the Community Shop. Food, based on the food stories of people who use Community Shop, was cooked for us by community members. It was absolutely fantastic. We want to thank all those who helped with the day and those who came and joined us.

If you were unable to join us for the launch and would like to know more, there will be a webinar on 1 October 2024, this time hosted by Sustainable Food Places. I will be talking about the food ladders and will be joined by Mark from The Bread and Butter Thing, another organisation that uses the Food Ladders to structure their support. The link to the event is here.

So why do we need a toolkit?

People in wealthy and poor countries struggle to have the food they need to live their best lives. The reasons for this are complicated. There is a mix of individual, group, community, and national factors. The food ladders is a framework to help communities, service providers, local government, and others develop an understanding and a pathway toward a food system that meets community members’ needs and desires, both now and in the long term.

We can’t expect communities that are already struggling to be able to do this on their own, but we also cannot do it without them. Building something new is hard work. It takes commitment and motivation. This toolkit aims to support those who can help to be able to do so. This toolkit is primarily aimed at those in local government and local food networks. There will be elements that community organisations may also find helpful. It is not a toolkit for those who are struggling.

The toolkit is based on interviews we conducted with about 30 people working in local governments across England. We wanted to understand how people were using the framework. In particular, we wanted to understand its utility and also where the difficulties might be. We found that organisations and local authorities across the UK use the framework to structure their planning and approach to community development, community resilience, health, and poverty. Local authorities using the framework have shifted to partnership working, with public consultation happening at the start of the process rather than toward the end. We learned about joined-up support networks in these places that cut across a variety of projects and organisations who come at the issues from a multitude of different directions. We saw an understanding of how places are designed, how we engage with people, and how we communicate with each other creates positive change.

But we also found several areas where this process can be complicated. Food work touches on multiple departments within a local authority, and coordinating that is needed. Motivation and momentum can flag. Sometimes, community members meet the effort with scepticism. Sometimes, we lose sight of the vision or forget to clearly define what we are building toward. Sometimes, messages are misunderstood. To help with this, we have created workshops, case studies, videos and diagrams and currated links to the work of others that we feel can help overcome these difficulties.

Enter the Toolkit here

I hope that these tools will be helpful. If you think a tool is missing, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me. Likewise, I would love to hear stories about how the Food Ladders is being used in your area. You can use the form below to do so.

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The Rise of Food Insecurity in England: Using Food Ladders to overcome the barriers

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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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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

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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.

#KelloggsFoodDesert

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Yesterday a report highlighting the presence of food deserts in the UK commissioned by Kelloggs was released to the media. I supported the report as I feel the issue is important. Continue reading →