Tag Archives: nutrition

Pledges, Missions and Food Security

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The government has 5 missions:  Kickstart economic growth, Take back our streets, Break down barriers to opportunity, build an NHS for the future, and Make Britain a green energy superpower.  Food security is imbricated with all these pledges. 

Economic growth means good jobs and good jobs need people who can do them. This means having healthy people and being healthy rests on being food secure.

If you are food insecure, you are also isolated.  In communities where people are isolated, there is also greater fear of crime, disaffection and anti-social behaviour.  If we are going to take back the streets, we need to make spaces for communities to grow within them.

We know that children learn better when they are nourished.  Yet too many children live in families struggling to just eat, let alone provide the nourishment needed to build healthy bodies and minds.  It isn’t right that in a country as wealthy as this, so many of our children do not have the best chance that this wealth offers. 

Too much of NHS resources are taken up with treating diet-related illness and the issues linked to social isolation.  People with healthy diets and strong social networks live better and independently for longer, even with underlying health conditions.

If we allocate farmland to producing green energy, we are not producing the food that sustains us all.  We must ensure that we take a systems view so that our energy needs do not undermine our food security in the long term. 

Food insecurity in the UK is at an astonishing rate.  According to the FSA government statistics, in autumn 2022, 1 out of every 4 adults experienced low or very low food security at some point in the previous 12 months—meaning they were frequently cutting back on portions, skipping meals, or in some severe instances, skipping meals for whole days. Nearly half, 46%, of people with household earnings of less than £32K are food insecure. More than 1 in 3 adults, 36%, who have at least 1 child are food insecure- This vulnerability increases for those with 3 or more children. In areas in the most deprived quintile, two out of every five, 40% of adults are food insecure. 

My research focuses on improving people’s ability to have the food they need to live their best lives and how places—the communities where people live—can foster health and well-being or create barriers that isolate and disable. 

With this in mind, and building on the UN’s 4 pillars of food security and resilience theory, I have created a framework called food ladders to help structure how people and organisations (public, private, and third sector) can collaborate in local places to increase the resources that are needed to be food secure.  (hand out materials).

The UN sees food security as more than just a financial issue.  Food access is financial, but it is also linked to legal and structural barriers.  Food security is also about availability—the food people need for a healthy and fulfilled life, which is available where they live without undue stigma, stress, and struggle.  It is also concerned with utilisation—do people have resources, including money, knowledge, know-how, tools, and mental and physical states, to utilise the available food they can access?  And fourth, is this all consistent and sustainable for the future?

When you are wealthy, you can have healthy meals delivered, but this is not an option for most of us all the time. We need other resources like having a shop we can walk to, an able body that lets us carry our food home, a home with a kitchen and tools that work, knowledge about what different foods are and how to cook them, and the head space to be able to do all that. 

Health is negatively impacted when people are food insecure, leading to a downward spiral of deeper food insecurity.  Repairing is much easier when people are not in crisis or have never been. 

How we organise food support makes a big difference to who and how people use it and what they can get from itFood gets people in the door.  When they come back, more support will be provided.  So many of the organisations I have worked with talk about how this.   Yet, we know that one of the most significant barriers is getting people the support they need, and there is a lot we still don’t know.  But what I do know is that there is a big difference between a food club and a food bank or a social eating space and a soup kitchen, and this has to do with how values are expressed through the ways that food is made available.

The Food Ladders offer a three-rung approach to capitalise on these differences. 

  1. Catching for those who need immediate support, but we don’t want people to keep coming back to this rung. What we want is for people to move to rungs 2 and 3. 
  2. Capacity building enhances the assets and resources people and communities already have and contributes to those that they don’t
  3. And finally, self-organising activity that increases sustainability and removes or redistributes vulnerability to make a fairer society. 

One organisation (of many) I work with, TBBT, facilitates food clubs across 124 community locations, mainly in the north of England.  We did a survey with members that resulted in more than 9k responses.   We found that as a result of using the club, people reported

  1. Increased fruit and veg uptake
  2. Cooking more healthy food at home
  3. They also get involved in food talk with club members and build friendships.  The majority say they feel less alone and feel more involved in their communities. These friendships turn into mutual aid. During lockdown, people shared advice and checked in with each other through WhatsApp groups. 
  4. The majority had not used any food support before using the food club, but of those who had said they used a food bank, most said they used them less frequently or stopped using them altogether. 
  5. We know that when we have thriving communities, the fear of crime decreases.  Food activities such as food clubs and social eating spaces support thriving communities.  To take back our streets, we need to make space for people on those streets to intermingle and eat together.  

Despite this and the increases in these activities, our communities are dominated by interventions that do not increase food security capability.

To facilitate food ladders, we need:

  1. More resources and industry collaboration for community food programmes that don’t reinforce the status quo but instead build capabilities at rungs 2 and 3. 
  2. A national mandate and funding for local food strategies.
  3. Investment in social development programmes to ensure that people have the capabilities to live a healthy life.
  4. Adequate incomes that offer living wages and advancement opportunities, with a safety net for those who cannot access work.
  5. Free school meals for all children in state schools would be great, but at a minimum, lifting the earnings threshold should be a priority.
  6. A review of business rates such that those businesses that predominantly offer healthy foods are not disadvantaged because they have more risk compared to those who offer few healthy foods. 

And finally, I offer a plea for better data with larger sample sizes.  Without understanding, we cannot produce insights that lead to change.

5–8 minutes

*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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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.

Children are going without lunch, but behind hungry children there are hungry parents

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I collaborated The Bread and Butter Thing and The Food Foundation on a survey with households with who have children in year three and above who do not receive free school meals. Respondents are parents who are members of TBBT food club. The results show that children are missing out on lunch because they fall through the cracks in Free School Meals provision or their parents are just above the (extremely) low earnings threshold. What is more, the number of parents within this group who are missing out on meals is even higher. The results are below. 

Households where at least one child is in year 3+ and is not registered for free school meals.

Households with a child in year 3 or above not registered for FSM (n=734)YesNo, but worriedEither skipping or worried
I would like my child to have FSM   
Child goes without lunch at school some days 15.5%42% 57.5%
Child eats a smaller lunch at school some days 31.5%30.6% 62.1%
Child eats a less healthy lunch at school some days30.5%21.9%52.4%
Children are having to go without food or eat smaller meals because they can’t access free school meals
Household with a child in year 3 or above not registered for FSMYes
Parent struggles to feed children at the weekend (n=734)36.9%
Parent skips at the weekend to make sure children have food (n=734)62.5%
I would like my child/children to receive FSM (n=529)85.3%
Parents are doing their best to feed their families but go without food.

Comments from parents who say they are skipping meals include:

  • My child is home-schooling at the moment, and yes, we do skip some meals daily due to being short on food, but unfortunately, your child has to be in school to receive free school meals I’m working to get him back I to school but will be a bit of a wait due to him having some problems that need diagnosed so he can receive help he needs in school. 
  • I have 5 children and my husband lost his job in Feb 2023. We have been unable to access Universal Credits as the system is too complicated as I cannot attend all the appointments because I am self-employed childminder and always have children with me. TBBT had been a lifesaver in helping me to provide healthy food for the children but by Monday packed lunches are bare minimum of whatever I can find leftover for them. Some of my children are on school meals as they prefer this and they are always paid as I prioritise food for them they don’t have many luxuries other children have but TBBT has helped me ensure they have a good diet. I have been able to make huge panfuls of vegetable soup with the quantity of vegetables and banana bread which had become a staple in our home but free school meals would be such a blessing. I often skip meals if there isn’t enough of one meal or I’m bogged down with work and juggling everything to make sure the children have their needs met. 
  • The threshold for getting free school meals is so low that even though I do not have much money after bills, I don’t qualify. I am on a low wage due to disability and struggle to make ends meet a lot of months. 
  • I am just over the income threshold so don’t qualify for free school meals. This is financially difficult as when you work, there is very little help. I am so grateful to the bread and butter thing as this makes all the difference. My kids would never go without food as I would never allow that to happen but it would be such a help to receive free school hot meals. Usually, we do 2 days pack lunch and the rest we pay for hot dinners, this keeps the cost down a little. 
  • Because I claim legacy benefits, I’m not entitled to free school meals even though my income, according to universal credit, would qualify me. No matter how much I plead with the council, they don’t help.
  • I work part-time and receive universal credit top-up. I wish my child was eligible for free school meals. I make sure she has fresh fruit and a sandwich every day, but I can’t afford much else. 
  • Because I receive working tax credit, I do not get any help with rent or meals. It would be better not to receive it (working tax credit) because it’s costing over £100 a week for school dinners for my 2 teenagers.
  • Both parents work, although one is a part-time worker, to avoid nursery costs. We don’t receive any benefits as over the wage limit but pay a mortgage, 1 car which is needed for work, and every other household bill we pay. All bills are covered, so no debts but little left from 2 wages for food. 

Who gets Free School Meals?

All children in key stage 1 (reception, year 1 or year 2) in England who attend school (e.g. are not home-schooled) receive free school meals (FSM) regardless of household income.  Those in year 3 or above do not automatically receive free school meals; instead, they must qualify and register to receive them. Children who are home-schooled also do not receive them.  Qualification is based on household income, benefits receipt, and registration in a government-funded school.  For those on Universal Credit who have applied for FSM after April 2018, the household income must be less than £7,400 a year (after tax and not including any benefits received).  If the household income increases above the threshold in the future, but the household income still includes some Universal Credit contribution, children remain eligible until they move to the next phase of education (e.g. from primary to secondary school).  Before 2018, there was not an income threshold for Universal Credit claimants.  Importantly, having a sibling receive free school meals does not automatically qualify a second child’s (often younger) eligibility. 

A claim for FSM is made through local authorities and is typically instigated by parents.  However, some local authorities, such as Sheffield, have introduced automatic enrolment[1].  Furthermore, the national food strategy recommendations call for automatic enrolment in FSM.  In March 2023, Harriet Harman asked the Secretary of State for Education (Nick Gibb) what discussions the DoE has had with the Department for Work and Pensions on introducing automatic enrolment for free school meals to eligible children.  The secretary of state responded that there are no formal assessments concerning the number of pupils that would become eligible for FSM through automatic enrolment and no plans for automatic enrolment. He did indicate that FSM take-up was estimated to be 89% according to benefits data[2]. 

[1] See this webinar discussing Sheffield’s autoenrollment scheme.  https://youtu.be/MVRs7Qw_9a0?si=KRpC8907S-S1CrS8

[2] https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2023-03-14/165185/

What is The Bread and Butter Thing?

The Bread and Butter Thing (TBBT) is an affordable food club.  It is not a food bank.  It works with volunteers from 115 local community organisations across 23 local authorities located in the North of England to provide low cost, healthy food to people who are not in food crisis but are vulnerable to it.  These are people who may be skipping meals or who are just about making ends meet.  They may be struggling and stretched, but usually not destitute.  Alongside the food, TBBT works with other organisations to help build people’s capability to live their best life by reducing barriers and improving their access to and utilisation of the resources they need.  Unlike food banks, the food is not free, and the local volunteers come from the community of people who use the services. 

According to the Food Standards Agency Food and You 2 survey (wave 6) conducted in the autumn of 2022, the number of people who use food clubs, sometimes also known as a food pantry or social supermarket in the UK, is larger than the number who use foodbanks.  In England, about 4.8% of the total adult population, or about 2.23 million adults, used a pantry or food club between Autumn 2021 and Autumn 2022 (compared to 4.6% or 2.14 million foodbank users).  These services operate in all regions of the UK.  The largest single provider of such services is TBBT.  In addition, there are at least 100 franchise branches within the Your Local Pantry network started by Stockport Homes and Church Action for Poverty, and Feeding Britain identifies 348 affordable food clubs within their network (although it is unclear what overlap there may be tween Feeding Britain and Your Local Pantry). It is likely that there are additional food clubs operating independently of these organisations. However, there is no clear data available for finding them.  Only TBBT can directly communicate with service members because they work in partnership with local organisations rather than the franchise model used by other networks. 

Despite the uptake of these services, relatively little is known about those who use them.  The analysis presented is based on data from a survey conducted by TBBT, which has a membership of more than 72,000 households using their service. Survey details are as follows.  

  • Total who opened survey text= 21,886
  • Total who answered survey =2917
  • Total who responded with a child or children in year 3 or above = 2671
  • Survey dates:  16-17 Jan 2024.  Method text survey
  • Survey Population:  Members of TBBT food club.
  • Confidence interval:  +/- 2%