Tag Archives: nutrition

Evidence submission to the Right to Food UK Commission

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Yesterday the Right to Food Commission in the UK published its report for 2026. There is a lot in the report to encourage and much of it supports what my research shows. It was nice to see my Building Resilience report and the evidence I submitted referenced in the final document. I am sharing my evidence submission here (RTF106). I am particularly pleased to see the themes of dignity and the interconnectedness of conditions that shape people’s ability to have the food they need to live their best lives.

Submitted by: Dr Megan Blake, School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield
Evidence base: Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security, commissioned by Comic Relief as part of Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation Programme.

Summary

This submission responds to the Commission’s questions on food insecurity, food support, community-based solutions, social protection, policy duties, monitoring and accountability. It draws on a large-scale independent study of 14,156 lower-income households across England and Scotland, showing that food insecurity is not a series of isolated emergencies but a condition of structural precarity that erodes household resilience over time.

The central argument is that a right to food law must guarantee adequate income, prevent food insecurity, invest in dignified community food infrastructure without substituting for state duties, monitor progress effectively, and ensure that people most affected shape accountability.

1. Introduction: who is submitting evidence and why?

I am Dr Megan Blake, a geographer in the School of Geography and Planning at the University of Sheffield. For more than twenty years, my research has focused on food insecurity, community food systems, poverty, resilience and the everyday conditions that enable or prevent people from accessing the food they need to live well.

I am submitting evidence because the Right to Food Commission is asking not only how people are fed in moments of hunger, but how the UK can reduce hunger and make the right to food a reality by 2030.

This evidence draws primarily on research I completed for Comic Relief, as part of Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation Programme: Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security. Based on a survey of 14,156 lower-income adults across England and Scotland, the report shows that food insecurity is more than a moment of crisis. It is produced through the interaction of income, housing, care, health, transport, local food access, diet, wellbeing and social connection. The report therefore does two things: it diagnoses the conditions that make food insecurity more likely, and it shows why interventions such as food clubs can help when they support capability and infrastructure over time, while remaining secondary to adequate income and statutory protection.

2. Commission question: Food insecurity in the UK — what are the challenges?

The main challenge is that food insecurity is often treated as a temporary emergency, when for many households it is a prolonged condition of structural precarity.

Food insecurity is not only hunger. It is pressure, instability and constant calculation. It is parents and grandparents quietly absorbing hardship so children can eat. It is people stretching food, skipping meals, keeping the heating off, managing debts and making impossible decisions about what can wait and what cannot.

In the survey, more than one in five respondents were either worried about having enough food or were actively food insecure in the three months before the survey. Among those classified as food insecure, 66% reported feeling hungry because they could not afford food and 42.9% reported skipping meals for a full day, not by choice.

However, the challenge is not only economic. Food insecurity is shaped by whether people have the conditions needed to turn food into a secure, healthy and dignified life. Money matters, but so do health, housing, transport, time, care, energy, social connection and the local food environment.

This matters because the ability to eat well depends on more than being able to buy food in principle. People need shops nearby that sell affordable, good-quality food. They need transport to reach those shops when local provision is poor. They need housing that enables food to be stored, prepared and eaten: adequate kitchen space, a working cooker, fridge and freezer, enough storage, safe appliances and manageable energy costs. They need the physical and mental health, time and caring capacity to plan, cook and eat. They also need local community infrastructure that provides support before crisis becomes catastrophic.

Rural respondents reported particularly poor access and lower perceived quality, showing that people can live in regions associated with food production and still be poorly served by the food system.

Food insecurity is also shaped by the conditions inside the home. The report shows that food-insecure respondents were much more likely than food-secure respondents to report poor mental health, poor physical health, being unable to work because of a long-term health condition, and full-time caring responsibilities. Food-insecure respondents were almost three times as likely to report poor mental health and twice as likely to report poor physical health as food-secure respondents. They were also more than three and a half times as likely to be unable to work because of a long-term health condition.

This is why the report describes food insecurity as an ‘architecture of hardship’. The problem is not simply that people lack food, money or skills. It is that low income, weak financial resilience, poor health, insecure housing, transport barriers, caring responsibilities, poor local food access, energy costs and social isolation interact over time and erode people’s ability to cope.

A right to food law must address the wider conditions that make food insecurity likely, rather than treating hunger as an emergency to be filled after it appears.

3. Commission question: What is working to improve access to food? Capacity-building and community food infrastructure

The evidence suggests that what works is not simply the distribution of food, but support that builds the conditions through which people can access, use, share and benefit from food with dignity.

The Food Ladders framework demonstrates how different types of support do different work and must not be collapsed into ‘food aid’: catching people in crisis; capacity building with people and communities; and transformation, where communities reshape local food systems.

The research focuses on food clubs as one important example of capacity-building provision. However, the wider point is not that food clubs alone are the answer. Food clubs, pantries, social eating spaces, community kitchens, cook-alongs, shared cooking facilities, community growing, local voucher schemes and food co-operatives can all create practical routes through which people obtain food, use food, build relationships and participate in local food systems.

These activities matter because food resilience is not only about whether food exists in the system. It is also about whether people have the money, time, transport, energy, storage, equipment, health, confidence and social support to turn food into meals, nourishment, care and everyday security.

The report found that regular and sustained participation in food clubs was associated with better food security. It also identified plausible mechanisms through which food clubs may operate as ‘more-than-food’ interventions: affordable food, social connection, wellbeing, confidence and routes into wider support.

The Commission should not treat access to food as a question of emergency supply alone. It should also ask what infrastructure enables food to become meals, nourishment, care and everyday security. Community food projects should not become a substitute welfare system. Properly resourced and publicly accountable, they can form part of the social and public health infrastructure that makes the right to food real in everyday life.

4. Commission question: Experiences of seeking support from food banks, food pantries and other food services — what works, and how?

Food banks, food clubs and dual use reflect different experiences of hardship, so they should not be collapsed into one ‘food aid’ category.

Free food support, including emergency parcels, cash handouts and food vouchers, remains essential in acute crisis. It provides immediate relief when households have no other option. However, it is not designed to rebuild the foundations of everyday life after prolonged hardship.

The report’s comparative analysis shows that food banks are more closely associated with acute crisis, while food clubs are more often used by households managing chronic precarity from a position of slightly greater stability. A third group, using both food banks and food clubs, appears to be experiencing compounded hardship, including in-work poverty, caring responsibilities and multiple pressures at once.

Food clubs, pantries and similar models appear to help where they provide continuity, choice, routine and a less stigmatising form of support. For households living with ongoing pressure, regular access to affordable food, including fresh and varied food, can help people plan, stretch budgets and reduce uncertainty.

The evidence also shows that these models work socially. Food insecurity is isolating and stigmatising. It damages mental health, social connection and people’s capacity to care for others. The report identifies a ‘buffering effect’: while food insecurity damages wellbeing, active engagement with a food club appears to weaken the relationship between hardship and poor physical health or social isolation.

Food support should not be assessed only by how much food is distributed. We also need to ask what hardship a service responds to, whether it is dignified, whether it improves stability, health and wellbeing, and whether it helps people move away from crisis. Food clubs and community food projects cannot substitute for adequate income, secure work or social protection; their role is to complement statutory provision by helping repair some of the damage caused by prolonged food insecurity.

5. Commission question: What is not working?

The current system is too reliant on emergency response. Emergency food aid cannot, on its own, address the conditions that make people food insecure in the first place.

Food insecurity cannot be solved by handing over food, vouchers or advice and assuming that people’s capabilities have been restored. Many households are living within conditions that repeatedly constrain what they can do: inadequate income, insecure housing, poor transport, limited time and energy, ill health, caring responsibilities, weak local food access, poor cooking or storage infrastructure, social isolation and limited trusted support.

The system also treats food insecurity as an individual problem. This can lead to responses focused on budgeting, cooking skills or behaviour change. The evidence from the report challenges this framing. Many people experiencing food insecurity already demonstrate considerable skill, care and resourcefulness. The issue is not that people lack capability in a simple sense. It is that their capabilities are being worn down by systems and circumstances that make secure, healthy and dignified food access difficult to sustain.

A right to food approach should avoid treating charitable food provision as the solution. It should ask why people are being made reliant on food aid, which state and market systems are constraining capability, and what duties are needed to prevent those constraints from recurring.

6. Commission question: What is the role of social protection, income support and a living wage?

Adequate income is foundational to the right to food.

The research shows that food insecurity is strongly linked to financial fragility. Households unable to afford an unexpected £100 expense were far more likely to be food insecure. This matters because shocks do not have to be large to be destabilising. A broken washing machine, school shoes, a transport cost, a late payment charge or an unexpected bill can push a household into crisis when there is no financial buffer.

The evidence also shows that work is not a guaranteed route out of food insecurity. People in work, including people in full-time work, are using food support because wages and household income do not reliably meet the cost of living. Food insecurity is therefore not confined to people outside employment.

A right to food law must therefore be connected to adequate social security, decent wages, secure work and household costs. Food support can help people cope, stabilise and rebuild, but it cannot substitute for income that is sufficient to live on.

7. Commission question: What policies affect families’ ability to feed themselves and their communities?

Policies affecting food insecurity extend well beyond food policy.

The ability to feed oneself and one’s family is shaped by social security, wages, employment conditions, housing, transport, childcare, disability support, energy costs, local government funding and the availability of affordable nutritious food in local places.

This is why a right to food law should include a duty to assess the food security implications of wider policy decisions. A policy that reduces household income, increases debt, limits mobility, cuts local services, weakens disability support or increases housing costs can also reduce people’s ability to secure food.

The right to food should therefore be treated as a cross-government responsibility, not as a narrow issue for food charities or local community organisations.

8. Commission question: What solutions reach those most marginalised?

The research points to the need for layered, local and dignified support. Some households are in acute crisis and need emergency help. Others are managing chronic precarity and need continuity, affordable food, routine and wider support. Others need opportunities to rebuild confidence, connection, community power and local food infrastructure.

The Food Ladders framework helps identify these different needs and avoid a one-size-fits-all response. It also highlights the importance of ‘rails’: the partnerships, anchor organisations, local authorities, funders, food networks and advice services that hold local support systems together.

For marginalised groups, access must be designed around real lives, including stigma, disability, care, transport, opening hours, cultural appropriateness, rural access, digital exclusion and awareness. People should not have to prove desperation before they are treated with dignity.

9. Commission question: How could a right to food law work in the UK?

A right to food law should not simply state an aspiration. It should create clear duties to prevent, protect and fulfil the right to food, with national government carrying primary responsibility.

This means recognising that food security depends on both household resources and local conditions. People need enough income, but they also need access to affordable nutritious food, transport, time, suitable housing, cooking and storage facilities, social support and services that do not stigmatise them.

The legal framework should include duties across national and local government, with adequate funding and powers attached. Local authorities and community organisations should support delivery but not carry responsibility without the resources or authority to act.

10. Commission question: What should government duties include?

Because food insecurity is produced across systems, accountability must also be cross-system, while remaining clearly anchored in statutory responsibility. Duties should focus not only on responding to hunger, but on building the conditions through which people can access and use food with dignity.

First, a duty to prevent food insecurity, including assessment of how policies affecting income, housing, welfare, wages, disability support, childcare, transport and energy shape people’s ability to secure food.

Second, a duty to ensure adequate income, through social security and wages that meet the cost of living, so that people are not forced to rely on food aid to meet basic needs.

Third, a duty to protect children, carers and people facing compounded disadvantage, including year-round nutritional support and tailored support for households whose caring responsibilities, health needs or living conditions constrain their food security.

Fourth, a duty to invest in publicly accountable local food infrastructure, including food partnerships, affordable food clubs, community kitchens, food co-operatives, growing schemes, advice services and other models that strengthen local capabilities and access.

Fifth, a duty to address unequal local food environments, especially where people face poor access to affordable, nutritious food or lack the transport, services or infrastructure needed to use it.

Sixth, a duty to ensure dignity and reduce stigma, so that food support is accessible, culturally appropriate, non-punitive and designed with those most affected.

Seventh, a duty to support a continuum of provision, recognising that crisis response, capacity building and community-led transformation all have a role in preventing hardship, repairing damage and building resilience.

11. Commission question: How could we monitor the impact and progress of a right to food law?

It is not enough to count emergency parcels. Many people experiencing food insecurity do not use food banks, and some use other forms of support.

Monitoring should include regular national and local measurement of household food insecurity, using robust and comparable indicators with large sample sizes. It should also include measures of diet quality, access to affordable fresh food, wellbeing, social connection, use of different support models and barriers to access.

Monitoring should also examine where local food infrastructure exists, who can access it, and whether it is sustainable. The question is not how much emergency support is provided, but whether people and communities are moving towards stability, dignity, health, connection, adequate income and reduced reliance on crisis provision.

12. Commission question: What accountability mechanism would ensure the voices of those most impacted are collected and acted upon?

People with living experience of food insecurity should be involved in defining problems, designing responses, reviewing progress and identifying unintended harms.

Accountability should not mean listening politely and carrying on as before. It should require institutions to show what changed: which priorities shifted, which harms were recognised, which decisions were amended, and how people’s everyday experience of food insecurity was acted upon.

Local food partnerships could play an important role, but only if properly resourced and connected to statutory duties. Community organisations hold deep local knowledge but should not be expected to carry responsibility without funding, authority or support.

13. Conclusion

The right to food will not be achieved by food parcels alone, nor by assuming that people simply need to cook better, budget better or make better choices.

The evidence from this research shows that food insecurity is a condition of structural precarity. It is produced through low income, insecure work, inadequate social security, housing pressures, caring responsibilities, poor health, transport barriers and unequal local food environments. It damages bodies, minds, relationships and communities.

A right to food approach must prevent hardship, repair damage and build the conditions that allow people and communities to live well. That starts with adequate incomes, secure work, strong social protection and decent housing, alongside accessible local food environments and accountable community food infrastructure.

Food banks save lives in moments of acute crisis, and they remain essential. But we cannot ‘catch’ our way out of food insecurity. A right to food law should be judged by whether it reduces the need for crisis food aid while creating the conditions for people to access food with dignity, stability, connection and hope.

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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Thank you for your response. ✨

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.