Rising Food Insecurity in the UK and the Cost for Children
According to the ONS, one in eight adults were left unable to buy essential goods in their local supermarket in October due to the shortages we’ve seen in recent months. Politicians have spoken about a potential “winter of discontent”, with rising energy bills, increasing prices and a critical shortage of workers resulting in significant food and fuel shortages due to supply constraints. The UK inflation rate has risen at its fastest rate for almost ten years (4.2%), meaning that the ‘cost of living’ has drastically increased at a time where pandemic support measures are being undone, like the government furlough scheme and the £20 a week uplift to social security payments. This significant inflation, alongside the shortage of labour and subsequent shortage of goods and services available to buy, has a plethora of consequences for consumers, but most importantly, on increasing food insecurity.
Food insecurity refers to the “insufficient and unpredictable access to healthy and nutritious foods” and occurs when an individual or household do not have consistent and regular access to fresh, healthy, and nutritious foods. Food insecurity can result in poverty and undernutrition, in which undernutrition means that people do not get enough of the nutrients needed for energy and growth, or to maintain a healthy immune system. Even before Brexit and the COVID19 pandemic, rates of food insecurity were at an alarming high, with many families left unable to afford essential food items and dependent on local foodbanks. However, the UK lockdown measures are estimated to have quadrupled rates of food insecurity, affecting those in the lowest income brackets hardest. In 2010, there were less than 100 food banks operating across the UK, whereas today, there are over 1,300 in the Trussell Trust Network alone. In 2020/21, a record number of 2.5 million food packages were given out by the Trussell Trust to food insecure families – an increase of 600,000 from the previous year. Alongside the Trussell Trust Network, approximately 1,000 independent food banks operated in the UK in the past year, and new food backs opening because of the COVID19 pandemic response in nearly 75% of local authorities, and one in five UK schools running food banks.
Food insecurity has dangerous consequences: it can lead to drastic weight changes, significant education losses for hungry children and an increase in violent crime. Longer working hours resulting in less time and energy to cook ‘fresh and healthy’ meals from scratch, and only being able to access calorie-dense and nutritionally deficient food sources (think of budget supermarket ready meals and low-cost, overproduced snacks) can also have an effect. For a country that has also ramped up its concerns about an ‘obesity epidemic’, the implementation of additional taxes on sugar and other foods deemed ‘unhealthy’ is further contributing to this issue of scarcity. Many people in low-income areas may only have access to their local convenience stores to buy food, due to a lack of transport options or many supermarkets not delivering to certain council estates or low-income areas, which is a phenomenon called a ‘food desert’. This means that often, the cheapest food is the unhealthiest, and they are paying an inflated price on long-lasting goods (because corner shops and convenience stores are typically higher priced) which are typically filled with more artificial chemicals and less nutritious than the alternatives available at shops in more prosperous areas. Hungry, ‘food insecure’ children are more likely to miss school than their food secure peers, are more likely to be distracted in classes and subsequently, less likely to achieve as high grades as their food secure peers due to the hunger and stress of food insecurity. Food insecurity in childhood also has a significant effect on lifetime mental health, with food insecure children more likely to report depression, anxiety, disordered eating (such as binge eating) and behavioural problems than their food secure counterparts. By the time they reach their teenage years, food-insecure children are twice as likely as their food secure peers to have to have been suspended from school. School suspension correlates with increased propensity to commit crime (due to institutional failings and a lack of support system for the child), which in turn, results in increase rates of incarceration for food insecure children, and a deadly, self-perpetuating cycle that is difficult to break and structurally implemented.
When we think of food insecurity, our thoughts go to the typical white savour Oxfam advert’s – a severely malnourished child, in a land far away from our own, with a voice over telling us about the child’s lack of access to food. We think, “this would never happen in the UK, this only happens elsewhere”, and yet, here we are, in a country where it took a professional footballer campaigning for free school meals for our government to feed hundreds of thousands of hungry children outside of term time. We lay the blame on the parents, thinking that “it’s up to the parents to feed their kids, so why should we have to do it?”, when many parents are trying their absolute hardest in a system that is built against them, children don’t chose the circumstances they’re born into, and we give our £85,000-a-year earning MP’s a £25 a day food allowance that could cover these parents entire weekly food shop. It shouldn’t take a footballer campaigning to provide a basic right for children in this country, nor should the disproportionate growth in food banks in the UK be praised as community ‘coming together – the overwhelming presence of charity in tackling food insecurity is a direct result of government failure, and our government keeps on failing us because it’s easier to blame the hungry child and their parents next door than it is to blame the people at the top.
Written by Geena Whiteman
Geena is a PhD student researching how young people are entering the workforce, particularly how they pursue entrepreneurship and what entrepreneurship means to them.
