The Food Foundation’s new Roadmap to Reducing Food Insecurity in the UK makes for a sobering read. One in 10 UK households are struggling to put food on the table, with families, citizens living with disability and people on benefits among those hit hardest.
Yet the report’s key message is underpinned by possibility: food insecurity is not inevitable, but actively shaped through the choices we make as a society.
The roadmap calls for a national plan to make healthy food affordable and strengthen community provision. Yet, to support those who are the hardest hit by food insecurity, we must focus on services that prevent people from reaching crisis point in the first place, through interventions that build community food resilience and deliver long-term impact.
Breaking the cycle of food bank dependency
The food system in the UK is often deemed to be ‘broken’. It has, in many ways, become two separate worlds. In one, adequate food is accessible to those who can afford it through the mainstream retail environment we all recognise. In the other, a parallel system has emerged for those who cannot: a food aid network dominated by charitable services such as food banks.
While food banks play an important role in moments of crisis, we need to break the cycle of dependency that emergency food aid can foster, as well as the stigma and anxiety it can bring in the long term.
There is, however, another way to approach food insecurity that addresses its root causes and creates lasting change. For many years, the affordable food club movement – an ecosystem of social supermarkets, community pantries and larders – has been insurgent, supporting hundreds of thousands of families across the UK.
These models provide dignified access to affordable food while also offering holistic, person-centred support to help people build the skills to move forward.
This isn’t an alternative to cash-first approaches or existing support models. Instead, it is a missing piece which offers a way of rebuilding a more equitable and functional food system. This sustainable model finds its inspiration in UK food retail history, where the uniformity of today’s retail offer was less prevalent. It’s a form of community food rooted in place, and which builds on local assets and wealth.
As the UK’s first social supermarket, Community Shop helped pioneer this model and remains part of the growing movement, working with communities to drive long-term change. Many retailers, manufacturers and community providers are already working together to make the sustainable, future-focused model a reality, and are actively looking at ways to unlock value from surplus stock to support this change.
The challenge now is scale: accessing enough surplus food to deliver the immediate need for millions of people and releasing its latent value to create genuine, long-term change.
Food insecurity across the UK does not have to be inevitable. The Food Foundation’s roadmap is a good step along what is a difficult road. Now it’s time for industry to work together to tackle the issues at their core.
Gary Stott is executive chair of Community Shop
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