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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how methods of food security analysis developed in the Global South can valuably be applied to Global North contexts. The results reveal a fuller picture of people’s livelihoods, amidst worsening poverty, and highlight severe limitations of increasingly-prevalent food aid.

Paper long abstract:

Food aid has become a high-profile component of the de facto UK welfare safety net over the past decade, alongside more widespread increases in food insecurity and poverty. Drawing on methods from the Global South which better account for the informality and irregularity of livelihoods that are typified by charitable food aid, this research provides new evidence of how different types of food aid affect UK households’ living standards and food security.

Interviews with people using food banks or community meals in London between 2016 and 2020 piloted a hybrid new Enhanced Family Budget approach, bringing together questions from established large-scale surveys with ground-breaking household economy methods that allow for analysis of ‘food income’ and other aspects which are often overlooked in survey data. Minimum Income Standard budgets were used to consider the adequacy of the incomes recorded, and open-ended questions gave additional context and meaning.

The results demonstrate the severe limitations of food aid as a component of food security systems in this context, where it can only satisfy the most reductive of approaches to food security. Almost all of the families’ total resources were far below a minimum socially-acceptable standard of living. Food aid helped to reduce essential costs to varying and potentially vital extents, sometimes with additional emotional or practical support. Yet food alone could not fill most of the deficits, and the provision of food rather than money generated further problems of unreliability, stigma and differences from desired consumption practices.