Food Poverty Is a Political Choice
The cost of living crisis will swell the queues at food banks across the country, but allowing millions to go hungry while a handful get rich isn’t inevitable – it’s a political choice.
The Food Foundation has recently found that 62% of households have experienced higher energy bills—and 16% reported having to cut back on the quality or quantity of food as a result. (Jack Taylor / Getty Images)
Inflation has hit a thirty-year high of 5.5%. Combined with years of stagnant wages, a brutal cut to the £20 Universal Credit uplift and further real-terms cuts to benefits more recently, skyrocketing energy prices and household bills, and an upcoming hike in National Insurance contributions, households in the UK are facing a drastic crisis in the cost of living. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rising price of supermarket food, which is going to hit the poorest families the hardest.
Partly as a knock-on from Brexit and resulting labour shortages, food prices have been rising steadily over the past few years. What’s new about this recent, sharp surge in prices is the global increase in the cost of oil and natural gas. From the fuel needed to deliver food in a globalised system to the CO2 required to increase shelf life and produce fertiliser, spikes in these resource prices have pushed the cost of food upward.
On top of that, all household costs are entwined; any increase in one area impacts the others. Food researchers have long noted the strategy of ‘trading down’ on food, where cash-strapped households buy cheaper and often less nutritious products in order to pay for the fixed costs of their energy bills and housing. But when households have already ‘traded down’ as far as possible, they resort to eating smaller portions, skipping meals, and eventually forgoing food for days.
This is a reality being borne out in modern Britain. The Food Foundation has recently found that 62% of households have experienced higher energy bills—and 16% reported having to cut back on the quality or quantity of food as a result.
Behind Food Insecurity
Food insecurity has long been at horrifying levels in the UK. 9% of households have experienced food insecurity in the past month, and in January, research from the Food Foundation shows that one million adults went an entire day without any food whatsoever.
Hunger is a drastic problem in itself, but it leads to other problems, too. Food insecurity is linked to a poorer diet, which means the exacerbation of broader health inequalities between the rich and the poor, including mental health issues. Cases of malnutrition in the UK, for example, have almost doubled since 2010—the start of Tory Party rule.
Food insecurity isn’t just a simple case of rising prices, either: it’s driven by various factors. Issues with the benefits system and the erosion of the social safety net by a decade of austerity are one: changes to the benefit system, most notably the so-called ‘bedroom tax’ and the five week wait for UC, have themselves been found to increase the need for food aid. Almost half of all those who used a food bank in mid-2020 were paying back debt to the government—debt accrued from benefit overpayments or advances.
Unexpected crises such as the loss of a job, illness, or divorce, and a lack of informal and formal support are another. Food insecurity has also been linked to social isolation.
What this means is that when food prices do increase, they hit those most in need the hardest. The work of chef and campaigner Jack Monroe shows that supermarket ‘value’ ranges have disappeared in recent years, while the costs of basics have increased exponentially; where prices have stayed the same, meanwhile, product sizes have decreased, a phenomenon known as ‘shrinkflation’. This has in turn led to calls for a new price index—one that more accurately represents how food price increases impact the poorest.
The Way Forward
Compounding all this—rising food prices, rising energy bills that put a squeeze on food budgets, crises in the benefits system and the intentional dismantling of our social support network—is years of wage stagnation. Recent inflation rates have meant wages have now fallen in real terms for the third time in a decade, leaving them, in real terms, £3 less than at the time of the 2008 financial crisis. This is as true as anywhere in the food industry itself: a survey carried out by the Bakers and Allied Food Workers Union last year found that 19% of the food workers surveyed had themselves run out of food because of a lack of money.
To mitigate the effect of food price inflation on households, then, we have to address the root causes of poverty and food insecurity. The wages of workers can and must grow: the minimum wage should be increased to £15, as the Bakers and Allied Food Workers Union and others have demanded.
We need to reinvest in our social safety net, too, increasing the resilience of families so they can weather unexpected crises. Benefits need to increase substantially and punitive measures such as sanctions, the bedroom tax, and the five-week wait for UC must be scrapped. We also need to take urgent steps to fix the energy crisis, a driving factor in rising food prices, by instituting a windfall tax on the fossil fuel giants turning record profits, investing in renewables, and, crucially, bringing energy back into public ownership.
But if we are really serious about tackling food insecurity, we also need to look beyond a commodified food system and toward a world where food provision is regarded as a public good, affordable for all. A fully funded National Food Service would provide nutritious food, delivered by well paid, unionised workers in dedicated community buildings in every neighbourhood across the country. Some cities, like Bristol, have already started building one.
Despite rising costs across the board and the claims made by Tory politicians, widespread hunger is by no means an unavoidable situation in modern Britain. Our political class has abdicated responsibility for what is ultimately a political problem to an army of charities and food banks who are now expected to feed the hungry, but this is not a long-term solution.
Building a country in which no-one has to go to bed hungry is not beyond our reach. We must fight for solutions that provide a real improvement to people’s material conditions, and make food affordable in the long term for all.