Introduction This chapter investigates the main pathways through food poverty, by exploring the experience of food aid recipients. Respondents described the impact of living through food poverty and it clearly affected their lives in many different ways. Food bank users in Dublin were asked about the difficulty of having no food and the experience of hunger, maintaining an appropriate diet, emotional experiences and social exclusion. The chapter presents important coping strategies, as respondents struggled to make ends meet and prioritise their spending
Introduction This chapter explores the main pathways into food poverty, based on interviewing a sample of food aid users. The literature indicates that there are often multiple drivers that result in poverty and this is also the case for food poverty. Chapter 4 has shown that there is a relatively high risk of food poverty for those who are unemployed and rely on social protection. There is an increased prevalence for those in low-paid and precarious employment, although working poverty often arises from low work intensity, due to limited paid hours at
Introduction This chapter reviews responses to food poverty in Ireland, including the Government’s participation in the EU-wide FEAD and the United Nations’ SDGs relating to food insecurity. It investigates the role of the voluntary sector, where food charity is delivered through food banks and other forms of emergency food aid. This leads to an assessment of the overall response in Ireland, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and both the growth and trends in food charity across Europe. Emerging developments in support models are also considered and
Michael Drew’s review of the causes and effects of food poverty in Ireland offers the first full-length study of this significant and protracted issue that has been exacerbated by COVID-19.
The book brings together the complex picture emerging from interviews with users of food aid. Their pathways into and through food poverty are impacted by the policies and practices of government and employers with wide-ranging implications. The work explores the international landscape of food poverty and situates both experiences and responses in a comparative context. It considers how these results contribute to an understanding of the problem and what action should be taken.
123 SEVEN Food and food poverty For most of human history, if you expended more energy in acquiring food than you derived from it, you would eventually starve. But in the fossil fuel era, the amount of energy we use in the production of food exceeds the energy we derive from food by a factor of 10 (Heinberg, 2011, p 130). By accessing hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight we have evaded the old expenditure versus consumption equation, while swelling the population from 1 billion to 7 billion in less than two centuries. Famines and starvation have
THREE Social innovation and food poverty Introduction Addressing household food poverty is a social policy issue in which social innovations are more common in Europe and elsewhere than in the UK. Social innovations in this area range from small, neighbourhood-based, citizen groups offering cooked meals, to organisations managing thousands of kilos of donated food. Civil society responses to undernourishment have often outshone government action. In fact, public sector initiatives which have developed in this field are often attributable to the
195 21 Food poverty and the policy context in Ireland Deirdre O’Connor Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the issue of food poverty in Ireland, starting with a discussion of how it is defined, understood and measured in the Irish context. We then consider how it is experienced by those who are ‘food poor’ in Ireland before moving to review the nature and range of interventions that address the issue and identifying the main actors involved. A key argument within this discussion is that the relevant policy context is
207 Journal of Poverty and Social Justice • vol 26 • no 2 • 207–23 • © Policy Press 2018 Print ISSN 1759 8273 • Online ISSN 1759 8281 • https://doi.org/10.1332/175982718X15200701225223 Accepted for publication 09 February 2018 • First published online 19 April 2018 article How do children and their families experience food poverty according to UK newspaper media 2006–15? Abigail Knight, a.knight@ucl.ac.uk Julia Brannen, j.brannen@ucl.ac.uk Rebecca O’Connell, rebecca.oconnell@ucl.ac.uk Laura Hamilton, laura.hamilton.15@ucl.ac.uk University College London
Introduction Food poverty in the UK is continuing to grow, and more often than not it is the voluntary sector that steps in to respond to people’s food needs at a local level. This paper addresses the question of whether voluntary sector responses to UK food poverty are a sticking plaster without addressing the causes of food poverty. This question has been asked both from within and outside the voluntary sector. For example, voluntary organisations such as The Trussell Trust have spoken of a desire to put themselves ‘out of business’ ( Butler, 2018 ) and
143 NINE Addressing food poverty in the UK Sarah Greenwood As London foodbank network manager for The Trussell Trust, I hear countless stories like this one from Lydia, who was referred to one of the network’s 420-plus foodbanks in the UK after losing her job: “I’ve worked all my adult life. After working in a bank for 25 years and then in a solicitors’ office, I was made redundant when my boss had to get rid of 15 staff members across the board. I got redundancy pay but I still had bills, rent to pay and a child to look after. My money was dwindling; my
