Introduction

In the last decade, rising food bank usage has become a source of escalating public concern in the United Kingdom (UK), where it has come to symbolise the country’s endemic problems with poverty and inequality (Cooper and Dumpleton, 2013). The UK’s largest provider of food banks, the Trussell Trust, distributed 2.5 million emergency food parcels in 2020/21, up from 61,000 in 2010/11 (Bramley et al, 2021). The significant increase in food bank usage has seen food insecurity become the subject of increasing scrutiny, intensified further by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has triggered further alarming rises in food insecurity (Trussell Trust, 2020).

This article is focused on the experiences of young people, a group that has been largely overlooked in relation to food insecurity. Young people are reported to be particularly reluctant to engage with food banks, which has contributed to the ‘hidden’ nature of this social problem (Priestley, 2018). However, the lack of attention to food insecurity among young people is still surprising, given evidence that has long demonstrated their enhanced exposure to known risk factors of food insecurity, including poverty and homelessness (Watts et al, 2015; Fitzpatrick et al, 2018). Young people also experience discrimination in the labour market, housing market and social security system, which limits their ability to experience economic security (Goulden, 2018; ILO, 2020; Homeless Link, 2021).

Despite this evidence, however, relatively little is known about youth food insecurity. Particularly little is known about experiences of food insecurity among young adults who are not teenagers and who are not homeless in the UK. This article draws on qualitative research with young people aged 18–26 living in Edinburgh and London with previous and/or ongoing experiences of food insecurity to consider what factors drive food insecurity among young people, how they manage it, and their experiences of informal and formal food support.

Rising food insecurity in the UK in context

Rising food insecurity and food bank usage in the UK has occurred against a backdrop of economic downturn, austerity measures and significant welfare reform over the last decade. Welfare reform has been heavily linked to rising food insecurity, with the introduction and rollout of Universal Credit (UC) – the UK’s primary income support benefit – felt to be particularly influential (Trussell Trust, 2019). UC has been widely critiqued for its delayed payment structure and emphasis on sanctioning (Loopstra et al, 2018; Reeves and Loopstra, 2021), which have been found to drive destitution among claimants, leading to increased reliance on emergency food aid (MacLeod, 2019; Trussell Trust, 2019).

The global financial recession of 2008 had a significant impact on the labour market in the UK, leading to spikes in unemployment, particularly among young people (Major and Machin, 2020). More recently, prior to the pandemic, employment rates had improved (DWP, 2020), but this has coincided with historically high levels of in-work poverty, with recent analysis concluding that more than half of people in poverty now live in working households (Innes, 2020). These and other research findings (for example, Bailey, 2016; McBride et al, 2018) point to profound changes in the quality of employment, particularly in the lower rungs of the labour market, where young people are overwhelmingly employed (MacDonald, 2009).

It is in this fractured socio-economic context that, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic not only brought the UK’s problems with poverty and inequality into sharper relief, but also significantly exacerbated them (House of Lords, 2020; Parkes and McNeil, 2020). Food bank usage is at a record high across the UK. This has worsened significantly under the strain of the pandemic, with the Trussell Trust (2020) reporting an 89 per cent increase in need in April 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. It is important to note, however, that food bank usage has been rising steadily year-on-year in the UK since at least 2016 (Trussell Trust, 2020).

While food insecurity has occupied increasing research, policy and media attention in recent years, this has typically been concentrated on the experiences of family units, young children and older age adults (Cardoso et al, 2019; Purdam et al, 2019). There has been relatively little attention given to the experiences of young adults, despite evidence highlighting that food insecurity is a significant problem among young people, who are more at risk of experiencing it than other age groups (Dush et al, 2020; Institute for Social and Economic Research, 2020). This article will now review existing research around youth food insecurity.

Youth food insecurity

Young people are at a particularly high risk of experiencing food insecurity due to a range of factors. Research demonstrates that young people are at an enhanced risk of experiencing poverty and are more likely to experience destitution than older age groups in the UK (Eisenstadt, 2017; Whitham and Acik, 2019). Young people experience discrimination and disadvantage in the labour market that contributes to their economic precarity. Before the pandemic, youth unemployment had been falling in the UK over the last several years, but has remained consistently higher than the unemployment rate for older working-age people (House of Commons Library, 2020). Moreover, the relatively healthy employment rates pre- and ‘post’-pandemic mask the nature of this employment, with young people disproportionately likely to be underemployed in jobs that are low paid and insecure (Schoon and Bynner, 2017; Kalleberg, 2018).

Young people have also been particularly affected by welfare reform. Discrimination against them within the social security system is twofold, relating both to (i) allowances and entitlements, and (ii) sanctioning. On UC, single under-25s without dependent children receive 26 per cent less than over-25s (Social Security Advisory Committee, 2018). The rollout of UC has been strongly linked to rising food insecurity and poverty (Loopstra et al, 2018; Trussell Trust, 2019). This is significant because Sosenko et al’s (2019) comprehensive study of food insecurity found that a significantly higher proportion of young people (50 per cent) receive UC as opposed to other income support benefits than do over-25s.

Research has also revealed the disproportionate impact of the increasing emphasis on sanctioning on young people under the age of 25 (de Vries et al, 2017). Since the 1980s, welfare conditionality and punitive sanctioning have been mainstays of the British welfare state, which is the second harshest in the world (Immervoll and Knotz, 2018). A particularly harsh stance has crystallised around young people, however, for whom there is felt to be particularly few excuses to not be either ‘earning or learning’ (Watts and Fitzpatrick, 2014). The early-2010s saw greater sanctioning introduced for income support benefits, with under-25s accounting for 41 per cent of all sanctions between October 2012 and December 2013 (Watts et al, 2014). The rollout of UC, a benefit that is highly conditional, has intensified this discrimination against young people.

The limited research that has been conducted on youth food insecurity reveals it to be a typically hidden problem, due to a combination of factors that include the stigma attached to food insecurity and how young people prefer to manage it. The often hidden nature of young people’s food insecurity can be traced, in part, to young people’s emergent position in the life-course, with youth a time of life particularly devoted to establishing independence and where peer approval is felt to be particularly important (Arnett, 2000). These values coexist uneasily with seeking food aid (Priestley, 2018). Accordingly, young people are generally underrepresented in the usage statistics of food banks and other relevant support agencies (for example, Sosenko et al, 2019; Trussell Trust, 2020). Rather than this signifying a lack of need among young people, however, research suggests that this is linked to most young people being able to draw on familial support but also to young people preferring to conceal or alternatively manage their food insecurity (Waxman et al, 2016). Popkin et al (2016) note that ‘many food insecure [young people] may go unnoticed because of the great efforts they make to hide their hardship’.

Since the onset of COVID-19, many established strategies for managing food insecurity have been stretched to the limit or have become entirely unavailable. Research demonstrates that young people under the age of 25 were the worst impacted by the pandemic in the labour market (Joyce and Xu, 2020). Analysis of survey data from the Understanding Society survey (Institute for Economic and Social Research, 2020) indicates a notably higher prevalence of hunger among young people aged 16–24 in April 2020 than all other age groups. Qualitative research on food experiences during lockdown (Connors et al, 2020) uncovered distinctive impacts of the pandemic on the food insecurity of young people. It found that young people under 25 had already been living with considerable financial insecurity before the pandemic, which had tipped them into poverty.

The literature reviewed here indicates that youth food insecurity shares a number of commonalities with general experiences of food insecurity among other age groups, particularly in terms of it being primarily driven by low income and the preference for it to be managed through informal rather than formal support networks. However, research also suggests that not only are young people more likely to experience food insecurity, but also that there are distinctive drivers, experiences and impacts of food insecurity linked to being young. However, while there is extensive coverage of food insecurity among older adults and families, there is a troubling lack of attention paid to youth food insecurity, with young people’s underrepresentation among food bank users perhaps erroneously perceived as denoting a lack of need among this population. This article draws important attention to this overlooked group.

Methodology

This article draws on qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews with a small group of young people, aged 18–26, between June and August 2020. The study adopted a qualitative research design to address the lack of qualitative research exploring food insecurity from young people’s own perspectives. Accordingly, in this study, the focus was less on quantifying young people’s food insecurity and more on the factors driving it and how it was experienced and managed.

The young people who participated in this study all lived in either Edinburgh or London, which were selected purposively on the basis of similarities in their demographic profiles and characteristics. Both are wealthy capital cities with sizeable youth populations, pronounced income and wealth inequalities and high living costs (NOMIS, 2022a; 2022b). London is significantly larger and is more ethnically diverse than Edinburgh. Situating the research in two places enabled any differences and similarities in experiences across the cities to be highlighted, providing a wider lens for the research.

Participants were sampled purposively based on their age falling between 18 and 26, and on the basis of current or previous experiences of food insecurity. This sampling criteria was established in efforts to encourage an older and more diverse sample of young people than in other studies of youth food insecurity, which have overwhelmingly been conducted with school-aged teenagers or homeless young people. Recruitment for this study was challenging due to it coinciding with stringent lockdown measures across the UK in response to the pandemic, which prevented me from visiting gatekeeping organisations to meet young people and promote the study to them directly. This meant that there was a greater reliance on recruiting through gatekeeping organisations at a time when these organisations were under intense pressure to provide services to young people remotely with fewer staff and resources. The original objective was to recruit 20 participants, ten from each city, but ultimately 13 young people participated; eight in Edinburgh and five in London (see Table 1).

There are important distinctions between the profiles of the Edinburgh and London samples that stem from how they were recruited to the study. All of the participants in London were recruited through a youth homelessness organisation and, as a result, were all living in supported accommodation at the time of interview. Efforts were made to recruit young people through a range of organisations in London, but the homelessness organisation was the only one to respond within the short timeframe of the study. As I was unable to travel to London to recruit more directly, I relied solely on the response of gatekeepers for the London sample. The participants in Edinburgh were recruited through a range of sampling techniques (gatekeepers, direct advertising and participant referrals), enabled by living in Edinburgh at the time of the research, and this is reflected in the more diverse profile of this group.

Given the profile and small size of the sample, some groups of young people have not knowingly been included in this study, including young people with disabilities. Eleven out of the 13 participants were British-born, and relatively little is known about the ethnic composition of the participants as this information was not collected. Information about the participants’ social class backgrounds was also not explicitly collected, but given that the majority of participants lived in supported accommodation or social housing, and that most described experiences of persistent economic insecurity in their interviews, it can be assumed that most, if not all, of the participants were from backgrounds of low socioeconomic status (SES).

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants. Due to the restrictions associated with the pandemic, the interviews were all conducted remotely over the phone, lasting between 30 and 50 minutes on average. Each participant was issued with a £20 supermarket or takeaway voucher to thank them for their contribution to the study. Each participant was taken through an informed consent process over the phone prior to being interviewed, where they were informed of their rights and how their data would be used before signing a consent form. Given the sensitive and potentially distressing subject matter of the research, I spent time prior to the interviews explaining to participants that if at any point they would like to pause or stop the interview, or decline to answer any questions, they were within their rights to do so. I also ensured that I had information about relevant local and national support agencies, should any participants request support relating to their food insecurity, or in the event that a participants’ testimony led me to be concerned for their welfare. Finally, because the interviews were conducted remotely, it was more challenging for me to be alert to how my questions were potentially emotionally impacting the participants. I made regular checks on the participants’ welfare throughout interviews to counter this and to ensure their consent was continuous.

This article focuses on the findings of the study that relate to the causes of participants’ food insecurity, how they managed it and their experiences of formal/informal food support. Data was coded and analysed thematically, following Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six analytical steps: (1) data familiarisation and the identification of initial ideas; (2) coding of the data; (3) sorting the data under potential themes; (4) reviewing these themes by cross-checking them against the codes and the entire dataset; (5) refining and solidifying the themes; and (6) identifying relevant extracts from the data that are illustrative of the themes and the dataset as a whole. All participant names have been replaced with pseudonyms.

Findings

Management of food insecurity and experiences of support

The participants described a range of strategies for managing their food insecurity and avoiding hunger. They described relying on food that is cheap, filling, in damaged packaging or past its sell by date, for example, as well as skipping meals and reducing their portion sizes. Several accessed food opportunistically, eating at work if employed in hospitality, or benefiting from their friends’ or flatmates’ jobs in hospitality.

Many described actively working on their budgeting and cooking skills since their earlier experiences of food insecurity and credited their improvement at this for mitigating against subsequent episodes of food insecurity. However, many of these participants were still experiencing food insecurity, which is unsurprising given its roots in structural factors, like low income, rather than individual deficits like inexperience. The participants compensated for their lack of experience by drawing from a range of sophisticated skills and strategies to manage their limited resources and cope with food insecurity. For the participants in this study, these strategies were underpinned by notions of independence. In this sense, many participants had a tendency to locate responsibility for their food insecurity, and certainly for managing it, within themselves, which had implications for their perceptions and experiences of food support.

Conclusion and discussion

This article makes an important contribution to knowledge around a demographic that has been troublingly overlooked in relation to food insecurity in the UK, despite their greater likelihood of experiencing it compared to older adults. Young people’s heightened risks of homelessness, poverty and destitution, known predictors of food insecurity, is well-established in research examining patterns of inequality (for example, Fitzpatrick et al, 2018), while more recent research has highlighted some of the ways in which young people’s food security has been compromised by the COVID-19 pandemic (for example, Connors et al, 2020). Despite this, young people’s underrepresentation among official food bank users has combined with, and actively contributed to, the ‘hidden’ nature of youth food insecurity in the UK, where the assumption that young people are sheltered from severe hardships by their families prevails (Kingman, 2019).

While the small-scale nature of this study inevitably places limitations on its ability to inform policy, by foregrounding the experiences of a more diverse range of young people, including those in employment, who are full-time students and who are in their 20s, this article has provided some important insights into experiences of youth food insecurity in the UK. It has identified a range of causes behind youth food insecurity, some of which are commonly recognised triggers of food insecurity, including low incomes, problems with welfare benefits and the various impacts of the pandemic. However, not only are young people more exposed to these triggers, this research has identified a range of additional factors driving or exacerbating food insecurity that are more distinctively tied to being young. These include leaving home for the first time, relational and environmental factors associated with shared living and a perceived lack of experience with budgeting and food.

The findings of this study have also highlighted that while the pandemic significantly worsened the participants’ food insecurity, most had been living in chronic or intermittent poverty for several years. This experience of persistent economic insecurity had forced them to become skilled and resourceful at ‘getting by’ (Lister, 2004), with participants drawing on a range of strategies to manage their hunger. Underpinning these strategies was a sense of independence; these were strategies they could deploy on their own terms that chimed with their tendency to frame their food insecurity as a personal responsibility that should be managed on their own, which carried significant implications for their perspectives on food support. While these sentiments of independence and personal responsibility are not unique to young people in relation to the highly stigmatised experience of food insecurity, the young people in this study often explicitly grounded these perspectives in relation to their youth and burgeoning adulthood, which suggests that these are potentially heightened barriers for this demographic with regard to food support.

Social support, which has been found to be a key resource in other studies of youth food insecurity (for example, Popkin et al, 2016), was problematic or missing for some of the participants in this study, which had necessitated their engagement with food banks. But consistent with the findings of other studies (Priestley, 2018; Sosenko et al, 2019), there was still relatively low uptake of formal support among the sample, who considered food banks to be an absolute last resort. This reluctance to engage with formal support was linked to the stigma attached to accepting ‘charity’, but was also strongly bound up in its incompatibility with the participants’ strong sense of emerging independence and personal responsibility, and was often entangled with their sense of being somehow undeserving of food aid; provision they felt should be reserved for more ‘deserving’ groups. These findings imply that there are a range of barriers to young people accessing both formal and informal food support, including the weight placed on establishing self-sufficiency and independence in young adulthood, and that young people’s relatively low usage of food banks should not be interpreted as denoting a lack of need for such support.

There has long been an assumption that young people are protected from experiencing severe hardships like food insecurity because they are able to rely on financial support from their families and can remain in or return to the family household if needed. As this and other studies have demonstrated, however, this assumption fails to acknowledge the diversity of youth experiences and how young people’s outcomes, support networks and resources are heavily shaped by social class, place and other key social divisions (Kingman, 2019). While information about the participants’ socioeconomic characteristics was not explicitly obtained in this study, the fact that the majority lived in either supported accommodation or social housing, combined with interviews testifying to chronic experiences of individual and familial economic hardship, strongly suggests that at least most of these participants were from backgrounds of low SES. Inequalities in young people’s access to familial support emerged particularly starkly in this study, where some participants had no access to this resource, which served as a protective factor against food insecurity for a minority of other participants. While most of the participants were against seeking or accepting familial support for reasons of pride or because of their parents’ own straitened circumstances, some were simply unable to make this choice, due to being estranged from their families, often since their early teenage years. Interestingly, however, while these are clearly qualitatively different experiences, almost all of the young people described their reluctant attitudes to informal – and formal – support in similar ways that circled back to their sense of independence and personal responsibility.

Little differences in experiences emerged between the two case cities, however, apart from those related to the significant differences in the two samples, with those living in supported accommodation in London describing distinctive challenges within these environments for food security, for example. Rather, the pervasiveness of food insecurity among young people from a range of circumstances emerged between the two cities, which have high living costs and youth labour markets skewed towards precarious, low-paid employment.

The findings presented in this article should not be surprising for three key reasons. First, evidence has consistently indicated that young people are at a disproportionately higher risk of experiencing poverty, destitution and homelessness than other age groups in the UK. Second, labour market approaches to young people in the UK are a key part of the problem, with young people paid lower wages than older adults and overrepresented in casual jobs with low levels of security. Third, young people are entitled to fewer and lower rates of social security protections than older adults in the UK. The demographic risks of experiencing things like food insecurity and poverty are vividly exposed during recessions and the numerous structural factors that disadvantage young people have been brought to the surface during the COVID-19 pandemic. If meaningful steps towards these actions are not taken, we can expect to see rates of youth food insecurity and poverty among young people rise further in the UK, particularly under COVID-19 and the current cost of living crisis.

There are actions that can be taken at the local level by practitioners that can help to mitigate youth food insecurity and its effects, including improving the accessibility and visibility of formal food support, but without a national government-led response, these will only address the symptoms of youth food insecurity, rather than its fundamental causes. There is a critical need for meaningful policy debate about introducing a living wage for young people, in acknowledgment of the diversity of young people’s circumstances, to better protect them from poverty and to enable them to build capacity for financial resilience, for example. It is equally important that current Universal Credit and Local Housing Allowance rates for under-25s be revised and that serious thought is given to regulating casual employment practices for young employees. These inequalities are part of a broader policy frame that homogenises the youth cohort by making blanket assumptions about their financial outgoings and access to family support and resources. While there is some rigour to this rationale because the majority of young people do live with, or are able to access support from, their families, at least a third of young people do not and instead live independently, facing many of the same financial responsibilities as older adults (Social Security Advisory Committee, 2018). Finally, the government and third sector organisations might consider a cash first approach to supporting young people with food insecurity, which carries significant stigma in relation to accessing food aid. The advantages of a cash first approach to food aid have been argued by a range of organisations (IFAN, 2022), and seem particularly appropriate for a demographic that is particularly underrepresented among official food bank users.

Funding

This work was supported by the Oak Foundation under Grant OCAY-16–607.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.