The United Kingdom (UK) has a serious food problem. It is the world’s sixth largest economy, yet according to the Food Foundation 7.2 million adults (13.6 per cent of households) experience food insecurity today. Food poverty has become so pervasive in Britain and Northern Ireland that even those who produce, process, deliver or serve food are themselves forced to use food banks (BFAWU, 2023). Although food insecurity is complex and multi-causal, the place of work tends to be neglected in the analysis of contemporary food poverty. The articles collected in this special section emerge from a series of knowledge exchange workshops – funded by the British Academy-Leverhulme Trust and organised by the Food and Work Network (FAWN) – which sought to address this gap. The network was born with one overarching mission: to identify, understand and explain the multiple ways in which work in contemporary Britain shapes what, where, when and how much the nation eats every day. This themed section showcases some of the new research conducted under this rubric.

There is no shortage of academic and policy studies into the failings of the UK food system. Recent scholarship has recorded the food vulnerabilities within households exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic (O’Connell and Brannen, 2021; SPERI, 2022), as well as the resilience displayed by families and wider communities in the face of these challenges (Blake, 2021). Specialists have published important research on the connections between food insecurity and racism (Bailey and Richmond-Bishop, 2021; Singh et al, 2023), employment rights (Bender and Theodossiou, 2018) or supply-chain economics (Klassen et al, 2023). Among advocacy and policy circles, the 2018 People’s Food Policy led the way in outlining system-wide changes to the economics and governance of the food chain, while Scotland has recently followed with its own Good Food Nation Act. The 2020 Dimbleby National Food Strategy also successfully raised the political profile of food security in UK government policy, although most of its key recommendations remain to be implemented (Edwards, 2023).

Largely absent from all these analyses, however, is the place of work – broadly conceived to include paid and unpaid labour, outside and inside the home – in determining the level and forms of food insecurity. The two research articles and one policy and practice article contained in this special section cut across the workplace–community–household triad FAWN has been using as a framework of analysis. They reveal the close connections between the nature of work and food insecurity, highlighting in particular the role of time – precarious and irregular shift patterns, zero- and unsocial hours, volunteering and ‘residual’ time available after the working day and care responsibilities are discounted – in governing dietary choices and eating routines among ordinary households across the country.

Three main propositions animate this themed section. The first is the assumption that the way we produce strongly frames the way we consume – including an everyday necessity like food. Here, ‘residual’ time accompanies disposable income as a key variable in accounting for food poverty (Calafati et al, 2023). The organisation of labour time – whether inside or outside the home, formally remunerated or otherwise – conditions the quality and quantity of food available to working families, and indeed how it is prepared and where it is consumed. The groundbreaking contribution from Lydia Hayes and Naomi Maynard captures the effects of poor-quality work on food insecurity (Hayes and Maynard, 2024). It is not simply pay and conditions, Hayes and Maynard note, but also irregular and insecure hours, stress, lack of care time, and the inevitable health consequences arising from these time-related issues, that generate situations where workers need to access food banks. As reflected in one of Hayes and Maynard’s individual vignettes of a migrant agency worker who is single parent to five children, ‘Jasmine finds it challenging to care for her growing children whilst affording her bills, especially in the winter months when it is extremely cold […] the agency gives permanent staff more hours, making her hours inconsistent, leaving her with low income.’ Time poverty is compounded by an especially punitive ‘coerced worker-claimant’ benefits system premised on more stringent job search requirements than the previous Job Seekers’ Allowance (Wright and Dwyer, 2022), which drives people into lower quality jobs, in turn reinforcing low pay and poor health, leading to food insecurity.

Although the engagement terms and conditions of volunteers in the ever-expanding food emergency industry (Williams and May, 2022) are themselves coming under critical scrutiny, the article by Ronald Ranta and Hilda Mulrooney reports unpaid volunteers in their two-site study of community food support organisations finding their work both beneficial and fulfilling (Mulrooney and Ranta, 2024). This is despite many volunteers harbouring strong reservations about food banks simply absolving the national government of responsibility for the UK’s food insecurity. One volunteer captures this sentiment when suggesting that ‘[a]s a country, a lot of food support and poverty support has been handed out to the charitable organisations which shouldn’t be the case’, while another was very much aware of the role of food banks as ‘sticking plasters’ for the country’s food crises: ‘I don’t think the communities should rely on us. There’s got to be another solution. At the end of the day, not many people can volunteer’ (Mulrooney and Ranta, 2024: 357). A second key concern of this themed section therefore involves the depoliticisation of food poverty: the reluctance by central government, in particular, to address the structural causes behind food insecurity (including those around earnings, working patterns, access to welfare as well as accompanying drivers like unaffordable childcare, cramped housing and systemic health inequalities) and instead relying on charitable models associated with the food bank complex.

A final thread running throughout the special themed section is the centrality of food, not just as an everyday necessity but also a potential source of restorative conviviality, collective dignity and identity, or simply small moments of joy punctuating our daily routines. Over the past couple of years, Elaine Swan, Shazna Hussain, Sajna Miah and Julie Yip have facilitated participatory action research with British Bangladeshi mothers in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets which highlights the importance of food aesthetics (taste, texture, colour and smell) in providing ‘pleasure, refuge, a sense of empowerment and opportunity for resistance’ among these communities (Swan et al, 2024). Using research methods like food photography diaries, food photography workshops, shopalongs and cookalongs, Swan and her colleagues demonstrate in their policy practice article how ‘good food matters to poor people’. They invite food inequality activists and researchers to shift away from a purely ‘nutritional gaze’ that focuses on calories and nutrients, and instead centre the embodied, multi-sensorial experience of food, which often brings with it enormous benefits to those historically marginalised and oppressed.

Together, these three contributions offer difference conceptions of how ‘work’ and ‘food’ combine in our understanding of poverty in Britain today. They deploy diverse analytical vocabularies and research methodologies to underline a similar point: namely, that the daily routines associated with food provide especially useful insights into the connections between work, poverty and social justice in their various manifestations.