Primary page content

Blog 1. Why a blog on food poverty in the UK?

Food poverty UK blog. Posting 1: 15th July 2017

Why a blog on food poverty in the UK?

Because it exists here and because it symbolises powerfully the state of our nation, revealing the effects of growing inequality and austerity.

As a social anthropologist working for much of my career in Tanzania and India, I learned a lot about food poverty: why it occurs, how people deal with it, and how it is perceived by others, both locally and further afield. As a foodie anthropologist who had specialised in this topic, I had thought of food poverty as being primarily a problem of the global South.

However, in 2012, I first heard mention of food banks in the UK and started to investigate. A simple entry of ‘food aid’ into search engines turned up many references, but none was about the UK. Adding ‘UK’ just gave information about the UK’s various aid programmes to the global south. This seemed to confirm that food poverty was viewed as a problem ‘over there’, not over here. This situation, by the way is very different now, with increasing numbers of leads on all search engines. This is partly because other academics – sociologists, epidemiologists, geographers, public health experts and more – have been working on this topic for the past few years ad partly because food banks (the most visible part of food poverty) has become such a highly politicised issue.

Doing research
I started my own research in 2014, choosing to focus on organisations in two areas of the UK: the London Borough of Barnet which is a very urban area and the County of Pembrokeshire in West Wales which is mainly rural.
Over the last three years, I’ve visited food banks, community cafes, lunch clubs, etc. most of which are volunteer-run. The research has involved interviews with clients, volunteers and trustees, as well as distributing questionnaires. In addition, I have observed at many organisations and served as an occasional volunteer at several of them.

Moreover, there’s a lot of material to be garnered from other academic work, from newspapers (both national and local) and other secondary sources, so a large amount of this kind of data has also been collected.

How to share all this information and data?
a) the academic route

Of course academics write articles in refereed journals, and I’ve done some of that:
2016. An article entitled ‘Big Society or Broken Society: Food Banks in the UK’ in Anthropology Today (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.12223/abstract

2017. An article in the same journal entitled ‘Win-win? Food Poverty, Food Aid and Food Surplus’: (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.12350/full)
Both of these pieces were based upon public lectures which I had given respectively at Goldsmiths College (the Gold lecture 2015) and the University of Oxford (the Mary Douglas Memorial lecture 2017)

b) Sharing more widely
This time I also wanted to share more widely. I wrote pieces in 2015 and 2016 for a Welsh local newspaper, the Pembrokeshire Herald, and gave talks to many kinds of groups in both research areas:
• In West Wales to a U3A group, and twice to a pensioners’ club in a Welsh town
• In north London to a food bank, a soup kitchen, and also to a group of social work students at my own college in south London

This blog
So I have now decided to start a food poverty blog in the hope of raising greater awareness of this issue in the UK, including among policy-makers.
• It will share some of the data I’ve collected for others to see while observing ethical issues such as confidentiality and anonymity
• It will include relevant material by others, including guest blogs by invitation
• It will serve as a resource for others working in this field, whether as academics, researchers, students, or as volunteers, administrators, activists or policy-makers
• In addition to textual material, there will be photos and other visual material
• Comments are welcome but any which are inappropriate or abusive will deleted. No anonymous comments will be accepted – you have to give your real name and a contact or affiliation.

If you want to contact me outside of the blogsphere, you can email me at p.caplan@gold.ac.uk

8 responses to “Blog 1. Why a blog on food poverty in the UK?”

  1. David Air Fryer says:

    Awesome post, When I read your post then I considered that you talked about the food poverty in the UK and also you talked about the how to remove the Food poverty in this post. So thanks for sharing the post. http://topairfryerreviews.com/

  2. Hmm is anyone else encountering problems with the pictures on this blog
    loading? I’m trying to determine if its a problem on my end or
    if it’s the blog. Any feed-back would be greatly appreciated.

  3. Hello! This post couldn’t be written any better! Reading through this post reminds me of my
    previous room mate! He always kept chatting about this.
    I will forward this post to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read.
    Many thanks for sharing!

  4. Sherrill says:

    I believe this is among the so much important information for me.
    And i’m happy reading your article. However wanna commentary on few normal things, The
    web site taste is ideal, the articles is in point of fact excellent :
    D. Excellent job, cheers

  5. Darryl says:

    I know this web site offers quality dependent articles and other data,
    is there any other web page which provides these kinds of information in quality?

  6. wordpress says:

    Thank you, I’ve recently been searching for information approximately this subject for a long time and yours is the
    greatest I’ve discovered so far. But, what about the
    bottom line? Are you positive about the supply?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.