More than Just Food: Food Insecurity and Resilient Place Making through Community Self-Organising

Abstract

This research considers the relationship between neoliberalism, poverty and food insecurity and how this impacts on the ability of a community to self-organise and become resilient. Specifically, it examines shocks imposed by the implementation of austerity policy and neoliberal welfare reform and the longer term individualisation that gives rise to greater vulnerability to such shocks and how community organisations encourage different levels of resilience in the face of this. Original findings from case study and qualitative analysis are twofold. Firstly, food insecurity effects are not only hunger and poor health experienced at the individual scale, but they also extend into places through the loss of social networks, erosion of community spaces, denigration of local foodscapes and collective de-skilling that limits the community resources needed for self-organising. Secondly, the ways in which food support is provided in communities has implications for how communities can regain the resources they need to be able to enact resilience in the face of trouble and difficulty. As such, the research demonstrates that self-organising is more than free-time activity; in these conditions, the capacity to self-organise is a vital community asset that is necessary for building resilience and social sustainability. As such, policy responses to poverty should take a multi-scale approach.

MRC Hot Topic workshop report: Reshaping the food environment – applying interdisciplinary perspectives in appetite research

“…Research by the Food Foundation (2018) on the affordability of the UK’s Eatwell Guide shows that for those living on the lowest incomes, meeting the Eatwell requirements takes up to 42% of household budgets after housing costs. Blake (2019) report that food is the most flexible part of the household budget and is bought after other fixed costs are addressed. This means that while 42% of the budget would need to be spent to achieve a healthy diet, after other costs are accounted for, a much smaller budgetary proportion is available for purchasing food.…”

A community-based participatory research approach to understanding social eating for food well-being

“…The research occurring in these spaces afforded everyone involved an opportunity to understand how citizens can become 'beneficiaries and co-creators of value' (Mathie & Cunningham, 2003) as the descriptions provided by customers were reported back to the organisers to help shape the services of local social eating initiatives. Grassroots commensality-activism can be understood here in terms of progressive possibilities, articulating newly emerging and not-yet-formed responses to broader social challenges around the access, availability and affordability of food (Blake, 2019a;Blake, 2019b;Marovelli, 2019;Smith, 2020).…”

Pathways to Scaling Agroecology in the City Region: Scaling out, Scaling up and Scaling deep through Community-Led Trade

“…Qualitative methods can be applied to investigate "experience, meaning and perspective, most often from the standpoint of the participant" [85] (p. 499). As an intensive qualitative approach that seeks to "understand processes as they are grounded in the experiences and narratives of those who are directly involved in living with the wider political, economic and social context" [86] cited in [87] (p. 4), the case study can play an important role in sustainability science. First, it can support context-dependent knowledge creation; second, it can support learning around processes in context, whilst still allowing complexity to be present [88].…”