Introduction

The issue of hunger, whether referred to as such or in related terms such as ‘food poverty’ or ‘food insecurity’, has remained largely on the periphery of social policy research in the UK despite notable interjections (Joffe, 1991; Dowler, 2002). In so far as the experience of limited access to food is addressed, it is often done so within the context of wider poverty research, rather than as a site of investigation in and of itself. Yet, what we have seen in the UK since 2010 in particular is the increasingly high public and political profile of the issue, manifest in the rise in the number of people attending charitable food bank projects for help with food. The nature of hunger in the UK today, and the ‘food bank phenomenon’, raise particular questions both of and for social policy, including how social policies themselves have affected these experiences, and the role social policies and social policy research could have in shaping progressive ways forward.

This chapter presents a case for rethinking hunger in relation to the current and future welfare state and the role social policy analysis and research could play. Its premise lies in evidence suggesting that people are finding it harder to eat well in the so-called ‘era of austerity’, and the fact that the main response to this is through the provision of emergency food parcels by charities, outwith the state. Recently published Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) survey data reveal that in 2011, 4 million adults could not afford ‘food basics’, with 3 per cent of adults not able to afford two meals a day (up from less than 1 per cent in 1999) and 7 per cent not able to afford fresh fruit and vegetables (PSE, 2012). Other surveys and research also indicate that people have been finding it more difficult to access food since the turn of the decade (Save the Children, 2012; Shelter, 2013). The key drivers of the shifting nature of hunger lie in the fact that wages and social security incomes have been growing at a slower pace relative to costs of living, including housing, food and fuel (Davis et al, 2014; Padley and Hirsch, 2014; see also Dowler and Lambie-Mumford, 2015).