Understanding adolescents’ lived experience of food poverty. A multi-method study among food aid recipient families in Italy.

Abstract

This article relies on the findings of a report titled Cresciuti troppo in fretta (“Grown too fast”), published by ActionAid Italy (ActionAid 2022), which examined food poverty among adolescents in two areas of Italy. Guided by a conceptual framework that emerged from the results of a qualitative study conducted by interviewing 32 adults and their children (34 adolescents aged 11–16 years), belonging to families that benefit from food distribution services offered by charities in the cities of Milan and Siena, Italy, in 2022, the analysis focuses on the nutritional, social, and especially psychological and emotional consequences of food poverty on adolescents. Complementary data on reported food habits provide additional insights, especially on the more quantitative aspects of food consumption, and was used to better frame a comprehensive analysis of food poverty. The objective is to derive considerations useful for designing and implementing actions intended to specifically address the consequences of food poverty among youth. The fieldwork provided an invaluable opportunity to interact with adolescents experiencing food poverty, to better understand the subtle implications of food poverty for them. The rich set of data emerging from the interviews with the adolescents' and their parents reveals how important is the emotional sphere in their life and how it can be negatively impacted by food poverty, especially because it conditions the children's social life and relations, both with parents and their peers. One implication of this is that narrow interpretations of food security, mainly focusing on adequate food access and utilization, may not provide the correct perspective to look at the problem of food poverty for adolescents. As a further contribution, the study proposes a short questionnaire that focuses on these emotional and relational experiences by children, as related to food poverty. It aims at capturing the intensity of the emotional and psychological distress on adolescents caused by living in families that experience a condition of limited capacity to access food. When further developed and tested, the questionnaire could then serve as a contribution towards more comprehensive survey-based assessments of the consequences of food poverty among adolescents, in Italy and elsewhere. Overall, the study has increased our understanding of what experiencing food poverty means for the adolescents and their families in Italy and puts forward proposals that could be useful to guide more effective responses to the problem of adolescents' food poverty.