The Food System Strikes Back

Martin Chadwick discusses FoodSEqual, a project that involves working with disadvantaged communities on solutions for enhancing access to nutritious, sustainable food, actively involving them in shaping the food system's decision-making.

The year is 2024: in the previous episode of ‘The UK Food System’, disadvantaged communities were left behind when it comes to eating well. Through no fault of their own, years of austerity squeezed purses, restricted benefits and limited public services. The hardships imposed by this period set the stage for greater challenges when Covid-19 struck, pushing people out of work. Some faced only short-term unemployment, while others witnessed the permanent closure of their businesses. The dual impact of austerity and the pandemic created a formidable economic storm, leaving individuals and communities grappling with the consequences. Supermarkets chasing the discounters got bigger, more efficient and further pushes fresh vegetables out of small independent corner shops. Food bank use is at unprecedented levels, food surplus schemes sprung up, and are themselves being squeezed as the traditional food system tightens up its operations to improve sustainability and reduce costs.

Reports tell us what we have known for centuries ‘eat fruit and vegetables, is good for you’ ‘aspire to the Mediterranean diet’ ‘Get your five a day’ but policy interventions lag behind, a disconnect between policy makers and struggling families is reminiscent of the famous ‘let them eat cakes’ although in the context of eating fruit and vegetables, that should perhaps be ‘let them eat dates’. So far, support for the individual is not forthcoming. Meanwhile, the decision-makers vilify sugar, the cheapest source of calories, and tax it specifically, with well justified health concerns around the use of refined sugars. However, this is only one side of the coin; what is needed now is a breadth of alternatives.

Even before the global pandemic hit in 2020, and before the war in Ukraine turned international energy markets on their head, The UKRI (UK research and innovation, the UK's foremost academic funding body) announced the Transforming Food Systems programme⁽¹⁾. This programme aimed to fundamentally transform the UK food system by placing healthy people and healthy environments at its centre; it funds university research into what people eat, how and what is grown and manufactured, and addressing import/export balances of UK food supply. Entering its 4^th year, the programme, led by Professor Guy Poppy, now has 16 independently run projects and training programs for budding food scientists. The project aims span a wide spectrum, from cultured meat to regenerative farming practices in Yorkshire.

FoodSEqual (or Food Systems Equality) is one of the larger projects which has the ambitious target to engage disadvantaged communities in the decision making of the food system. We are working with four diverse areas with challenges which are familiar across the country.

Whitley, in Reading (Berkshire) is a traditional housing estate, where we work alongside the charitable Whitley Community Development Association, at their centrally located community centre. The centre has a long history of supporting the local community, with initiatives such a food surplus scheme; businesses can generously contribute unwanted food, and locals have the opportunity to pick it up free of charge—no questions asked.

Tower Hamlets is home to a large Bangladeshi population and is increasingly in the literal shadow of Canary Wharf. Here, we aim to see a different side of the food system, with a less formal food system including market stalls more commonly used than suburban hypermarkets. In this context, we are working with local community groups such as the Women's Environmental Network and Tower Hamlets Food Partnership to hear from voices that are perhaps less established in the traditional policy space.

Whitleigh in Plymouth is an area typified by a seaside economy. Seasonal tourism work and populations hit by the decline of fishing are a major demographic. There is a real connection to the sea, but the population sees the local catch sent away, to be processed overseas rather than staying available at home and hope to change that.

Brighton and Hove encompass a broader area, and our engagement with participants is often centred around community shops affiliated with the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership, rather than being limited to a specific geographical region. This has meant a different, broader demographic is involved, encompassing people from many walks of life, but who are struggling to take control of their own food system.

With a focus on co-creating solutions to inequalities that can be transferred to a larger scale, FoodSEqual works with a community researcher model. Rather than dropping in academics and pulling all support back out at the end of the funding cycle, members of each community are being trained up with skills in research methods. With supervision from experienced academics, this model ensures that the researchers are trusted in communities where the academic class might be viewed with an entirely reasonable suspicion. From the start, community researchers are familiar with the local context in a way that would take years to achieve for an ‘outsider’, and critically it leaves a legacy of skills, drive and knowledge to forge their own path for the future.

Community researchers get training in academic methods and in soft skills, then supported by academic rather than led by them, conduct research which engages the wider community, ensuring that work is carried out with the community, rather than on the community. People are not merely interviewed, remotely assessed, and then left unattended. We propose that communities are built up and empowered to challenge the existing food system using their own lived experiences to guide them, while gaining access to traditional academic and industrial resources only when needed and always on their own terms.

Across the project, we have developed a range of techniques and outputs. Community researchers have largely enjoyed conducting workshops, both in a more formal Q&A type of setting and in a more open free flowing format. The Plymouth community has created a community cookbook available to share recipe ideas, there have been ‘grow your own starter’ packs delivered to school children, a podcast and even the birth of new products.

Principally, we are finding that communities have an aspiration for change. The mood in all our locations in relation to most issues is a straightforward one. People know what they want, they know they should eat healthily, they want to limit their environmental impact and know the benefits of eating locally and seasonally. Barriers to change are not of willingness or personal ability but based out of structural capacity. Here's how our communities are addressing key barriers:

Price is understandably the first barrier to change. Fish is regarded as more healthy than red meat, but is more expensive, delicate and has a shorter shelf life. Fruits and vegetables are an essential part of a balanced diet, however, are some of the most expensive items in the shopping list in terms of being able to feed a hungry family.

To challenge that, the communities have taken different approaches. In Reading and Plymouth we have set up ‘Fresh Street’. Fresh street offers access to fruit and vegetables by local deliveries (Plymouth) and an on-site market stall in Reading. Staffed by community members and run through commercial partners this helps to support the issue of accessibility, but to support the research we are offering vouchers to the local community to enable people to have free access to fruits and vegetables. We hope that by giving residents access fruits and vegetables, and by setting up a profitable stall through the community centre, this can be a lasting initiative, but at the least we will generate data to understand how price affects consumer purchases, and how easier access to affordable fruit and vegetables will affect dietary habits by measuring nutritional biomarkers in the urine. Meanwhile, researchers in Brighton are looking into offering bean cooking kits through the existing Food Partnerships to promote beans as a cheaper and healthier alternative to existing products, while these have been offered free so far, we hope to explore how pricing influences uptake of a desirable and healthy product. Price is inevitably the hardest issue to tackle, as it pushes against the inevitable rises in global cost of living, but if we can demonstrate the benefits of healthy eating through initiatives like fresh street, we hope to target this with our policy arm finding alternative ways to subsidise healthy foods, not just tax the unhealthy.

Health is a clear concern for all our participants. In Tower Hamlets particularly, this has been highlighted as a key concern about the food system. Having chosen oils and organic vegetables as points for intervention, our community researchers aim to tackle this challenge by exploring the role of oils in the diet, with a specific emphasis on Bangladeshi cuisine. They focus on the use of ghee, which is high in saturated fats but also contains beneficial conjugated linoleic acid (CLA)⁽³⁾. Ghee is used in traditional medicines and is implicated in reducing weight gain. Organic food is another target area for their research, with goals of sharing their understanding of this production method and its benefits to health and the environment, and how food can be produced locally to circumvent murky supply chains. Embracing the small food economy, de-commoditised, local and socially sound initiatives, Tower Hamlets researchers are pushing back against an opaque food system. Community researchers have developed a real expertise in spreading the word, organising workshops in the community, and ensuring that all voices are heard Community members have a successful podcast, and make videos and comics to share their findings to the local the community in a way that makes local needs and aspiration the central focus. This training and access to expertise is of course important to get the right message together, but it is the community cohesion which makes this approach work, sharing knowledge directly with people who want to listen, and in a way that will be understood and trusted.

Both our Plymouth and Brighton communities identified access to local food as an area of concern, both seeing how fish produced in the UK is shipped to Europe, while the UK fish supply chain is dominated by fishing in the Indian Ocean and Pacific. This is seen as causing huge ecological harm; ‘floating factories’ catch huge quantities of fish, which is then frozen and shipped to save economic costs, but with huge bycatch and long carbon hungry shipping creating its own burden. To counteract this, the Plymouth community has identified like-minded local fisheries, and developed a plan. Eager to also address concerns around pricing, and in mind of the sustainability issues in low value fish being dumped at sea, Plymouth's researchers have opted to take local bycatch, and process it into fish fingers. With uptake from local schools and businesses, this directly targets local food supply, promotes healthy eating for children, and stays affordable.

The prevailing solution to this can be snacking to accommodate difficult schedules and to fall back on more expensive or highly processed, but time saving ready meals or prepared sauces. In Reading, these are the targets for the community interventions: to displace unhealthy snacks, and to find better ways to add convenient vegetables to mealtimes, in a way that is at least tolerated by children. Reading has the benefit of a dedicated community centre in the Whitley Community Development Association and has the longest running established community researcher program within the study. This indicates that community researchers have successfully built a robust network, engaging a diverse group of people in the area. The Reading community has run ‘Fun With Food’ days in school holidays to reach the hardest to reach families, and to gain a fantastic understanding of the community needs, educating children with ‘grow your own veg’ packs, presenting fruit and vegetables in novel ways and listening to the needs of the community to feed back into their research. Reading's community are in investigating how to get access to healthier or low fat snacks, having identified snack types that they like as much as traditional ones. Price is once again a barrier here as healthy snacks still carry a premium. By working alongside traditional industry partners, they are also looking into ways to make vegetables more convenient, longer lasting and more appealing to children, to reduce waste, and preparation time, while presenting them in a form that is ready to eat, and acceptable by children.

The role of the community researchers in this type of research is key to its success. In Reading, without the community centre and community researchers who truly understand the challenges faced by their friends and neighbours, it would be impossible to build up the trust required to hear the true voice of the community. Food is a sensitive issue for us all, with social stigma tied to how and where we shop, how often we fall back on the ready meals and chocolate bars we know we shouldn’t really be eating as often as we all are.