King Charles III’s Coronation Food Project aims to tackle food insecurity and food waste together. While this is welcome, we cannot lose sight of the underlying food system inequities. Unless we also ensure the principles of dignity, social justice and equity are integrated unreservedly, the aims of the project will not be achieved.
To celebrate his 75th birthday, King Charles III launched the Coronation Food project, which says it aims to “bridge the gap between food waste and food need across the UK”. The project has three pillars: saving more surplus food, supporting food distribution networks, and pioneering food-rescue initiatives.
It will establish up to eight Coronation Food Hubs, across the country, which will include means of transportation, to collect surplus from the food industry and supply charities and community groups, storage capacity, including fridges and freezers, processing structures to create meals, and spaces for training and supporting people into work.
This is a welcome and timely charitable undertaking, particularly in the context of government apathy, but we cannot lose sight of the food system inequities that are at the root of food insecurity and food waste in the UK. It is therefore crucial to recast responses to the above problems in the language of equity, calling for systemic change, rather than transient generosity.
Food insecurity, poverty, and waste in the UK
Over the past few years, and particularly since the pandemic, food insecurity levels in the UK have increased dramatically. According to the Coronation Food Project, up to 14 million people are food insecure in the UK, including up to four million children. There are manifold reasons for food insecurity, but at its core it is a manifestation of poverty, inequality, and a broken food system.
As winter approaches and the cost-of-living crisis endures, there is every indication that matters will get worse, with some people facing tough decisions on whether to keep their fridges on or their houses heated. Food support organisations are expecting rising demand, while struggling with limited resources, including limited food supplies. At the same time, millions of tonnes of food go to waste, with only a fraction of that redistributed to food support organisations. While there is a wider debate over whether food surplus/waste should be used to address food insecurity, most food support organisations currently depend on surplus food for part of their provision.
Affordable food clubs
The idea of combining social justice, poverty and sustainability goals is paramount though not novel. During the Covid-19 pandemic, several innovative projects, driven by civil society organisations across the UK, attempted to precisely do this. Affordable food clubs are a case in point. They drew inspiration from alternative food networks that for a long time have sought to establish ways of organising local food systems, driven by the ethics of social justice, dignity, and sustainability.
Affordable food clubs aim to offer those in need dignified access to affordable food. Unlike traditional food banks that provide emergency and temporary support, often based on means-tested referrals, affordable food clubs are open to local community members through a small membership fee. They offer long-shelf and fresh food products as well as non-food essentials at low costs and members are free to choose what they need. Products on sale are either donated by local shops, supplied by surplus food networks, or procured from supermarkets with funds raised by the projects.
Affordable food clubs are largely operated by volunteers, often including members. Using community infrastructures and networks, they are socially embedded and aware of community needs. These may include access to fresh produce and culturally appropriate food, which are critical in communities with minoritised ethnic groups, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The surge in funding and volunteers during the pandemic enabled these types of initiatives to flourish across the country, including in places like Birmingham and Brighton and Hove.
Challenges of converting innovations into permanent solutions
During the pandemic, affordable food clubs benefited from the temporary availability of infrastructures for storage and distribution and the availability of grants. And they profited significantly from unprecedented levels of coordination between key actors (voluntary sector, food partnerships, local authorities, retailers, social enterprises) and flexible networks that were able to act swiftly, energised by a sense of urgency and solidarity.
With the end of the pandemic and the continuation of the cost-of-living crisis, affordable food clubs face multiple challenges, including reduced food surplus, dwindling funding, and rising food prices, alongside growing demand for affordable food alongside other needs. These challenges are pushing the original logic and capacity of these initiatives to the limit. Over the past year we have seen the introduction of restrictions to membership, reduced availability of local fruit and vegetables that are prohibitively expensive, and a less diverse offer, which have meant further hardship for those in need.
Making food provisioning more equitable, making charity history
The Trussell Trust, a UK-wide network of food banks, advocates for “a future without the need for food banks”. Taking inspiration in this, we argue that rather than perpetuating dependency by relying on food surplus and feeding a potentially perverse surplus-charity cycle, we need to tackle the root causes of poverty and waste and confront food system inequities.
Pathways to equitable food systems emphasise the need to bring communities and government together around a shared understanding of what is needed to overcome food insecurity, unhealthy diets, food deserts and other expressions of food inequity. They also highlight the need to address power imbalances in food systems that disadvantage communities and leave them marginalised.
The Coronation Food Project may be able to provide momentary responses to some of the above problems; the project is spot on in identifying the need for increased food storage and transportation. The question is whether these fixes will be sufficient, systemic, and for the long run. For that to happen, the government needs to step in and up and recognise that food insecurity and waste are outstanding public policy issues. It must also recognise the need to integrate undeservingly the principles of dignity, social justice and equity unreservedly into our food systems.