ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the emergence and development of food poverty as a topic of research in the UK. Unlike the world’s poorest countries, whose populations experience widespread food insecurity as a result of food scarcity, food poverty in wealthier countries, like the UK, occurs against the backdrop of economic inequality and food abundance. Poverty, especially in wealthier countries, is a political issue. While policy attention around food poverty in the US can be traced back to the 1930s, it is only in the last decade that it has become a prominent debate in the UK. The year 2008 saw a financial crisis and a sharp rise in global food prices. This was compounded in 2010 by the introduction of austerity measures in the UK. As these cuts took hold, food banks and food poverty were embedded in public and policy discourses and became accepted as an ongoing public health and social justice crisis. A varied body of research has sought to investigate its nature, scale, extent, and severity.
