The practice of interviewing food bank users across a range of spaces was largely participant led and partly pragmatic. Research consistently demonstrates that low income households find it difficult to adopt healthy eating guidelines. Household interaction with food aid typically occurs during other episodes of health crisis, which prompt them to turn to healthcare professionals. Food bank workers were interviewed once about their experiences of dealing with people experiencing food poverty, the referral process, and the challenges they faced. Food and nutrition Nutrition Food poverty.
In the UK, food poverty has been associated with conditions such as obesity, malnutrition, hypertension, iron deficiency, and impaired liver function. Food banks, the primary response to food poverty on the ground, typically rely on community referral and distribution systems that involve health and social care professionals and local authority public health teams. The perspectives of these key stakeholders remain underexplored. This paper reports on a qualitative study of the health and wellbeing challenges of food poverty and food banking in London. An ethnographic investigation of food bank staff and users was carried out alongside a series of healthcare stakeholder interviews. A total of 42 participants were interviewed. A Critical Grounded Theory CGT analysis revealed that contemporary lived experiences of food poverty are embedded within and symptomatic of extreme marginalisation, which in turn impacts upon health. Specifically, food poverty was conceptualised by participants to: firstly, be a barrier to providing adequate care and nutrition for young children; secondly, be exacerbated by lack of access to adequate fresh food, food storage and cooking facilities; and thirdly, amplify existing health and social problems. Further investigation of the local government structures and professional roles that both rely upon and serve to further embed the food banking system is necessary in order to understand the politics of changing welfare landscapes.
London’s Poverty Profile Within an advanced marginality framing, this would be interpreted as the state and third sector being implicated in a political agenda that recasts the problem of food poverty and deprivation as the outcome of individual lifestyle choices and can therefore be subsequently used to justify punitive trends and structural stigmatisation in social policy Cummins, They should only be used in emergency situations and certainly not relied upon. These impacts are described in the sections below. Both food bank and Local Authority cooking classes provided all the ingredients, and many included time for the attendees to eat a shared meal together at the end of the session and take home leftovers. Child Poverty Action Group; London: