Food poverty in modern day Britain

There has been a new trend to eat healthily especially through social media such as Instagram. Capturing the perfect photo of colourful and enticing images of a wide array of fruits and vegetables, rich green kale or spinach smoothies, and healthy breakfasts for example overnight oats topped artistically with different types of berries and various seeds have made it more fashionable than ever to eat healthy meals that look aesthetically pleasing as well as packed full of nutrients. Social media is definitely changing our attitude towards diet and nutrition and of course making it more glamourous to eat well. Photos of healthy foods posted on Instagram accounts presented as works of art such as @gkstories or @livegreenhealthy are certainly something to aspire towards. It is a positive step encouraging people to eat healthily and instil thought and creativity into cooking, however, I do question how inclusive is this trend. 

It is important to note that the level of food poverty in the UK is increasing. According to a recent food poverty report, sadly up to 4 million children in the UK live in households that would struggle to afford to buy enough fresh fruit, vegetables, fish etc to meet the official nutritional guidelines. This therefore puts these children at a greater risk of diet related illnesses such as obesity and diabetes. The study also worked out that the poorest fifth of families would have to set aside 40% of their income after deducting housing costs to actually meet Public Health England's (PHE) nutritional guidelines. In addition to this, 60% of single-parent families in the UK don't spend enough money on food to meet the dietary recommendations, while less than a fifth of unemployed people manage to reach them.

Kathleen Kerridge an anti-food poverty campaigner wrote a very interesting article for The Guardian titled: Jamie Oliver is right, for poor people putting food on the table trumps diet where she conveys the challenges working class people face with eating healthily with a very limited budget.  Weekly, she has to ‘feed six to seven people three meals a day on about £50 a week, sometimes £65, sometimes less than £30’. She says ‘The majority of those struggling and living in poverty are in work; they are not avoiding healthy food because they prefer junk; they are not avoiding broccoli because they’re too stupid to cook it. This problem has very little to do with a fabled “working-class mentality”. Poor people are not obese because they are lazy, or simply because they eat too much (although some do), rather because the price of good wholesome food is beyond their financial reach.’

 However, she argues against the othering of poor people and ‘their’ diet for example when Jamie Oliver said the poor ‘think in a different gear’ to ‘middle class logic’ suggesting perhaps eating healthy is not important to them but there is not much conversation about people who want to eat healthier but are unable to afford it and how they can achieve this.

She says vegetables are a ‘luxury item’ because they cost more to put on a plate. ‘We live in the same world and we don’t think in a different gear, but we do face an unsettling reality of not having a spare 60p to buy a cabbage – an addition to a plate which, while good for us, will not fill a stomach like potatoes or rice’. This is interesting as vegetables are an 'addition' due to the price and after a meal rich in carbohydrates which are filling if  extra money isn't available to buy vegetables it's easy to go without them.

She stated she buys ‘risk-free food I know won’t end up in the bin. When I have just £2 in my pocket, it’s not the time to experiment and find out whether my 13-year-old would appreciate a quinoa-and-aubergine bake.  I can’t afford to take risks with food, because there is literally nothing else to offer if the new food is disliked’. So for example the recipes I found on the @gkstories Instagram page such as the banana and spinach pancakes or the quinoa salad whilst they looked absolutely amazing they might be an acquired taste and therefore it is a risk buying ingredients that one is unfamiliar with or trying unusual flavour combinations when money is so limited. Therefore in most cases it's much easier not to change cooking habits.