Win-win?: Food poverty, food aid and food surplus in the UK today

Abstract

There is currently considerable public disquiet about food waste and there have been high-profile media campaigns directed at supermarkets to persuade them to: (a) publish their waste figures; (b) sell what is now deemed unacceptable to customers and hence surplus, e.g. wonky vegetables; (c) dispose of their surplus in a socially useful way, e.g. to feed people; (d) avoid ‘wasting’ useable food for climate change reasons. At the same time, there are growing levels of food poverty in the UK and increasing public awareness of both its existence and of the food bank movement which has sprung up in the last decade to try to ameliorate this situation. With the recent use of modern technology (the Food Cloud app) and the setting up of partnerships between the likes of Tesco and FareShare, it now appears simple and feasible to bring these two issues together in a win-win situation. This paper seeks to deconstruct such popular views of both food poverty and food surplus and to reveal that such a purported solution to food poverty may potentially contribute to its normalization.