Holiday Hunger in the UK

Local Responses to Childhood Food Insecurity

Michael A. Long, Margaret Anne Defeyter, Paul B. Stretesky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000417760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This timely and much-needed book focuses on the phenomenon often referred to as "holiday hunger" in the United Kingdom.

The book begins by outlining the history and scope of holiday hunger – the condition that occurs when a child's household is, or will become, food insecure during the summer holidays. The decline of the UK welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism have created a situation where up to three million children in the UK face food insecurity during the summer months when there are extra financial pressures on the working poor and when free school meals are not available. This book details the level of childhood and household food insecurity in the UK and describes one of the main responses to holiday hunger – holiday clubs. These clubs are locally organised and funded and provide a place for children to go to eat nutritious meals for free during the school holidays. Highlighting the benefits of holiday clubs that often extend beyond food provision, this book also discusses the challenges that they face now and in the future. The book concludes with recommendations for food insecurity policy and the role of government in fighting holiday hunger.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food and nutrition security, social policy and public health.

1 Holiday hunger in the UK

Introduction

Over 200 years ago the respected English economist Thomas Malthus (1998 [1798]) observed that while the British population increased exponentially, the food supply (required to sustain that population) only increased in a linear fashion. Malthus proclaimed that the result of these diverging trends led to the inescapable proposition that “famine stalks [humankind] and with one mighty blow [would] level the population” with misery and death (p. 44). Malthus was careful to point out that the problem was global and that only some classes of poor people would suffer from the inevitable calamity, being “reduced to severe distress” (p. 9). Thankfully, Malthus’ disaster hypothesis did not materialise (Deming, 2004). Nevertheless, An Essay on the Principle of Population was popular among the British elite for over half of a century and led to misguided economic policies that, for instance, encouraged the import of enough potatoes from Ireland to Britain during the potato famine of 1845–1846 to feed all of the Irish who starved to death during that time (Latham, 2000; Paarlberg, 2013). As it turns out, Malthus appears to be mistaken on a global level. That is, the world currently produces enough food to feed every human living on the planet (Smith, 2015; Trewavas, 2002). As Griffin (1987, p. 1) observes, “there is no world food problem, but there is a problem of hunger”. While Malthus’ proposition about the causes of hunger and famine is incorrect, his observations about the impact of blight and hunger on the poor are accurate (Hendrix, 2011). In particular, the fact that hunger even exists on earth is the “paradox of our times” and a serious problem for the global poor (Serageldin, 2002, p. 54).

Mercy Corps recently estimates that 821 million people cannot maintain an active and healthy life because they are deprived of food (Mercy Corps, 2020). These people live in areas of the world described as “poor”, “developing” or “in conflict”. Many of these areas include nations that are forgotten or that no one seems to care about. Donald Trump, for instance, infamously referred to countries with populations struggling to survive as “shitholes” in 2018 (Wintour et al., 2018). Even more disturbing is the fact that hunger is likely to have the greatest impact on children. Hunger is believed to be a major contributing factor in the death of children under five years old across the globe as is documented at some level in every nation (Mercy Corps, 2020). Unfortunately, global hunger shows no signs of disappearing and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2020) suggests that the number of people impacted by hunger is increasing year after year since 2014, a situation, they say, that is being accelerated by Covid-19. But what is happening in “developed” or “rich” countries? While far fewer people who live in wealthy countries go hungry, there is still a frightening trend of hunger emerging in wealthy nations (Hossain et al., 2021; Riches, 2016). Such is the case in the UK. This book is about the conditions of some of the most vulnerable members of UK society, children. We focus on an alarming trend that is becoming increasingly normalised in UK society known as holiday hunger.

In the words of Livingstone (2015, p. 188) “hunger is increasingly becoming a mode of existence in UK society”. But how many people are hungry in the UK? Up until recently, the UK government has not measured food insecurity. On 25 February 2020, the Government announced they were including the ten adult questions from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Security Module (USDA Economic Research Service, 2019) into the UK Family Resources Survey from April 2019. According to a Parliamentary Question asked on 6 May 2020 by Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck MP, the results are due to be published in 2021 (Parliament, 2020). The government has collected data on food security and hunger using the Family Resources Survey, but that is not due to be published until the end of 2021. So, currently, it is difficult to say with any certainty how many people are hungry in the UK. There are some indicators, however, that hunger is a major problem in the UK. According to a 2014 United Nations survey an estimated 8.39 million UK residents struggle to access food (FAO, 2016, p. 39). For a population the size of the UK (nearly 68 million people), this statistic is shocking and places the combined countries of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland among the most food insecure affluent countries across the globe. Recent evidence published by the Food Foundation (2017) suggests that the UK leads all of Europe (by a significant margin) when it comes to childhood hunger (see also Craig & Dowler, 1997; Lambie-Mumford & Sims, 2018). Nearly one in ten UK children faces severe food insecurity, a term that is often used technically and summarised numerically to measure the availability and accessibility of adequate food, which is more than double the rate in most other European countries such as Italy, Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, Spain, Hungry and Latvia, to name a few (The Food Foundation, 2017, p. 4). In the case of the UK’s children, hunger might not need to exist, but it is clear that the conditions of hunger described by Thomas Malthus are alive and well. Within the context of UK childhood hunger, the problem of “holiday hunger” has recently gained attention among politicians, the media and the public. Holiday hunger is seasonal hunger that occurs in households when pupils are on school holidays. As noted above, this book is about holiday hunger and the UK’s response to the problem. Prior to laying out our plan for the book, it is important to expand upon the definition of holiday hunger.

Defining holiday hunger

The term “holiday hunger” was first used in Britain over 100 years ago. Anna Connolly (2018) reports that the term was developed shortly after the implementation of free school meals in 1909. Specifically, the phrase is believed to have first appeared in the London Daily News to describe a lack of food during the Christmas holiday among a group of pupils who were not in school in West Ham, a district in East London (Connolly, 2018). In more modern times the phrase holiday hunger has been used extensively by the British media (e.g., “Holiday hunger should be the shame of this government and it isn’t” – The Guardian (Foster, 2018); “They hadn’t eaten all day: food banks tackle holiday hunger” – The Guardian (Perraudin, 2018); “Emma Thompson: my fight to end Easter holiday hunger for 4m British schoolchildren” – The Times (Griffiths, 2019); “Nearly four in five teachers say holiday hunger is failing to improve” – Independent (Osborne, 2018); “School holiday hunger: Parents ‘living on cereal’, says MP” – The BBC (2019). In some shape or form, the term holiday hunger is in the headlines constantly. Despite the widespread use of the term holiday hunger, it is not always clear what it means. That is, does holiday hunger refer to a lack of access to food during the school holiday, a deficiency in foodbank provision, the absence of healthy and culturally appropriate food, or the impact of poverty and other financial hardship such as unemployment, government cuts and/or neoliberal capitalism on children’s food intake? And, who is impacted by holiday hunger? Is it children, young people, adults, students? Unfortunately, researchers have also been slow to define holiday hunger and only a handful of studies specifically reference the term (except see Graham et al., 2016; Machin, 2016). We could begin by simply stating that “holiday hunger occurs when a child is hungry during the holiday” and move on to more technical aspects of the problem and the potential solutions employed. However, we suggest that would be a mistake as it accepts the increasing trend in the UK of demonising the poor. In short, we are reminded of Gouldner’s (1961) observation about our role as researchers in the research process:

Insofar as our culture conventionally construes technical, scientific, and professional roles as those that obligate men [SIC] to ignore all but the technical implications of their work, the very social structure itself is inherently pathogenic. The function of such a technical role…is to sever the normal moral sensibilities and responsibilities …to enable them to be used as deployables, willing to pursue practically any objective. In the last analysis, such arrangements produce an unthinking readiness to kill or to hurt others—or to produce things that do so.

As a result, we begin our examination of UK holiday hunger by defining the term and laying out our domain assumptions (as Goldner might say) that shape our view of holiday hunger.

To begin, we note that all social scientists carry with them domain assumptions about the world and we are, of course, no different (Gouldner, 1972). Rather than proceed as if holiday hunger is something that we know when we see it, we start by building our own definition of the concept to guide our work. Our definition is based not only on our values but also on our experiences working with holiday club providers, parents and children across the UK. Prior to laying out our definition of holiday hunger that will shape the remainder of this book, we suggest that any definitions of holiday hunger that are used will impact conclusions about the issue. These conclusions, in turn, inform what should be done by national and local governments, civil society organisations, schools, teachers and citizens about the issue – indeed they determine if it is an issue at all or something that is normalised and accepted by UK society. As Jeremy Clarkson recently pointed out, “We live in a country where children from less well-off families are entitled to free lunches when they are at home. Yippee” (The Sunday Times, 2021). Prior to defining holiday hunger, we believe it is important to discuss three important issues related to holiday hunger that shape our definition of the concept and guide the content in the remainder of this book: hunger vs. food security, the political economy and economic disadvantage, and the role of schools.

Hunger vs. food security

We suggest that any examination of hunger must take account of human rights. Simply put, at the most basic level, a human right is one that belongs to every global citizen irrespective of their status (Dembour, 2010). Hunger is “an uncomfortable or painful physical sensation caused by insufficient consumption of dietary energy” (FAO, 2020). When hunger is the result of economic disadvantage (something we will address in the next section), we argue that it violates a basic human right. Simply stated, freedom from hunger is an essential human right (Riches, 2016). Our definition of holiday hunger therefore emphasises our view of human nature that all people have the right to live free from physical harm because of circumstances beyond their control and that nobody wants to live in a condition of hunger. By adopting this stance, we reject recent and popular arguments that children, parents and caregivers allow themselves to become hungry so that they can take advantage of the UK government’s benefits system. We suggest that this shift in policy away from a more broadly based political-economic view of the problem of childhood hunger is disturbing and agree with scholars like Lambie-Mumford and Sims (2018, p. 244) who point out that today it is popular to “focus on the family unit and behavioural interpretations centred around the notion of individualized dysfunction”. We reject the individualised dysfunction view of childhood hunger and argue that nobody purposefully becomes hungry to obtain free food. People who experience hunger directly or indirectly because of their economic circumstance...