Holding the past, present, and future when working on food during the pandemic

A rapid change to our environment leads to rapid changes in our diets

We saw population health and economy changes rapidly play out in changing purchasing and eating trends. For some, lockdown increased their home cooking and reduced their out-of-home purchasing; convenience stores took market share from larger corporates as people shopped closer to home; there was an increase in snacking across the board.

Old inequalities continued to play out in these trends; for example, households living on lower incomes were less likely to have bulk bought at the start of lockdowns, leaving them more exposed to food shortages. Overall, thousands more households fell into circumstances of food insecurity; struggling to access meals because of financial or health barriers.

For us, this displays the importance of a focus on the food options around us – rather than public information campaigns – for any programme trying to affect people’s diets. The Government recently announced a new programme of investment into weight-management services. The good advice that these services provide is largely negated by food environments that work in its opposite direction.

Campaigns like Feed Britain Better speak to actions that can have fundamental impact in reshaping our diets in the long-term.  Sustain’s recent report on the risks of Free Trade Agreements to children’s health show that legislative energy needs to focus on the larger systemic factors affecting our food options.

The food system is designed and can be redesigned

Institutions whose operations involved food in some way – from major corporations to schools and community organisations – have had to quickly react to supply chain risks, rapidly changing safety regulations and new types of demand for their services. The speed at which the Free School Meal system was redesigned for school closures, with supermarkets becoming a point of access for a new voucher system, felt extraordinary.

We saw similar adaptation amongst our partner organisations. With School Food Matters, we designed and started delivering a healthy Breakfast Box scheme within a few weeks – which has just delivered it’s one millionth breakfast. Pecan’s new community food store in Peckham has seen unprecedented demand since the start pandemic with over 2,000 households joining the scheme to access affordable healthy food with dignity and choice, and we are supporting them to scale and sustain the Pantry model. With Shift we pivoted from a healthy takeaway model to provide food to families who were struggling due to the pandemic. Through its brand Mama Leys, Shift partnered with local distributors and community groups to create a wide range of menus, serving 3,750 meals by the end of 2020.

With these adaptations, we have tried to keep reflecting on what this means for our future work. For example, lessons from our Breakfast Boxes showed the value of rapid project iteration and keeping the end user needs at the absolute centre of project design. Looking further ahead, this project has led to us ask what a universal, sustained, healthy school breakfast offer would look like.

To understand a problem – and shape solutions – lived experience needs a voice in the debate

Last year we funded a series of YouGov polling commissioned by the Food Foundation, exploring people’s lived experience of food during the pandemic. The surveys cumulative findings exposed the fact that food insecurity was much more widely spread than first thought, Government responses weren’t always reaching target groups, and households with children were at higher risk of food insecurity. These findings were widely covered and incorporated into policy debates.

Research on the Breakfast Box scheme found that one in four families identified by schools as needing support were not eligible for free school meals: painting a wider picture of food insecurity than Government subsidy data.

We also funded a piece of research led by Bite Back 2030 looking at young people’s experiences of food during the pandemic, demonstrating diverse impacts on young people from different backgrounds, as well as growing awareness of food as a topic of social justice. This research informed the youth-led Feed Britain Better campaign for fairer food systems. Without these perspectives, we’d be missing a crucial piece of the puzzle when taking actions on food.