The rise of hunger among low-income households: an analysis of the risks of food insecurity between 2004 and 2016 in a population-based study of UK adults

Publication date: 
April 2019
Loopstra R, Reeves A, Tarasuk V.
Published by: 
J Epidemiol Community Health

People who are food insecure do not have enough to eat or are uncertain they will always have enough to eat because of a lack of financial resources.

Some food insecure people use food banks but many do not. Most of the studies of hunger in the UK in recent years have focussed on food bank users and not people who are food insecure more broadly. As a result, not much is known about who is food insecure and how food insecurity has changed over time.

Addressing these gaps in our understanding is important because while more people have been using  food banks since 2010, the number of food banks has also increased. Thus, it difficult to know if more people are vulnerable to  food insecurity today, or if they are newly using food  banks in response to a problem that has always existed. We examine risk of food insecurity in the 2016 Food and You survey and compare it to risk in the 2004 Low Income Diet and Nutrition survey to address these gaps.

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