The multiple roles of Food Hubs: more than just fighting food poverty
In the most recent round of Research England Policy Support Funding, Dr Effie Papargyropoulou is working with Leeds City Council, Food Wise Leeds and food hubs across the Leeds City Region to investigate the importance of these hubs in fighting food poverty, and the innumerable additional benefits these present for local communities, the economy, and the environment.
This research aims to help food hubs evidence their impact, to share best practice among organisations working in the community food sphere, and create greater understanding of how local authorities and other food actors can support these hubs to maximise their impact.
This post is based on a recent Global Food and Environment Institute webinar, where Effie shared the preliminary findings of this ongoing research programme.
The UK’s cost-of-living crisis has seen a growth in Food Hubs
In the UK 18 per cent of households are food insecure, meaning they’re unable to secure enough nutritious, affordable food, culturally appropriate food — or they don’t know where their next meal will come from. This figure includes 4 million children living in these households.
This food insecurity is not felt equally across the country. Different regions are affected in different ways. For example, the North East is the worst affected with nearly 28 per cent of households being food insecure.
Households with children, ethnic minority groups, people with disabilities, or those on benefits are more likely to be food insecure.
In this context we have seen food hubs growing in number, as well as in the roles they perform. Now, in the middle of the cost-of-living crisis, food banks have reported an 89 per cent increase in usage that they’ve seen.
What are Food Hubs?
We use Food Hub as an umbrella term for entities that sit between producers and consumers. They often have explicit ethical priorities, are usually third sector organisations, and would do things like food aid or food surplus redistribution. Some do food skills training, like growing or cooking classes, and a lot of community engagement, like community cafes and shared meals. They could be a social supermarket, and some even offer business training and advice.
They often serve disadvantaged communities, most often urban settings where fresh food and vegetables are not very accessible.
They also often offer a local and more sustainable food supply chain. And they deliver wider social, economic and environmental benefits.
Although those benefits are increasingly being recognised, we found that there wasn’t a lot of evidence to support that claim, and there was a little bit of a gap. That’s exactly what this project aims to do — to provide empirical evidence of the impact food hubs have on the food system, and the communities they serve in the UK, and make policy recommendations on how they can be supported to make healthier, more sustainable, resilient and just food systems.
The varied work and impact of food hubs
When we asked food hubs what their primary function is, most of them identified as food banks. Others as community cafes, community centres. Food pantries is a model that we’ve seen growing quite quickly, as well as social supermarkets or cooperatives.
Some do food growing activities, and that can be anything from larger community-supported agriculture schemes all the way to smaller scale food-growing activities at the back of a garden. Some do composting, others do a lot on education — such as cooking classes, or healthy food literacy.
There are other things they do that are important, even though they are not strictly food activities. There’s a lot of mental health and finance support and signposting. A lot of people accessing food hubs could have mental health issues, and their finances are probably not very good, so food hubs act as advisors a lot of the time, or when they can’t help they signpost to other relevant services.
They run community groups which tend to be more about bringing people together, preventing isolation — including art classes, or exercise, or other sociable activities..
When we looked at the different benefits that the food hubs bring to the communities and the food system, we grouped them under five categories:
Sustainability
They do a lot around sustainability, whether that’s the primary goal or not. They use surplus food and reduce food waste, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by sourcing seasonal food or local food, plant fruit and vegetables and support biodiversity in that way, and improve soil quality through composting and organic growing practices.
Supporting the local economy
They play a really important role in supporting the local economy, by providing access to smaller, local businesses. That could be by sourcing some of food locally, where sourcing surplus food doesn’t meet demand.
Some have models of social enterprise to generate a little bit of revenue and support other activities. They can employ staff and provide volunteering opportunities that are really important for people to gain some experience, develop skills, and confidence.
They provide connections with businesses and organisations, and assist members accessing financial and other support, and other services.
“The café drives income for us, nobody makes millions from curry and rice, but it’s a sustainable social enterprise and provides volunteer opportunities.”
- New Wortley Community Centre
Supporting local, healthy food systems
They play a very important role in supporting local, and healthy, food systems. Some provide access to land facilities for food growing, that could be a community supported agriculture type of scheme, they develop food growing and cooking skills.
They work on raising awareness of, and support the purchase of, healthy local, culturally appropriate food.
Advocacy
In addition to working directly to support communities, they often play a role in advocacy as well, trying to bring about change at different levels, in policy for example.
Wellbeing support
They also do a lot of work in improving wellbeing — physical health, and the mental and emotional health of people. With isolation, and where people cannot secure a meal, there is going to be an impact on mental health, so they help with this.
Because they’re community centres, a lot of the time they promote opportunities for social connection, and they have those community activities that bring people together and that’s always very important.
“You can bring people together from different backgrounds, create an intergenerational activity, they all have food in common.”
Supporting Food Hubs to develop
We need to recognise the wider value of the food hubs, but there is a danger of relying on them to tackle food insecurity. Emergency food provision is what we call a ‘band aid’ solution, it is not a long-term solution because it doesn’t tackle the socioeconomic causes of poverty or the systematic roots of food waste. It’s not meant to.
The food hubs bring social, economic and sustainability benefits. They’re really important in terms of food security, health, justice, resilience, sustainability — these are on local authority, national and international agendas.
To fully realise these benefits, Food Hubs need more support to widen and strengthen their offering, and transition from emergency food provision models to more holistic offerings — like supporting those activities that do a lot more on community wellbeing, healthy diets, local economy, environmental sustainability.
Recommendations
- Government departments, agencies and local authorities should support food hubs in that transition from providing emergency food to delivering a more holistic solution, focussing more on community wellbeing, healthy diets, local economy, sustainability and justice.
- Food Hubs should work to evidence and demonstrate the impact of their activities to strengthen their bids for funding. We have developed a tool to help them do that.
- Local authorities and the commercial organisations should try to foster more of a partnership across food hubs, to collaborate, share best practice, and build capacity.
- Food hubs should not be seen as a long-term solution to food insecurity which has a root cause in poverty and inequality.
Further reading
This research has helped develop a policy brief and an Impact Evaluation Toolkit for Food Hubs to support work on the Leeds City Council’s Leeds Food Strategy. Both of these are available on the Food hubs for Food Security, Health, Inclusive Growth and Sustainability project webpage
This blog was originally published by Policy Leeds on 13 June 2023.
