ABOUT

What, how and where we consume food is structured by working patterns, welfare support, pay, terms and conditions.

Our focus is on the right to food for working people in UK cities, towns and rural areas. We want to build a shared understanding of the causes of food poverty to help inform collective action for the right to food in communities where household food insecurity is on the increase.

FAWN’s work is strongly informed by the experiences and views of workers in the food sector, as well as those who care and feed in the household. Food workers across the supply chain are critically important to the UK labour force, and their efforts during the pandemic ensured that there was enough food available for everyone else. Yet many experience in-work poverty and now struggle to access the food they need. Household reproductive labour is also essential, but remains under recognised and poorly rewarded.

FAWN will use this focus to help shape and support radical political interventions into our broken food system through a combination of academic research, democratic campaigning, and labour organisation across workplaces communities, and households.

Like many campaigning and advocacy organisations and food activists in the UK, FAWN believes that access to enough affordable, safe, nutritious, and diverse food every day is a basic human right.

To tackle food insecurity effectively, FAWN believes that there needs to be a major structural change to the UK’s broken food system.

What would that mean in practice? Improved public provisions like all-year universal school meals. And progressive procurement. with procurement rules that follow labour and environmental standards and prioritise community wealth building. These are all part of the structural change we want to see.

The right to food is closely interconnected with access to health, housing, transport, education and skills development in our workplaces, communities and households.

The UK is a deeply unequal society where health and income inequalities arise from a complex interaction of many factors. These factors include housing, income, education, social isolation, poor transport and disability. The lower your social and economic status is the more likely you are to experience health and income inequality and are at risk of household food insecurity.

FAWN believes that the organisation, value and reward of labour time (including household work) are essential in achieving food security for those people who experience the starkest health and income inequalities.

The Food and Work Network (FAWN) brings together academic specialists, community activists, senior trade union officials, policy researchers, advocacy campaigners, and elected politicians from central government, devolved administrations, and regional and local authorities. We involve people affected by food poverty within and outside the UK food sector.

The conversation that is often missing in discussions about food insecurity is the central role of work—both paid and unpaid, as well as its absence—in conditioning what and how the nation eats. FAWN's coalition of academics, community activists, and trade unions aims to fill that gap.

FAWN includes food industry workers because their importance has been overlooked. They supplied us with food during the pandemic yet they often work in exploitative conditions on low pay and are priced out of the products they work so hard to produce.

We will run 4 events annually across the UK to provide our network with an opportunity to hear about the latest academic research, and from the activists, campaigners and politicians working to tackle the issue of household food insecurity.

Underpinning all of our work is our central proposition that working time - how it is organised and rewarded - is critical to understanding and addressing food inequalities and food insecurity.

Dr Tommy Kane

Prof Alex Colas

Dr Michael Calderbank