Making Work of the Right to Food - Food and Work Network (FAWN)
The United Kingdom has a serious food problem. It is the world’s fifth largest economy, yet in early 2023 almost one in five households, including 9.7 million adults and 4 million children have experienced food insecurity.
“Through this website and its associated activities, FAWN will from today facilitate new and cutting-edge research into the relationship between food and work in its widest conception, helping to inform radical political action in changing the UK's acute food injustices.”
Food poverty has become so pervasive in Britain that even those who produce our food are forced to use food banks. In a 2021 survey of its own members, the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) reported one in five respondents relying on friends or family to provide meals, and 7.5% using food banks themselves. These figures are increasing exponentially across the country’s workforce, while the top four supermarket chains record superprofits year on year. The connection is structural: astronomical shareholder rewards are premised on worsening pay and conditions.
The Food and Work Network (FAWN) was born out of the conviction that it is the nature of work (including its paid and unpaid forms, unemployment, and everything in-between) which remains the common denominator in explaining food insecurity in the UK today. FAWN was established with the aim of systematically interrogating the role of shift work, zero-hour contracts, workplace terms and conditions, household reproductive labour (shopping, cooking, cleaning, feeding), leisure time and lunch breaks, among other everyday work and time-related practices that condition what, how, where and how much working families eat across the country today - be it in urban, small-town or rural settings.
Launched at Birkbeck College, University of London in May 2022 FAWN brings together academic specialists, community activists, trade unionists, policy researchers, advocacy campaigners, and elected politicians from central government, devolved administrations, regional and local authorities. It also involves people affected by food poverty within and outside the UK food sector.
We want to occupy a space that engages with and amplifies relevant activities of all these different groups in an effort not only to understand but also to transform key aspects of the food chain from field to fork when addressing the country’s spiralling food inequalities.
The relationship between work and food security cannot be seen in isolation from wider socioeconomic and political structures. Housing, transport, free time, health, care, education, energy and the environment, are all connected to the food system, and so the right to food and associated struggles for food justice don’t stop once we clock-off. Household and community are plainly also sites of food (in)security, where social inequalities around gender, race, ethnicity, rural-urban divides, and citizenship status combine with class to produce distinctive patterns and expressions of food vulnerability and resilience. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed the starkly unequal health outcomes of the pandemic among different ethnic groups, exacerbating underlying structures of occupational infection risk and co-morbidity. These racialised inequalities also find expression in the form of sharp food insecurities.
FAWN advocates a structural approach to the food crisis in the UK and elsewhere which calls for systemic changes that begin with practical steps, ranging from whole-chain worker unionisation campaigns to community wealth-building procurement schemes. These all fall under the purview of the Right to Food campaign championed by Ian Byrne MP.
We want to contribute from a uniquely work-centred perspective to the right to food, and the many other policy initiatives and collective struggles for food justice in the UK and internationally. Beyond important questions of local food sovereignty, access, quality and affordability, our focus on food and work also seeks to recover the joys of sharing food in public, and the wider social and cultural benefits of food citizenship that can restore both health and dignity to communities ravaged by the decline of High Streets, the public realm and the disappearance of social eating.
Through this website and its associated activities, FAWN will from today facilitate new and cutting-edge research into the relationship between food and work in its widest conception, helping to inform radical political action in changing the UK's acute food injustices. Join us by signing up to our newsletter, sharing our news and analysis, and participating in future FAWN initiatives.