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Food poverty and access

Increasingly community food initiatives across Scotland have been responding to demands for emergency food aid for people experiencing the most severe effects of food poverty. The provision of emergency food parcels through food banks has grown rapidly.

However, balancing the need for short-term emergency food aid with creating sustainable change for people experiencing food poverty is a rising challenge across Scotland. In view of this, the Scottish Government recently held a consultation on Ending the Need for Food Banks. The CFHS/PHS response to this can be found here.

Our plan for 2022/23

CFHS is currently working with the Scottish Government, community food networks and our colleagues in Public Health Scotland to plan how the community food sector can be supported in the future.

News and updates

Ending the Need for Food Banks consultation

Posted: February 18, 2022
Public Health Scotland has responded to this recent consultation, which closed on 25 January 2022. You can read the response at the link below. PHS Response - ...

Guest blog: Katy Gordon discusses the different approaches that two local areas in Scotland took to tackle food access and food insecurity last summer.

Posted: August 15, 2021
In March 2020, like many people, we, as researchers with an interest in food insecurity in the UK, were hugely concerned about the impact of ...

What’s in a name? – Redistributing surplus food via Food hubs, food banks, social supermarkets, larders, community fridges and pantries….. Does the label matter?

Posted: February 11, 2021
In this blog post, our colleague Jacqui McDowell gives her views about the variety of community food provision models using surplus food: Surplus food, emergency food ...

A snapshot of Covid-19, food insecurity and community food initiatives: What happened and what can we learn?

Posted: July 3, 2020
About the snapshot In March 2020, the community and voluntary, private and public sectors responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lock-down. Community food initiatives ...

CFHS blog: Food insecurity research conference – learning from across the globe

Posted: July 3, 2020
We recently attended the second ENUF (Evidence and Network on UK Household Food Insecurity) UK conference on research, food and poverty. Around 200 people attended ...

Understanding food insecurity in Scotland: using evidence for policy and practice change

Posted: November 2, 2018
The latest seminar on measuring food insecurity, co-organised with A Menu for Change, took place in Glasgow at the beginning of October. National and international presentations, ...

Matter of fact

Posted: August 22, 2018
With the latest Scottish Health Survey results due to include data from the three new food insecurity questions and research work ongoing across the UK, ...

Guest blog: Sue O’Neill-Berest from Cyrenians on food insecurity, cooking and using CFHS development funding to run sessions for young mums

Posted: June 21, 2018
Something to eat, someone to eat with The Food and Agricultural organisation of the United Nations has suggested that 8.4 million live in food insecure households ...

1st World Congress on Migration, Ethnicity, Race and Health

Posted: May 18, 2018
Florence Dioka from Central and West Integration Network (CWIN) and our colleague Jacqui presented the poster below at the 1st World Congress on Migration, Ethnicity, Race ...

Time to Digest

Posted: March 26, 2018
Despite the Arctic conditions and transport systems in chaos, practitioners, policy makers and researchers from across Scotland and beyond met in Glasgow for this latest ...