Experiences of Food Poverty: Contents and Bibliography by Samuel Lindskog

Food poverty is the experience of not being able to acquire and eat a sufficient amount and good enough quality of food and entails a loss of self-respect, causes ill-health and has implications for social relations. This qualitative research has captured some of the complexity and pervasive nature of that lived experience, for people in Brighton and Hove.
The analysis of this study locates the cause of food poverty in structural factors “outside the individual’s ability to manipulate information and money” (Dowler 1998:63), such as rising cost of living, diminishing wages and a welfare system that has failed to support participants through times of extreme vulnerability. Read more…

Experiences of Food Poverty: Results and Discussion by Samuel Lindskog

Eight out of nine participants interviewed were unable to “acquire or eat an adequate quality of sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways” (Dowler and O’Connor 2011:44) or were worried about not being able to do so. All participants attributed this to growing gap between incomes and expenses(BHFP 2012b: 3-4: Family Action:3; Church Action on Poverty and Oxfam 2013:3; Dowler 1998:59), with other factors further compounding the problem. Read more…

Experiences of Food Poverty in Brighton and Hove by Samuel Lindskog

This research project was undertaken to understand the experience of being in food poverty in Brighton and Hove. Participants were recruited through two services supporting individuals in food poverty and by the use of research posters. Data was collected in seven unstructured interviews and analysed using grounded theory techniques.

The research finds that the experience of food poverty is pervasive, complex and affective: participants displayed a range of feelings and employed several emotional coping techniques. While some of these experiences were unique to the city, many of them correlated with earlier findings on food poverty in industrialised countries.
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