The 2020 edition of the Global Food Policy Report from the International Food Policy Research Institute looks at how to make food systems inclusive of smallholders, women, and people affected by poverty or conflict.

This book explores the history of government food programmes in Britain over the past two centuries, including workhouses, school meals and the post-war welfare state. The book discusses how these programmes treated people differently, e.g. because of gender or race.

This briefing from UK NGO Sustain argues that the UK government should extend universal free school meals beyond the first three years of primary school. After the first three years, only children whose families receive certain benefits qualify for free school meals. Currently, many children who live in poverty are not eligible to receive free school meals, e.g. because their families are not allowed to access public funds due to their immigration status or because of 2018 changes to the earnings threshold that determines eligibility.

The SHARECITY project, based at Trinity College Dublin, has launched SHARE IT, a free toolkit to help food sharing initiatives worldwide document and communicate the impact of their activities on the sustainability of food systems. 

This report from the Food Systems Group of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute argues that small-scale (less than 20 ha) family farms are and will continue to be important suppliers of food in middle- and low-income countries, and that oversimplified narratives get in the way of effective policymaking.

This report from charitable coalition End Hunger UK sets out the arguments for addressing the root causes of hunger in the UK from seven perspectives: morality, child welfare, health, secure income, human rights, politics and public opinion.

According to this study, the diet recommended by the EAT-Lancet commission on grounds of health and sustainability is too expensive for around 1.6 billion people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. The study is based on food prices and household incomes in 159 countries. 

In this comment piece for Foodservice Footprint, Dan Crossley of the UK-based charity Food Ethics Council argues that the current model of charitable food assistance can give an excuse for businesses and policymakers to avoid addressing the underlying causes of food insecurity.

One in five adults in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland experienced some level of food insecurity in 2016, according to this paper, with people who are younger, non-white, less educated, disabled, unemployed or low-income being more likely to experience food insecurity. Low-income adults had a 28% probability of being food-insecure in 2004, which by 2016 had risen to 46%.