Food (In)security, Food Justice and Planetary Health
Research carried out by Exeter Food members on food insecurity and hunger engages with communities around the world as well as those in the immediate environs of the University’s campuses, and includes historical, as well as contemporary, work on famine and food poverty. Work in this area includes research on how food systems and food access are not only shaped by structural inequities, but also affected by dynamic processes such as shifting political landscapes (e.g., Brexit), national and global economic events (e.g., the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and subsequent austerity policies), environmental forces (e.g., the climate crisis) and public health events (e.g., the Covid-19 pandemic).
The work of public health physician and epidemiologist Nigel Unwin and Medical anthropologist Cornelia Guell has grown out of the need to address upstream determinants of diet related chronic non-communicable diseases, and in particular the role that (re) localisation of sustainable and resilient food production can play in improving local population well-being, especially nutrition and health. Unwin has studied the burden of malnutrition in small island developing states in the Caribbean and the Pacific with a focus on the relationships between where people source their food (from production through to types of retail outlets) and the quality of their diet, as well as looking at ecosystem sensitive agriculture including home gardens designed to improve local food production and nutrition. Guell has led research asking how food and nutrition-related data collected over time by different institutions and sectors can be systematically assembled to understand Caribbean foodscapes, as well as how the historical perspective this affords can inform policy and practical strategies for better nutrition and health in the region. Emily Haynes—a registered dietician and anthropometrist—has worked with Unwin and Guell in Fiji , in St Vincent and the Grenadines, and in Haiti, including research mapping food systems and identifying key contributors to the burden of malnutrition and systemic barriers and facilitators to the production and consumption of healthy local food, as well as seeking to understand the impact of natural disaster on food production and recovery and development strategies.
Toby Pennington—Professor of Tropical Plant Diversity and Biogeography—has been working on developing agroforestry and silvopastoral systems in Amazonian Brazil that use native, nitrogen fixing tree species simultaneously to reduce rates of deforestation and offer improved food security and incomes to vulnerable communities, thereby improving their resilience in the face of climate change. Geographer Tomas Chaigneau studies multi-dimensional poverty and resilience and is interested in how inequalities can both shape and be shaped by the environment; he has conducted research on Common Pool Resource Fisheries in Southeast Asia to understand how to better use the sea as a source of nutrition to alleviated poverty and improve food security.
Rebecca Sandover—also a geographer—works with the Devon Food Partnership to address food inequalities in the county. Public Health Nutritionist Kerry Ann Brown develops innovative methods to study food systems and evaluate food policies—from international food labelling schemes to the UK food safety net programmes e.g., Healthy Start food vouchers. Experimental psychologist Lee Hogarth examines how zero-hours work contracts increase snack consumption in order to quantify the externalities of these contracts (i.e. cost to taxpayer in terms of health bills) and test the mechanism by which low socioeconomic status leads to obesity. Michael Winter, Tim Wilkinson, and Steve Guilbert have been studying the implications of food system responses to Covid-19 for nutritional security, social justice and sustainability. Anthropologist Celia Plender—who has been studying how care, aid and community are shaped within food cooperatives in multicultural London in the context of austerity Britain and the Covid-19 pandemic—is collaborating with Food Exeter to develop a toolkit featuring case studies and practical recommendations on how to bring together food access and sustainability within food projects.
Ayesha Mukherjee, who is Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, has examined the cultural and literary history of the food crisis in 1590s England, as well as undertaking work to compare food insecurity in early modern India and Britain and to facilitate a cross-cultural dialogue on famine and its consequences by engaging artists from urban and rural India to create original artworks based on famine stories recovered from historical and literary materials in 10 languages gathered from 14 archives in India, Bangladesh, and the UK. Simon Rennie—who lectures in Victorian Poetry—has created and maintained the Poetry of the Lancashire Cotton Famine database comprising 400 poems collected from local newspapers between 1861 and 1864 relating to the economic crisis in cotton manufacturing regions caused by the American Civil War—many of which deal with the experience and consequences of hunger and food poverty
