Hunger, Hardship and Low Hanging Fruit: two new food reports

I don’t normally cry when I’m in a cafe. Last week, poring over a report on my laptop, I angled myself away from other customers as tears dripped quietly onto the table.

The cost of hunger & hardship

The Cost of Hunger & Hardship report produced by the Trussell Trust – the UK’s biggest network of foodbanks (including five in Lincoln) – is long and detailed at 142 pages.

It looks at the impacts of having very low resources, and articulates qualitative data from workshops, interviews and focus groups with quantitative data to calculate the monetary cost of hardship to the economy, the public purse and public services: £75.6 billion. 

I’m not going to summarise it. Sure, you can ask AI to do that for you – but that would betray the devastating layer, upon layer, upon brutal, miserable layer of poverty.

Hardship touches practically everything – health, education, work, housing, communities, relationships, wellbeing.

Oftentimes hidden from view, the impacts of hardship compile and multiply to decimate lives. I’m talking about people who live here in our city: our neighbours. 

The Cost of Hunger and Hardship recommends policies to “increase people’s income; reduce housing costs; provide more support for children and people with caring responsibilities; and support decent, secure, rewarding work.” 

It’s a hard read. Do it anyway, without mascara. 

Low Hanging Fruit – the Food Foundation

I think it is helpful to read it alongside another recent report that addresses overlapping issues but offers contrasting recommendations.

Low Hanging Fruit from the Food Foundation focuses its attention improving diets:

“At present, people on low incomes are priced out of eating healthily and sustainably. The most deprived fifth of the population would need to spend 45% of their disposable income on food to afford the government recommended healthy diet, rising to 70% for those households with children.“

Low Hanging Fruit is short and sharp. Designed to feed into the government’s Food Strategy, it proposes “pragmatic and easily implementable” policy recommendations to address dietary health, with benefits to sustainable farming and food security. 

Recommendations include: “to expand eligibility, improve uptake, and increase the value of Healthy Start payments” (vouchers to families on low incomes for fruit, veg and pulses).

Half of its recommendations (e.g. on public procurement, advertising and reporting) are geared towards making healthy food more attractive and accessible.

That may not address poverty head-on, but could help to prevent ill health and low energy from poor diets from compounding other impacts of hardship. 

Other recommendations address sustainable healthy food production – and let’s be clear: the food shocks and shortages that are likely to accompany climate change will hit the poorest first and hardest. 

Inadequate diets

Hunger and dietary ill-health (including overweight) are frequently aspects of the same problem: inadequate diets caused by low resources.

In 2025, it is relatively cheap and convenient for most people in the UK to meet their caloric needs (a white loaf from Lidl is 34p), but far more costly, time-consuming and difficult to access an appetising, varied diet.

Those on low resources are also more likely to be contending with ill-health or disability, poor housing, limited transport, caring responsibilities, etc.

Both sets of responses are urgently needed. We wait to see how the government will respond.

With thanks to the Lincoln Independent for publishing this article in June 2025