I’m hungry. Whose fault is that? And who should fix it?

Of the many means for telling the impacts of COVID-19 on our society, amongst the most provocative is the language of hunger. Since the first lockdown in March last year, the number of adults who are food insecure in the UK has quadrupled. Not only have those already struggling before the crisis been forced into more desperate straits: exploding rates of unemployment, mandatory acts of self-isolation and the closure of services providing food have plunged many millions of those previously food secure into hunger. Data from the government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) indicates that up to 7.7 million adults missed meals or reduced their size during the first few weeks of the lockdown alone.

Whilst shocking in their own right, these numbers invite us to think further about the relationship between hunger and our place in a world ravaged by COVID-19. For the historian James Vernon, hunger is unique in its ability to lay ‘visceral claim on our attention’ and ‘to connect us in elemental ways’ with others. This is because hunger is at once both universal (we have all, at some point, felt the pangs of hunger) and highly personal, taking place within the intimate spaces of our own bodies. Whether or not we feel the pains of hunger ourselves, we are still therefore drawn into ways of thinking and feeling about the world in relation to the absence of food.

Despite its seemingly consistent physical nature and presence, Vernon illustrates how these understandings of hunger and attitudes towards the hungry are ever-changing. In this short piece, I want to consider how this rapid rise in hunger due to COVID-19 has influenced some of the broader guiding principles and beliefs we hold as a society. Specifically, I want to consider one question: who bears responsibility for feeding the hungry during our collective moments of crisis?

For the geographer Doreen Massey, responsibility implies ‘the very acknowledgement of our constitutive interrelatedness’—or, put simply, that we as humans always exist in relation to other people and places. But the forms, feelings and performances of responsibility that arise from this interrelatedness are not uniform, nor are they singular. Rather, responsibility comes in many different guises that clash and coalesce, particularly in times of crisis.

Charting how hunger has hit the news over the past few months of the pandemic reveals at least three different iterations of responsibility. With 3.7 million adults seeking food aid in the initial few weeks of the March lockdown, it is apparent that the first form of responsibility for the hungry exists through charity. This is clear in figures from the Trussell Trust, a charity operating around half of the country’s food banks, who reported a 61 percent increase in demand as they provisioned the equivalent of one package of three-days-worth of food every six seconds in the last months of 2020.

Without these services, many millions more would have gone hungry. But it is in the Trust’s model of provisioning that we can begin to see the pitfalls of such a form of responsibility. While the Trussell Trust distributes food freely, it is only given to those deemed to be ‘deserving’ according to the Trust’s practices—practices that include gathering a large amount of personal data and refusing to provision food to people they deem to have received too much already.

More importantly, given their limited resources and reach, such charities can only ever provide temporary solutions to hunger. Their responsibility stretches to the immediate consequences of hunger but cannot address the causes. As Oscar Wilde famously put it, ‘charity is a remedy that does not cure the disease of hunger—it merely prolongs it… the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.’

Mural of Marcus Rashford on a wall in Withington, Manchester, November 2020.
Creative Commons licence

Inspired by this very aim, the Manchester United and England footballer Marcus Rashford has been at the fore of urging a different kind of responsibility for hunger: one aimed at the government. Beginning with an open letter to MPs penned in July 2020, Rashford—who frequently experienced hunger growing up—led a successful campaign pressuring the government to provide a ‘Covid summer food fund’ to support children who qualified for free school meals over the holidays.  

By compelling the government into several humiliating U-turns, Rashford forced the state to take on greater responsibility for combating hunger. In many ways, this is a much more advanced form of responsibility than charity alone. By funding food aid, the state can exercise progressive means of support funded by those most able to pay, whilst also working to address the structural and political causes of hunger in the first place.

Image published on Twitter by Roadside Mum, 11 January 2021, and viewed 28 million times in two days.

But it, too, is problematic—especially when we come to look at how the government has provided forms of relief. Just because a response seems more progressive in theory does not mean it is in practice. In a set of images shared tens of thousands of times on social media in January this year, photos were circulated of some of the food parcels received by hungry families. At a cost to the government of £30, the food items provided by private companies were shown to cost the company just £10.50 in food and distribution (in some cases, this figure was claimed to be even lower)—with the remaining money presumably turned to profit for the firms involved.

Furthermore, despite being driven by a seemingly more progressive form of responsibility, these food parcels are far worse nutritionally than those provisioned by the Trussell Trust. They indicate the problems with systems of tender and competition that emphasise profit and cost-saving at the expense of nutrition—further illustrating the uneven ways responsibility comes to be performed.

Returning to Rashford’s intervention, a third notion of responsibility has been brought forth in the responses the footballer received from several politicians. In tweets sent to Rashford, Conservative MP for Mansfield Ben Bradley argued that solving hunger was ‘not as simple as you make out’ because the government has ‘lots of responsibilities’ and extending free school meals to cover the summer holiday period ‘passes responsibility for feeding kids away from parents, to the State’—something that, according to Bradley, ‘increases dependency.’

Bradley was not alone in highlighting the responsibility of the individual for tackling hunger. Accusing Rashford of ‘virtue signalling,’ the Conservative MP for Bassetlaw Brendan Clarke-Smith stated that he ‘does not believe in nationalising children, instead we need to get back to the idea of taking responsibility.’ Echoing the oft-cited view of Margaret Thatcher that ‘there’s no such thing as society’ and that ‘people must look after themselves first,’ both MPs frame responsibility at the scale of the individual—who must ultimately bear their own responsibility for hunger.

It is in these three iterations of responsibility—charity, government and the individual—that we can see the ideological stakes in the material and social responses we have to hunger. To return to James Vernon, it is in these three ideas that the modern history of hunger continues to animate the present. The form of responsibility that comes to dominate will have implications for us both now, and for the kind of society we build as we enter a post-COVID world.