In the circular economy, one man’s waste becomes another man’s flowers

To find policy decisions and mechanisms that create structural and institutional racism in the UK, we need look no further than the disproportionate impact of household food insecurity on people from ethnic minority communities. A blog by our Right to Food project coordinator Imogen Richmond Bishop and independent human rights researcher Sara Bailey. In March 2021, as the Sewell report declared institutional racism to be a fiction, the UK Government released statistics revealing that on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, households where the head was Black were more than twice as likely to be food insecure than White households. And while hypotheses regarding the disproportionate COVID-19 deaths among ethnic minority groups  have coalesced around their increased exposure to infection, food insecurity – and its bedfellow, malnutrition – cannot yet be erased from the picture. As health and medical experts have underscored, research ‘points to a role for nutritional status in resilience to infection and as a mediator of its effects’ with adequate ‘intakes of energy, macronutrients, and micronutrients…critical for immune functioning’. Food insecurity is never inevitable.