Don't talk about 'food poverty' – it's just poverty

We need to deal with the economics of food as well as the obscenity of poverty. But the solution to one does not fix the other

It is, I know, a statement of the bleeding obvious to say that we must get rid of food poverty. It’s perhaps a little less obvious to argue that one of the key ways of doing so will be to stop using the damn phrase “food poverty” itself. This seems nonsensical, doesn’t it, at a time when the Trussell Trust is reporting that it handed out a record 1.6m emergency food packages in 2018; that it saw a 19% increase in the number of people needing its help.

And yet it’s so. We need to stop treating a lack of access to good food as some discrete disease. We need to start talking simply about poverty.