Food poverty is on the rise in rich countries. And evidence suggests the impact can last for years afterwards.

Kerry Wright didn’t feel hungry. Not in the way you might expect. Her tummy grumbled, yes, she could hear it. She just couldn’t feel it. She called it “starvation mode”. Wright, a mother of three living in Aberdeen, had hit a low point. But she needed to provide for her children, who then were just entering their teens. By the time she was faced with the prospect of watching her own children go without, she had fallen out of contact with her parents and the rest of her family. She’d wanted a fresh start. Except that at that moment, in 2013, a fresh start was looking pretty far off. Her partner had left and her benefits were falling short. Now and again, she took paid housework jobs but never made enough money. She would scan her cupboards in despair, hoping there would be enough soup or tins of beans to at least get the next lunch together.

Because there was always so little to go round, it didn’t take long before she started skipping meals. The effects soon materialised. She was tired all the time – and yet she couldn’t sleep. She was hungry, but she didn’t want to eat, and, if she did, she would sometimes be sick. Her head was frazzled. It was hard to keep a string of thoughts together. Wright was exhausted but desperate not to reveal the extent of her fatigue to her children. So she would walk around the house with one hand on the furniture, holding herself steady. A severe iron deficiency, she eventually learned, accounted for the terrible fatigue and it had also made her dizzy. The dizziness was more or less constant, in fact. All of this went on for about two years. But it wasn’t her own wellbeing that she worried about most. It was her children’s. Try as she might, she couldn’t hide from them the fact that she wasn’t well. They asked her questions: Why was she dizzy all the time? Why was she taking those pills from the doctor? And one day she came home to find a glass of milk on the table. Her son, worried about her, had poured it. He made her drink it while he watched – to make sure she had it all. “It shouldn’t be like that,” she says now, remembering. “Kids shouldn’t be worrying about their parents like that.” Today, her biggest concern is not that her physical health took a hit, but that her children’s mental health did. What psychological scars were left, in the wake of watching their mother starve herself? What happened to Wright and her family is common to far more households in wealthy countries than some may think. Food insecurity, also known as food poverty, is on the rise in the UK, the ninth-richest country in the world. The exact extent is unknown. But many other countries are struggling with this problem. There are millions of families in Europe, the US and Canada, for example, that are facing food insecurity right now. Food banks, which hand out free supplies of food to those in need, have become more and more common in places where food insecurity has become a persistent problem. But even the groups that run them, including the Trussell Trust in the UK, say that food banks cannot be a long-term solution. The food they provide can vary in quantity and quality – often it is nutritionally limited. Systemic reform, charitable organisations say, is needed to stop families falling into the hunger trap. Scientists have shown that hunger isn’t just something transient. Hunger during childhood can have a ripple effect that we are only just beginning to understand. The long-term physical and psychological consequences of hunger are serious and have implications for the health of society itself. Food insecurity may be a ticking time-bomb for today’s hungry generations – just how dangerous is it? © Christopher Nunn for Mosaic

It was at a charity that helped local people find employment that someone first mentioned the term “food bank” to Wright. But she flinched at the idea. “No way,” she thought. She was terrified that, should she seek help at a food bank, social services would take her children away. It was a reflexive reaction, she feels, left over from childhood. Her own parents distrusted outside agencies and told their children that should anyone come to the house, “keep your mouths shut”. So Wright came up with a plan. She would apply to become a volunteer at the food bank instead. “It felt a bit better,” she says, “for it to be a bit of a trade.” As a volunteer she might get some support, the odd bit of food. It was worth a shot. During the first few days, she felt awkward and out of place. But then one of the workers, Kelly Donaldson, took her under her wing. She soon learned what Wright was going through so now and again Donaldson would put a small pack of food together for her new friend at the end of the day. “That’s your supper for tonight,” she would tell Wright, encouragingly, handing over the bag. That food bank was the one in central Aberdeen run by Community Food Initiatives North East – known as CFINE. Besides the food bank, CFINE offers cooking courses and subsidised fruit and vegetables. And it’s at CFINE’s HQ that I first meet Wright in person. I arrive on a busy Wednesday, as people queue up for three-day food parcels. Helpers are passing round specific items as a small queue forms at the door. The food parcels are presented as nondescript white carrier bags stuffed with milk, several tins of food, cereal, rice or pasta, and sauce. Within about 20 minutes, two rows of the bags stacked on shelves disappear. It won’t be long till they’re replenished. I’m told that a few weeks ago, CFINE gave out 179 of these bags in a single day, the highest number the charity had ever recorded. Reliance on food banks in Aberdeen is high. There are 20 such services in the city – more than in any other city in Scotland, including the more populated Glasgow and Edinburgh. Food banks are becoming a more common sight in many places – for example in rural US communities, in Canadian cities, and in wealthy European countries. Scotland is by no means an outlier. Kerry Wright. © Christopher Nunn for Mosaic Before we get a chance to meet, I spot Wright darting into an interview room to give advice to a young man. He has long hair, camo trousers. His dog has come with him. Wright is now part of the financial capability team. It’s her job to help people manage their finances. The role includes assisting them with benefits applications – exactly the sort of hoops she had had to learn to jump through herself, in order to keep her family fed. Wright tells me she still worries about what her children have been through. “My children’s health wasn’t compromised in the physical sense, but I would say in terms of their mental wellbeing, absolutely,” she explains. “They were concerned and worried about their mum. They were anxious about going to school because they weren’t sure about what was going on with my health.”

Food banks are becoming a more common sight in many places – rural US communities, Canadian cities, and wealthy European countries.