Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 An international perspective
- 3 Poverty and food: the Irish context
- 4 Interpreting the data
- 5 Pathways into food poverty
- 6 Pathways through food poverty
- 7 Investigating the policy drivers
- 8 Responses to food poverty
- 9 Conclusions
- Appendix 1 Secondary analysis of survey data
- Appendix 2 Interview methodology
- References
- Index
6 - Pathways through food poverty
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 An international perspective
- 3 Poverty and food: the Irish context
- 4 Interpreting the data
- 5 Pathways into food poverty
- 6 Pathways through food poverty
- 7 Investigating the policy drivers
- 8 Responses to food poverty
- 9 Conclusions
- Appendix 1 Secondary analysis of survey data
- Appendix 2 Interview methodology
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
This chapter investigates the main pathways through food poverty, by exploring the experience of food aid recipients. Respondents described the impact of living through food poverty and it clearly affected their lives in many different ways. Food bank users in Dublin were asked about the difficulty of having no food and the experience of hunger, maintaining an appropriate diet, emotional experiences and social exclusion. The chapter presents important coping strategies, as respondents struggled to make ends meet and prioritise their spending. Respondents were asked about food shopping, providing for children and coping with special occasions when money was scarce. Finally, the use of moneylenders and support networks at pressure points in their lives was explored.
Impacts of food poverty
Hunger and running out of food
Many respondents reported they had experienced hunger after running out of food. Respondents described the different ways that hunger affected them, including food cravings, insomnia and a feeling that eating any food was better than going without:
‘I go to bed hungry and then I find it hard to go to sleep. I’d move around a lot and find it hard to sleep.’ (Barry)
‘When you’re very hungry, you don’t really care what you are getting, to be honest with you.’ (Kathleen)
‘That would be terrible, as you have a craving for different things, like people might have a bar of chocolate in front of you and you feel like grabbing that. You have to do without it, because they have it, you haven’t got it.’ (Mary)
Respondents also experienced hunger when they had little remaining food, but not sufficient for their needs: “We would have probably gone to bed hungry because we would not have eaten as well as we would have liked. We do our best with what we have. If we go hungry, we go hungry” (Kathleen). Respondents described how occasionally there would be little or no food left in the home:
‘Nothing … sitting in the cold, with no gas, no electricity and no food. No money. I can’t go into a shop … I can’t go in and get milk and bread every day … I can’t do that.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Uncovering Food Poverty in IrelandA Hidden Deprivation, pp. 101 - 122Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2022