Unknotting the complexities of food vulnerability

As levels of food insecurity rise, understanding food vulnerability is increasingly pertinent. To date, food vulnerability is under-theorized and studies tend to focus on particular food insecurity/poverty influencing factors, associations of food vulnerability with health and well-being, and mitigating policies/initiatives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty participants. Adopting a social constructionist perspective, this paper conceptualizes vulnerability in the context of food by bringing together the views from both “insiders” (such as food aid recipients) and “outsiders” (such as food aid providers), as well as those who used to be food insecure but managed to “escape.” Consequently, a novel conceptualization of how food vulnerability is produced and reproduced is proposed by drawing from a dialectical interplay of agency and structure in individuals’ life circumstances, as well as stigma and marginality and previous conceptualizations of vulnerability. Our findings show that food vulnerability can be exacerbated in the presence of inequality, exclusion, stigmatization, poverty-related addictions, and moral and policy judgments. The study advances theoretical understandings of food vulnerability by highlighting its nuanced multidimensionality, and factoring in the systemic, structural constraints of welfare provision that often trigger food vulnerability and entrap individuals within a vicious circle of food insecurity. Wider policy implications are discussed.