Parents skipping meals to feed their children, healthcare workers relying on food banks, middle-income families struggling to afford fresh produce—these increasingly common realities reflect something more profound than individual hardships. They provide compelling evidence that our food environments are fundamentally failing to provide accessible nutrition for all.
The statistics underpinning these examples are sobering: the most deprived fifth of UK households would need to spend 50% of their disposable income to afford a healthy diet aligned with government guidelines. In the UK, this widespread problem is left mainly to charitable food provision—a response that, while well-intentioned, treats the symptoms rather than the systemic causes. Yet the problem extends far beyond poverty—middle-income households also consistently fall short of meeting nutritional recommendations, caught in the same challenging food environment.
Across Europe, these challenges are being addressed in various ways. They show that creating fair food environments benefits everyone by making healthy, sustainable choices easier and more accessible. This represents a crucial shift in thinking—away from interventions that focus on food access as an individual responsibility, which dominate in the UK, and towards creating environmental conditions that enable everyone to thrive. As multiple examples from other European food policies demonstrate, systematic policy change delivers universal benefits that strengthen our collective food security. Crucially, this approach connects to the right to food as a universal entitlement rather than welfare provision, shifting accountability from individuals and charities to systems and governments.
Universal benefits in European approaches: Evidence across four dimensions
A recent study of food strategies across 11 European countries identified four dimensions for coordinated action to improve food access: affordability, availability, appeal, and information. The following examples from their work demonstrate how developing fair food environments benefits everyone, creating the conditions where healthy and sustainable choices become easier for all, regardless of income.
Affordability: From targeted relief to universal investment
Sweden, Spain, and Denmark demonstrate how universal investment in food access can transform affordability challenges across all income levels. Sweden’s free school meals exemplify this transformation—available for all children since 1997, rather than means-tested as in most of the UK. Sweden treats nutrition as a universal right, delivering benefits that extend well beyond immediate food access: lifetime income improvements have been found for all students, with particularly pronounced effects for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Spain’s temporary elimination of VAT on fruits and vegetables demonstrates how fiscal policy can make healthy choices more accessible across the income spectrum. While implemented as a crisis response to rising food costs, early data suggest this universal intervention stabilized declining consumption patterns that affected households regardless of income. Denmark’s substantial, long-term investment of €170 million (2022–2030) in plant-based food development takes this logic further, utilizing public resources to lower market prices for sustainable options that benefit all people.
Poland’s government-subsidized “milk bars” offer a different model—commercial restaurants receive a 70% subsidy on raw materials, creating affordable nutrition that serves students, elderly people, and workers across income brackets. This approach maintains dignity through commercial operation while ensuring accessibility, contrasting with food-bank models that can stigmatize users.
Availability: Transforming food environments
Strategic interventions in what foods are available—and where—demonstrate how institutional purchasing power and regulatory requirements can reshape entire food landscapes. In 2017, Portugal mandated vegan options in all public canteens. While ostensibly ensuring dietary diversity, this policy had the knock-on effect of expanding plant-based meal preparation skills across institutional kitchens, and it has normalized plant-based eating in public facilities. Changing availability requirements can have effects far beyond their immediate scope.
France has adopted an institutional approach to scaling up through comprehensive public procurement standards, which since 2022 have required a 50% quota of “quality foods” (including 20% organic) across public catering. This affects millions of daily meals in schools, hospitals, and universities, effectively using public purchasing power to drive market transformation.
While some progress has been made in food environments in the UK, such as restrictions on unhealthy food promotions in key retail locations, we lack coordinated public procurement standards that enable countries like France to leverage institutional buying power for broader food system transformation.
Finland’s collaborative approach with industry on product reformulation offers a different model for improving the availability of healthier options. The North Karelia Project collaborated directly with food manufacturers to reduce the content of salt, sugar, and fat through sustained, decades-long engagement that was embedded within a broader community intervention. In contrast with voluntary industry commitments that are widely promoted in the UK but often lack sustained collaboration and clear economic incentives, Finland’s persistent engagement within a broader community intervention made its approach successful.
The Netherlands’ systematic approach to food waste reduction demonstrates how availability can be improved through better resource utilization. Their public−private partnership coordinates 125+ stakeholders across the supply chain, combining monitoring, targeted working groups, consumer campaigns, and policy advocacy to achieve measurable reductions in household food waste (23% between 2015 and 2023) while ensuring more available food throughout the system—an approach that addresses both environmental sustainability and food access simultaneously.
Appeal: Reshaping cultural norms and consumer environments
Transforming the appeal of healthy and sustainable food choices requires interventions that go beyond individual education to reshape cultural norms and food environments. Denmark’s New Nordic Diet initiative embodies this approach, reframing sustainable eating as an expression of national identity rather than personal sacrifice. By mobilizing influential chefs and positioning plant-rich, seasonal, locally sourced foods as culturally desirable, this approach has made sustainable choices aspirational across society—a stark contrast to approaches that frame sustainable eating primarily through restriction or environmental duty.
The Netherlands demonstrates how appeal can be transformed through multiple reinforcing mechanisms: their food waste reduction campaigns have shifted social expectations around food conservation, combined with targeted working groups addressing specific challenges like date labelling confusion, consumer behaviour change campaigns such as the annual ‘Food Waste Free Week,’ and policy advocacy for regulatory reforms that enable food redistribution to make sustainable behaviours feel normal and expected rather than exceptional.
These positive examples highlight the limitations of more isolated approaches. While the UK has introduced regulations to limit exposure to unhealthy food marketing—including location-based retail controls and planned restrictions on TV and online advertising—repeated delays in implementation (with key measures postponed until October 2025) illustrate how regulatory interventions can struggle against industry resistance without the cultural foundation that makes such policies feel legitimate and necessary.
What emerges is how appeal operates most effectively when cultural positioning, social norm shifting, and regulatory frameworks work together to create reinforcing change, making healthy and sustainable choices feel natural rather than effortful.
Information: Building awareness and confidence to enable informed choices
Greater knowledge in society about the impacts of food choices is surely helpful, but effective interventions go beyond simply providing more information to consumers. A systematic approach can build awareness and enable informed decision-making across populations. Germany’s integration of environmental considerations into its national dietary guidelines is an example of this approach—it helps all consumers align nutritional needs with sustainability goals through authoritative guidance that recommends significantly reduced meat consumption for both health and environmental benefits. This represents a fundamental shift from treating health and sustainability as separate concerns.
Spain’s comprehensive legal framework for reducing food waste demonstrates how effective information strategies are when supported by sector-wide coordination. Their approach combines education programs that reach diverse audiences with industry agreements and institutional requirements, creating coherent messaging that reinforces behavioural change across schools, workplaces, and retail settings, rather than leaving individuals to piece together disparate information sources.
Finland demonstrates how information interventions can create lasting change when embedded within broader educational systems. Their approach combines educational campaigns with community-based interventions and professional training, building food literacy across generations rather than relying on one-off awareness efforts. This systematic approach to facilitating informed choices contrasts with the more fragmented information provision in the UK, which requires consumers to navigate complex and often conflicting messages independently.
From individual to systemic responsibility: Rights as a universal framework
These examples from across Europe demonstrate the potential for policies to create food environments that enhance access to adequate, healthy, and culturally appropriate food. This would benefit everyone’s relationship with food, not just those facing acute food insecurity. A robust and legally enshrined right to food would significantly strengthen this approach to food policies.
Importantly, the UK is not starting from scratch in developing rights-based approaches. Scotland’s Good Food Nation Act (2022) already demonstrates how food can be treated as a cornerstone of wellbeing through mandatory national and local food plans. Wales’s Well-being of Future Generations Act (2015) embeds long-term thinking and cross-cutting decision-making into governance. These approaches align closely with the integrated, universal policy frameworks seen elsewhere in Europe. Scotland and Wales are showing how legislative frameworks can institutionalize the systemic thinking that makes fair food environments possible.
These devolved examples provide both proof of concept and practical experience for how England’s developing food strategy might move beyond individualistic and charity-based responses towards systematic changes that improve food access, health, and sustainability for everyone. Rather than seeing food insecurity as inevitable, a rights-based framework establishes food security as an achievable goal—creating accountability for continuous improvement and the foundation for a healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable future.
UK implications: From evidence to action
Systematic interventions across four dimensions—affordability, availability, appeal, and information—offer a clear pathway for the UK from charity-based responses to a more comprehensive food system transformation.
Scotland’s Good Food Nation Act and Wales’s Well-being of Future Generations Act already show an appetite for rights-based approaches within the UK. England’s developing food strategy can learn from these devolved examples and more widely from interventions across Europe. Investment in fair food environments can deliver universal benefits that strengthen collective food security and address individual hardship.
A rights-based framework would provide the accountability needed to make this systematic thinking effective, ensuring food security becomes guaranteed rather than remaining dependent on individual circumstances and charitable goodwill.
The time for half-measures and charity-based responses has passed. It’s time to make food security a reality for everyone.
I write about the future of food and the connections between our food systems, the environment and public health. Sign up for my newsletter.
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