How to talk about food insecurity (and how not to)

We get asked a lot why we're fussy about words. Here's the honest answer: language is often the first thing a person notices when they're deciding whether a place is safe to walk into, and it's usually the last thing organisations think about.

"Service user" over "beneficiary". We're not saving anyone. Someone who comes to the pantry on a Thursday morning is using a service, the same way they'd use a library or a leisure centre. "Beneficiary" puts us above them. We'd rather not be.

"No questions asked" over "means-tested". We don't ask for proof of benefits, payslips, or a letter from a caseworker at the door. Partly that's practical — verifying income takes time and staff we don't have. Mostly it's because asking someone to prove they're poor enough for help is its own small humiliation, and we'd rather spend that energy on the food.

Numbers, carefully. We publish visit counts and tonnes rescued because funders and the council rightly want evidence the work is happening. But a number is not a person, and we try never to let a statistic stand in for someone's actual circumstances — no "these poor families" framing, no photographs of anyone at their lowest moment. If we wouldn't want a photo of our own kitchen table on a leaflet, we don't ask it of anyone else's.

"Food insecurity" over "hunger", most of the time. Hunger sounds dramatic and distant, like a famine appeal. Food insecurity — not knowing if there'll be enough this week, skipping meals so a child doesn't have to, choosing between the electric meter and the shopping — is what actually walks through our door, and it's far more common than people assume. One in five people who've used a UK food bank in the last two years, according to the Trussell Trust, are in work. This isn't a fringe problem.

What we try to avoid entirely: stock phrases like "the vulnerable", collective nouns that flatten people into a category, and any language that implies gratitude is owed. Someone donating a tin of tomatoes is doing something kind. Someone collecting that tin on a Thursday isn't required to perform thanks for it.

None of this is a rulebook we've got perfectly right. Volunteers slip into old habits, funding applications sometimes demand language we wouldn't choose ourselves, and we're still learning. But we'd rather be asked to do better than assume we already have. If something on this site reads wrong to you, tell us — get in touch and we'll fix it.