Poverty within Modernity - the experience of food insecurity in the post-2008 era

Abstract

In the post 2008 era in Scotland, financial inequalities has increased along with poverty levels. The policy response to the financial recession saw austerity introduced, and withheld, since. The prevalence and need for food banks across the UK has dramatically risen, due to diminished social security and depressed wage-levels. Through phenomenological and qualitative research methods, this study has sought to understand the experience and attitudes held by food bank clientele. By drawing on data from interviews held and view it through an ideological, political, cultural and historical lens, this study finds that social and cultural rationales in the UK are cause for social exclusion and stigmatization. This view has developed along with the spread of affluence among the majority of citizens, and fortified since the era of Thatcherism which altered the way in which poverty is presented through media and individualist political rhetoric. This study explain the prevalence of poverty amidst affluence as a political choice, informed on an unstable, ideological basis.