Muslim adults twice as likely to experience food insecurity

Muslim adults in the UK are twice as likely to experience food insecurity as the wider population. This is according to new national research which Muslim Aid commissioned ahead of Ramadan.

The survey of more than 1,000 Muslim adults reveals clear inequality in how hardship affects people across Britain.

Muslims facing food insecurity

59 percent of Muslim respondents said they had worried about running out of food in the past year, compared with 29 percent nationally.

44 percent said they had experienced days where they went hungry because they could not afford food, more than double the national figure of 19 percent.

The findings come as national data from The Food Foundation shows food insecurity remains persistently high, with millions of households affected even as headline inflation has fallen.

Food insecurity is not always visible. It can mean skipping meals, cutting portion sizes, choosing cheaper and less nutritious food, or deciding between heating and eating. A Muslim diabetic survey respondent from London reported:

I have to feed my daughter bread at home and for her school lunch. I cannot afford to buy healthy food. Most [meal] times I eat my daughter’s leftovers.

Another Muslim interviewee, a student from the West Midlands, said:

I have siblings who live with me and hearing them complain about wanting what the other children can eat hurts me as they don’t deserve to live like this. I study in college and I feel a lack of engagement due to hunger and lack of nutrition.

For many Muslim and minority households, food insecurity can also mean going without culturally appropriate food. One man told Muslim Aid he was living off one tinned item a day from food banks as he couldn’t afford halal food, while another said they had become vegetarian for the same reason.

Uniting communities to tackle food poverty

Through interfaith partnerships, Muslim Aid has delivered more than 167,000 culturally appropriate meals and now supports 109,000 people of all backgrounds every week from its West London depot.

To coincide with the research, Muslim Aid is supporting a Ramadan Community Cooking and Wellbeing Project in Tower Hamlets on Tuesday 24 February, in partnership with Well One and The Felix Project.

The initiative will bring together local women, particularly from a Bengali background, to prepare and distribute 500 nutritious, culturally appropriate meals across the borough, alongside education promoting healthier cooking during Ramadan.

Bangladeshi households are consistently among the ethnic groups most likely to experience food insecurity in the UK. In boroughs such as Tower Hamlets, where there is a large British Bangladeshi population, the pressures the survey identifies are not abstract statistics but lived realities.

The project aims to strengthen solidarity between communities facing the same economic pressures and provides a counter-narrative to rising division and anti-migrant sentiment.

Lucy Rae, Muslim Aid UK programmes lead, said:

Our research has found that those of all faiths and none are more comfortable turning to charities than other sources when enduring desperate food poverty.

However voluntary action cannot be an ongoing substitute for the structural reforms needed to end a crisis disproportionately impacting Muslims across the UK.

Muslim Aid is calling on the government to:

• Introduce a national food poverty strategy with clear targets to reduce reliance on emergency food.
• Reform social security to guarantee basic living standards.
• Address ethnic disparities in poverty through targeted, data-driven policy.
• Increase funding to tackle homelessness and improve housing affordability.

Muslim Aid is urging coordinated action so that fewer families are forced into food insecurity, hunger and hardship.

Full findings and policy paper are available here.

Founded in 1985, Muslim Aid is a faith-based international charity supporting people affected by conflict, disaster, and poverty around the world.

Featured image via the Canary