NimbusRomNo9L-Regu


This is an Open Access document downloaded from ORCA, Cardiff University's institutional

repository: http://orca.cf.ac.uk/101431/

This is the author’s version of a work that was submitted to / accepted for publication.

Citation for final published version:

Moragues Faus, Ana 2017. Problematising justice definitions in public food security debates:

towards global and participative food justices. Geoforum 84 , pp. 95-106.

10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.06.007 file 

Publishers page: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.06.007

<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.06.007>

Please note: 

Changes made as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing, formatting and page

numbers may not be reflected in this version. For the definitive version of this publication, please

refer to the published source. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite

this paper.

This version is being made available in accordance with publisher policies. See 

http://orca.cf.ac.uk/policies.html for usage policies. Copyright and moral rights for publications

made available in ORCA are retained by the copyright holders.



1 

 

Problematising justice definitions in public food security 

debates: towards global and participative food justices 

Ana Moragues-Faus 

In: Geoforum 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



2 

 

Problematising justice definitions in public food security debates: towards global 

and participative food justices. 

 

In the current environment of austerity, social justice concerns are increasingly 

permeating the food security agenda. However, there is a need to clarify what it means to 

create socially just food systems conceptually and practically. To address this gap, this 

paper proposes an analytical framework to embed a more complex conceptualisation of 

justice in food security debates that also serves as a bridging device across competing 

narratives. This framework is mobilised to analyse the framing process of the UK media, 

which plays a key role in developing narratives that provide audiences with schemas for 

interpreting events. Results show the emergence of eleven frames which highlight 

different solutions to deliver food security. The application of the justice analytical 

framework evidences the contingent relationship between food security and justice 

claims and discusses how these food security frames address differently what counts as 

a matter of justice (including economic, socio-cultural and political dimensions) and who 

counts as a subject of justice, tackling issues around delimitation of scales and sites of 

justice. The analysis reveals polarised positions between whether the sites subject to 

justice should be individuals or structures and uncovers how political and global 

elements of justice are largely by-passed in food security debates. These 

conceptualisations of justice and associated policy recommendations neglect the 

potential for people to participate fully in the conditions and decisions that give rise to 

particular distributions of goods and bads in the first place; limiting the construction of 

shared responsibilities to deliver global and participative food justices. 

Key words: justice, food security, global food justice, frames, media, participative 

approaches 

1 .  I n t r o d u c t i o n  

Rising levels of obesity sitting alongside staggering undernutrition numbers situate food 

insecurity - or the inability of people to regularly access sufficient nutritious and 

culturally acceptable food – as one of the main social challenges of our time. Increasingly, 
the delivery of good food for all has been regarded as impossible without social justice  
(Cadieux and Slocum, 2015:3). Given the multifaceted processes and the complexity that 



3 

 

characterises food security dynamics, developing a successfully resilient and equitable 

global food system requires high levels of interaction between diverse stakeholders and 

a commitment to flexibility and learning in order to produce effective collective 

responses (Misselhorn et al., 2012). However, so far, solutions and conceptualisations - 

envisaged from policy, academic spheres and lobby groups - have mostly revolved around 

oppositional narratives (e.g. efficiency vs sufficiency, productivist vs demand-led) 

reproducing old dichotomies (e.g. production vs consumption, rural vs urban, local vs 

global, protectionism vs free trade, etc.) that are unable to address the systemic nature of 

the global food crisis and its unjust outcomes (Freibauer et al., 2011; Sonnino et al., 2014; 

Lang and Barling, 2012). This paper explores further how these competing food security 

narratives support or hinder the creation of socially just food systems conceptually and 

practically. 

Recently, there has been a growing body of work around food security framings that aims 

to unblock this polarised debate and gain an in-depth understanding of narrative 

formation and its policy implications. Framing is to select some aspects of a perceived 
reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote 

a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation  Entman, 1993: 52). Of particular interest is Mooney and 
Hunt's (2009) examination of food security as a consensus frame - that is, as a term that 

finds broad acceptance and consent but that is used to make different claims which result 

in divergent policy positions to address food insecurity. These can range from supporting 

genetic engineered technology to advocating for land reform.  In the UK context, Kirwan 

and Maye (2013) use the food security consensus frame to scrutinise the relationship 

between scale and framing, paying particular attention to the polarisation between the 

official  UK discourse – which supports sustainable intensification, market liberalisation 
and risk management policies (see also MacMillan & Dowler 2012) - and the side-lined 

proposals of local food systems advocates. These studies highlight how food security 

discourses have the capacity to produce social realities (see also Nally, 2014), which then 

translate into targets for policy interventions having implications for people s wellbeing 
(Sonnino et al., 2016).  

Despite the insights gained from previous framing analysis, an emerging food security 

agenda is calling for an examination of the relationality and potential convergence of 



4 

 

different narratives and associated interests in order to deliver good food for all (Jarosz, 

2014; Hopma and Woods, 2014). For example, Sonnino et al (2016) recently analyse the 

distinct governance frameworks embedded in food security narratives in order 

investigate their potential integration. However, there is a need to explore further key 

concepts that can serve as bridging devices in the entrenched food security debate, and 

how those concepts are mobilised across different constituencies and deliberation spaces 

(i.e. academia, policy arenas, social movements and the general public).  In this paper, I 

contribute to this agenda by focusing on social justice, a concept that has recently being 

recognised as one of the necessary starting points to analyse, and explore solutions to, 

food insecurity (Cadiex and Slocum, 2015: 3). 

Furthermore, in the context of economic crisis and austerity measures, both food security 

and social justice have also become more prominent in public debates of developed 

countries such as the UK, fuelled by reported increases in food poverty and inequality 

(see for example Oxfam and Church Action, 2013; Kneafsey et al., 2013). Particularly, 

social justice has become a fuzzy and ubiquitous word to qualify food poverty or food 

security challenges, seldom defined in the academic literature, policy arenas or media 

outlets. For example, Godfray et al (2010:818) state in an agenda setting Science paper 

that the food security challenge now also requires the delivery of social justice outcomes. 

Similarly, the European Commission (2010:1) argues that global health improvement 

depends on greater social justice ; or as Oxfam (2013:7) puts it, the answer to hunger and poverty it s simply justice .  The limited engagement of these assertions with the rich 
literature on (social) justice1 poses a risk of generating a new consensus frame where justice  is invoked as an abstract call for fairness. As Loo (2014) identifies, scholars  
efforts have been concentrated in understanding distributive food disparities leading to 

a narrow conceptualisation of justice that tends to by-pass the root causes of inequality. 

By unpicking the connections between food security and the justice literature, through 

this piece of research I set out to address recent calls for a more rigorous scholarship that 

engages in clarifying what it means to create socially just food systems (Cadieux and 

Slocum, 2015).  

                                                           
1 In many cases authors such as Fraser and Young use indistinctively the notion of justice and social justice. 

There are authors who advocate the use of justice when applied to individuals and social justice when 

referring to society. In this paper I use justice in order to integrate all the possible subjects and matters of 

justice.  



5 

 

This paper aims to problematise the concept of justice in order to foster progress in 

current food security debates. The main objective of this piece of work is to embed a more 

complex and reflexive conceptualisation of justice that allows critical evaluation of 

existing narratives and provides new elements to help in unblocking entrenched food 

policy positions. Questions such as what are the different conceptualisations of justice in 

food security debates, how different food security narratives converge and diverge 

around particular justice dimensions, and how these distinct justice definitions underpin 

support for particular policy solutions; are instrumental to assessing the potential 

contribution of notions of justice to the food security agenda. For that purpose, section 

two presents a literature review on justice and its intersections with food security, 

outlining an analytical framework to examine key elements in the process of constructing 

justice definitions. This framework illustrates the way in which different perspectives 

address what counts as a matter of justice (including economic, socio-cultural and 

political dimensions) and who counts as a subject of justice, tackling issues around 

delimitation of scales and sites of justice.  

In order to understand how different justice definitions are mobilised, I apply this 

analytical framework to the UK public food security debate. The analysis of media outlets 

constitutes an innovation given the lack of food security frame analysis of non-policy 

communications (with some exceptions, see Wells and Caraher(2014)). Furthermore, the 

mass media constitutes a key framing actor (see Herman and Chomski, 1988), actively 

intervening in people s environment by creating public narratives that provide audiences 
with schemas for interpreting events, that is, framings (Iyengar, 1994; Pan and Kosicki, 

1993). For example, Sampei & Aoyagi-Usui (2009) found a direct correlation between 

newspaper coverage on climate change and an increase of awareness of the public, which 

was instrumental in the implementation of environmental policies by the Japanese 

government to cut emissions. The framing and presentation of events and news in the 

mass media can thus systematically affect how recipients of the news come to understand 

these events galvanising support for specific policies or interventions. Or in other words, frames influence opinions by stressing specific values, facts, and other considerations, 
endowing them with greater apparent relevance to the issue than they might appear to have under an alternative frame  (Nelson et al., 1997:569).  



6 

 

The UK media analysis consisted of two-steps. First, 475 text units were analysed from 

eight main British newspapers2 published in the 2010-2014 period. The text units were 

selected from the lexis-nexis database by entering food security  or food poverty  as key 
words which resulted in a total of 2572 articles. The text units were selected according 

to their relevance, source, topic and number of articles in that source. Following Candel 

et al., (2014), an inductive frame analysis was applied using the qualitative software 

NVIVO to code problem definitions, proposed solutions and moral bases displayed in the 

different newspaper articles. The eleven resulting frames were discussed through semi-

structured phone interviews with six experts representing non-governmental 

organisations and institutions working on sustainable development/sustainable food, 

trade unions, anti-poverty campaigners, academics and agricultural experts. These 

interviews were instrumental in the establishment of connections among frames and in 

the discussion of their relevance in public and political debates. Section three discusses 

these eleven food security framings constructed in the UK media with the objective of 

gaining an in-depth understanding of narrative formation and its policy implications. 

Section four presents the second analytical phase, where these eleven frames are further 

examined under the justice framework proposed to understand how food security 

debates operationalise different definitions of justice. Using justice as a bridging concept, 

section five discusses the emergence of two main justice narratives in UK popular debates 

and their (dis)connections with the justice literature. Finally, section six outlines the 

conclusions of the paper highlighting how superficial approaches to justice  

can hinder the delivery of good food for all.  

 

2 .  A n  a n a l y t i c a l  f r a m e w o r k  t o  p r o b l e m a t i s e  j u s t i c e  n a r r a t i v e s   Food security is widely acknowledged as a situation that exists when all people, at all 
times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food 

that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO, 
2002). This definition appeals to basic notions of equality. In fact, food security is 

increasingly associated with notions of sustainability and justice, acknowledging that 

                                                           
2 The newspapers selected were the Guardian, Telegraph, The Sun, The observer, The Independent, The 

evening standard, Daily Mail and The Mirror. 



7 

 

food systems that are environmentally sound but socially unacceptable would not be 

resilient in the future and vice versa (Garnett and Godfray, 2012; Sonnino et al., 2014). In 

this regard, by and large, social movements, policy makers and academics resort to social 

justice as a way of qualifying food security. For example, Kirwan and Maye (2013) call for an official  UK interpretation of food security that better accommodates social justice imperatives  p. , while others identify specific social justice issues such as 
farmworker rights, economic concentration and hunger (Clancy, 1994). However, even 

when considering the different narratives under the food security consensus frame, there 

are difficulties to explicitly define justice, treating the term as a broadly shared antidote 

to distinct inequalities (based on race, class, gender, etc.) and generally promoting 

progressive rather than radical change (see for example Alkon, 2014; Holt Gimenez and 

Shattuck, 2011).  

In the study of the intersections between food security and justice the concept of food 

justice holds particular interest. This concept emerges out of diverse social and 

environmental justice concerns to highlight distinct socio-economic, racial and cultural 

inequalities within the food system. Food justice is intimately associated with a section 

of the US food movement that aims to combat causes, processes and outcomes that create 

food inequalities (Agyeman and McEntee, 2014), ensuring that the benefits and risks of 
where, what, and how food is grown and produced, transported and distributed, and accessed and eaten are shared fairly  (Gottlieb and Joshi, 2010:6). Nevertheless, different 
voices raise concerns over the multiple meanings and interpretations of food justice 

(Gottlieb and Joshi, 2010; Sbicca, 2012), as well as its focus on consumption, access, race 

and class; generally privileging the local and micro-scale practices ahead of a more 

comprehensive and multilevel account of the food system (Cadieux and Slocum, 2015; 

Jarosz, 2014). As Cadieux and Slocum (2015:15) put it if food justice means anything, it 
may stand for nothing—or, worse, serve to undermine the credibility and rigor of 
substantive food justice practices . Accordingly, they call for more clarity around what it 

means to create socially just food systems including a more rigorous food justice scholarship and activism that discloses how increasing food justice  claims actually 
further justice.  

In order to do so, there is a need to reconnect food justice  and other food claims food 
security, food sovereignty, the right to food, food democracy, etc. see Sonnino et al., 



8 

 

(2016) for a recent review) with the vast literature that problematises the concept of 

justice more generally. In this section I outline debates and key contributions on justice 

from political philosophy, social science and geographical literature. This allows us to 

identify different dimensions of justice which are instrumental to broadening narrow 

definitions that have prevailed in food debates (Loo, 2014).  

  

2.1 From distributive justice to productive justice 

Political scientist John Rawls (1971) reinvigorated the debate on social justice in the 

1970s, defining social justice as fairness. Stemming from this definition, he proposed a 

way to design a system of justice, invoking the notion of a veil of ignorance  on the initial 

endowments of different people, to ensure that the distribution of goods and bads is as 

equitable as possible. This fair equality of opportunity  principle is complemented by a difference principle  that only permits inequalities that work to the advantage of the 
worst-off. Equality is then the logical definition of justice as well as the guiding principle 

for an appropriate system of justice.  

This idea of distributive justice, that is, of justice as distributing the goods and bads that 

we have been assigned arbitrary at birth, has received criticisms from different fronts. 

First, Marxist or radical critics posit questions around the object of justice, that is, what 

needs to be equalised (i.e. outcomes or opportunities), and how to deal with spatial, 

temporal and social unevenness in the process of defining equal goods and bads. In this 

context, Harvey (1992) calls for the application of historical-geographical materialist 

methods to understand the production of power differentials that result in distinct 

conceptions of justice mobilised by diverse groups in the struggle for ideological 

hegemony. Consequently, considering justice as a universal principle is problematic since 

there are competing interpretations of good and bad that need to be acknowledged. In 

this line, the prominent political philosopher Iris Marion Young (1990) developed an 

early post-structural critique highlighting the politics of difference at play and stressing 

the difficulties associated with constructing a theory of justice to become a universal 

standard for evaluating institutions and relations. Young (1990) defines justice as the 

elimination or reduction of oppression, which has five faces – exploitation, 
marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. Finally, and likened to 



9 

 

the development of the capabilities approach (see Nussbaum, 2003), Sen (2009)  recently 

formulated a theory of justice that aims to clarify how we can proceed to address 
questions of enhancing justice and removing injustice, rather than to offer resolutions of questions about the nature of perfect justice  p. ix . His proposal is to build a 
comparative approach that allows us to assess the justice of a situation or process by 

reference to other situations without having a perfect theory. 

Taken together, these criticisms led to a formulation of productive or participative justice 

approaches that highlight not only the redistribution of material resources, but also the 

need to recognise different realities and allow them to participate in the development of 

institutions O Connor, 98). In this line, Fraser (2008) defines justice as parity of 
participation, identifying economic, cultural and political obstacles that prevent people 

from participating as full partners in social interaction. 

2.2 A framework to unpack justice narratives  

The analysis of different conceptualisations of justice prompts us to identify two main 

challenges in defining justice: what counts as a matter of justice and who counts as a 

subject of justice. These challenges are examined below, and constitute a framework to 

analyse how justice narratives are constructed.  

2.2.1 The what of justice 

Fraser (2008) proposes three dimensions to address what counts as a matter of justice. 

These three dimensions are directly linked to the evolution of theoretical approaches to 

justice as succinctly summarised above, but also highlight key elements at play when 

constructing a justice narrative. The first dimension relates to the economic elements of 

justice, where distributive justice scholars have made an important contribution. Debates 

around the economic dimension of justice include supporters of equalising outcomes but 

also scholars that emphasise the importance of applying justice parameters to 

redistribute opportunities (Waterstones, 2009).  

The second dimension relates to cultural aspects of justice, championed by post-

structuralist critics who argue for the recognition of difference in front of universalising 

and sometimes blanket approaches in defining equality and fairness. Young (1990) 

addresses the importance of difference and identifies cultural imperialism as an essential 



10 

 

face of oppression, that is, how dominant groups construct a social hierarchy of difference 

by portraying their experiences and cultural products as superior. This hierarchy creates 

moral norms that condition the identification of injustices. Nevertheless, Smith (2000) 

points out that recent preoccupation with difference can ultimately be divisive, with the risk of eroding the sense of human sameness or close similarity to ground a broader egalitarian project  (p.1151). Smith draws on the foundations of human sameness - 
including aspects of care and human needs – to call for a wider recognition of sameness 
in justice evaluations without abandoning the awareness of the particularity of persons 

and places brought by post-structuralist contributions.  

Finally, there is also a political dimension when defining the matter of justice. Early 

conceptualisations of distributive justice revolve around the application of justice principles. (owever, as O Connor (1998) points out, any definition of justice striving for 
equality should include the process of production of justice. This participatory or 

productive approach to social justice aims to include the potential for people to 

participate fully in the conditions, situations and decision that give rise to particularly 

distributions of goods and bads in the first place. For example, environmental justice 

claims are not only about redistributions of goods and bads, but also about whose values 

and visions of the environment are recognised as well as who participates in decision-

making and deliberation spaces (Martinez-Alier, 2014; Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 

2015; Sikor and Newell, 2014). One of the main characteristics of political injustice is, 

therefore, misrepresentation, where miss-framing – or when questions of justice are 
wrongly framed in a way that exclude some from consideration  Faser, :  - 
constitutes a key mechanism to create injustice. This miss-framing not only applies to 

what counts as a matter of justice but also who counts as a subject of justice, which 

includes defining who is affected by given structures and therefore holds a moral 

standing as a subject of justice in relation to it (see Barnett, 2012). 

 

2.2.2 The who of justice 

The second key challenge in defining justice approaches revolves around determining 

who counts as a subject of justice, which includes clarifying the sites and the scales of 

justice. When demarcating the sites of justice, Barnett (2011) identifies two main focuses 



11 

 

in current moral and philosophical debates, either emphasising the coercive institutions 

of the basic structure or the non-coercive fields of personal conduct and ethos. In the first 

group, Rawls (1999) argues that the subject of justice should be the institutions of society 

which sustain inequalities - what he called the basic structure of society - while individual 

choices and attitudes should not be subject to the principles of justice. On the contrary, 

Cohen (2009) supports the inclusion of non-coercive structures - such as conventions, 

social ethos and personal choices - in the evaluation of justice. Young (2011) breaks this 

polarised debate to call for a more complex analysis of injustice that posits the individual 

as the central locus of ethical responsibility but also recognises the central role of 

structures in producing injustices. She calls for a shared responsibility, a model in which 

responsibility is distributed across complex networks of causality and agency (Barnett, 

2011; Young, 2007). According to this model, being responsible means that one has an 

obligation to join with others in order to transform the structural processes to make their 

outcomes just  (Young, 2011:96). 

 

Defining the sites subject to justice is closely related to problematising the scales or the 

scopes of justice. The scales of obligations of justice are widely considered to be defined 

by membership to a particular political community, mainly the nation-state (Miller, 2008; 

Rawls, 1971). This Rawlsian position basically holds that obligations of justice with other human beings presuppose the existence of shared political institutions  Young, 
2011:136), and therefore global distributive justice could only rely on the possibility of a 

global basic structure (Buchanan, 2003; Pogge, 2002;  see Barnett, 2011 for a debate on 

the existence of a global institutional order). However, critics of this position highlight 

the arbitrary membership to a nation-state from a moral point of view, stressing the role 

of power in the evolution of political communities and boundaries (Young, 2011). 

Furthermore, relationships between people can be unjust without political institutions 

that govern them and, at the same time, non-governmental collective actors can have an 

important role in the creation of injustices. Indeed, current globalising processes – 
including discourses of justice and corresponding institutional arrangements but also 

capitalist developments (Fraser, 2008; Sikor and Newell, 2014) –have reshaped existing 
forms of inequality and modified the spaces available for the pursuit of justice beyond 

Westphalian states (Newell, 2012).  



12 

 

In contrast, other authors support a cosmopolitan-utilitarian view where moral agents 

have obligations to all human and even non-human beings (Singer, 1993; Unger, 1996). 

This stance also receives criticism for being overly individualistic, disregarding the roles 

of institutions and collective action as well as failing to propose specific actions. In the 

face of these two conceptions, Young (2011) argues for a shared responsibility of all 

agents contributing to structural processes involved in reproducing injustice. Those 

processes cut across jurisdictional boundaries creating moral geographies as illustrated 

by the environmental justice scholarship that demonstrates how place-specific policies 

and practices can have consequences that cross national boundaries, affect multiple 

scales, and extend across global networks  (Holifield et al., 2009: 595). 
This review of justice conceptualisations allows the construction of an analytical 

framework to examine justice narratives. Table 1 summarises the dimensions involved 

in developing these narratives, as well as key questions and debates on the who and what 

of justice. This analytical framework constitutes a tool to navigate conflicting views, 

establish new connections among narratives and support the development of more 

complex accounts of justice in different food security approaches as discussed below.  

  



13 

 

Table 1. Summary of the analytical framework to identify key justice challenges and its 

constitutive dimensions  

Challenges Dimensions Key questions and debates 

The what of 

justice 

Economic: 

Redistribution 

Do narratives champion equalisation of 

outcomes (final goods enjoyed) and/or 

equalisation of opportunities (possibilities of 

access)?  

Social and cultural: 

Recognition 

Do narratives emphasise sameness of all 

humans and/or they call for recognition of 

difference (e.g. vulnerable groups)? 

Political: 

Representation 

Do narratives consider the application of 

justice principles (by who, to who) and/or do 

they problematise the process of producing 

justice (who participates in defining justice)? 

The who of 

justice 

Scales of justice Do narratives refer to national boundaries 

(linked to the capacity of the national state to 

act, e.g. legislate) and/or do they include 

global perspectives (other geographies are 

implicated in defining and applying justice 

principles)? 

Sites of justice Do narratives consider the structures of the 

basic society as the places to apply justice 

principles and/or they focus on individuals 

when evaluating justice?  Source: Author s own elaboration 
3. UK media food security framings: a segmented discursive foodscape 

The UK is a particularly interesting example to study food security frames given its 

combination of increasing dependency on food imports since the 1980s - which today 

constitute 40% of all food consumed in the UK (DEFRA, 2014a) – as well as rising 
numbers of people experiencing diet-related diseases and food poverty. In England, 64% 

of the population is overweight, with low-income families being particularly affected 

(HSE, 2013). Unsurprisingly, one of the main concerns now for the UK s population is food 
prices, which have increased by 18% in real terms between 2007 and 2012, affecting 

mainly low-income households (DEFRA, 2014b). Government figures estimate that there 

are around 13 million people in poverty in the UK, that is, one in five people (Department 

for Work and Pensions, 2014). Alternative sources state that four million people suffer 

from food poverty (Gordon et al., 2000) and that around three million people suffer from 

undernourishment or are at risk of being underfed (Brotherton et al., 2010). There has 

been an expansion of charity-run food banks around the UK, with estimates of around 

500,000 residents are now reliant on food aid; and the Trussell Trust food banks have 



14 

 

delivered 3 days emergency food to 913,138 people in 2013/2014 (Lambie-Mumford et 

al.,2014).  

The media has been active in reporting some of these trends, and particularly the food 

banks surge (Wells and Caraher, 2014). The analysis of the UK media framing process 

from 2010 until 2014 resulted in the identification and characterisation eleven food 

security frames. Following the methodology of Candel et al. (2014), the table below 

summarises these frames, including the way in which each frame defines food insecurity 

as a problem and identifies related threats, key concepts and associated solutions 

suggested with examples of specific policies, and the moral bases mobilised. 



15 

 

Table 2 Food security (FS) frames emerging from UK media analysis  

Frames Problems definition/threats Key concepts / suggested solutions Policies Moral bases 

Distributive 

justice 

Increasing social inequalities, Violence 

and riots, Economic crisis, Cuts to public 

expenditure, Tax avoidance. 

People are arbitrarily born with distinct 

endowments. This is unfair and needs 

to be corrected in order to deliver FS 

for all. Redistribution and effective 

welfare enable FS.  

Increase minimum 

wage/living wages. 

Reform welfare state. 

We are arbitrarily endowed 

with different resources 

and skills. These should be 

redistributed fairly. Social 

justice as fairness and 

equality.  

Ecological  

Soil fertility loss, Pollution, Climate 

change, Pressures on biodiversity. 

Sustainable food production. Organic and 

environmentally friendly 

production practices. 

Animal Welfare. 

Inter-generational 

sustainability, Respect for 

nature, Eco-centrism. 

Food safety 

Spread of animal & plant diseases, Food 

chain complexity & inefficiencies, Food 

contamination, Cuts on public 

expenditure. 

Food safety standards are key for 

national FS. 

Increase controls of food 

safety. 

Scientific evidence, 

Hygenic-sanitary measures 

to ensure public health. 

Free trade 

Dependency on food imports and 

international trade, Price volatility and 

surge, Food chain complexity & 

inefficiencies, Spread of animal & plant 

diseases, Food contamination. 

Relying on competitive advantage 

theories and creating global food chains 

is the way to assure an efficient and 

affordable food provision for all. 

Liberalise trade. Freedom of choice, 

Efficiency. 

Individualistic 

Economic crisis, Short term crisis, 

Welfare dependency. 

People are responsible for their own 

choices and associated consequences, 

therefore they are the ones responsible 

for assuring FS in their households. 

Reduce welfare state, 

Achieve high levels of 

employment. 

Individual freedom and 

responsibility. 

Productionist 

Climate change and bad weather, Spread 

of animal & plant diseases, Population 

growth, Violence and riots, Anti-GM 

lobby. 

Stimulating production and increasing 

productivity. 

Invest in sustainable 

intensification 

techniques. 

Invest in technologies to 

increasing yields.  

Every country should be 

involved in producing more 

food and increase yields, 

using technological 

advances. 

Quality 

Unsustainable purchasing & eating 

practices, Increasing social inequalities, 

Economic crisis, Prices. 

Having access to nutritious, healthy and 

good food. 

Promotion of local foods. 

Promotion of east well 

guides, eat five a day. 

Nutritious food as a right 

for everybody. Promoting 

local/national and 



16 

 

indigenous food as part of 

the rural landscape, 

preserving identity. 

Regulatory 

Dependency on food imports and 

international trade, Price volatility and 

surge, Food chain complexity & 

inefficiencies, Unsustainable purchasing 

& eating practices, Food fraud and crime, 

Increasing social inequalities, Food 

industry lobbying & advertisement, Tax 

avoidance. 

Markets work inefficiently since they do 

not consider environmental, social and 

economic externalities or the fulfilment 

of the right to food. Governments are responsible for people s FS. 
Protectionist measures. 

Grants and payments to 

protect and support 

national markets and 

producers. 

Sugar and unhealthy 

food taxes. 

Regulate advertisement. 

State as steward of its 

citizens, responsible for 

delivering rights. 

Solidarity3 

Increasing social inequalities, Population 

growth, Price surges, Economic crisis.  

People should help each other to achieve FS, building a Big society . 
Food assistance is an expression of this 

community and solidarity spirit 

delivering short-term and effective 

solutions for people in need.  

Empower communities, 

devolve resources. 

Human solidarity, 

community spirit, 

compassion.  

Sovereignty 

Increasing social inequalities, Food 

industry lobbying & advertisement, 

Dependency on food imports and 

international trade, Economic crisis, 

Land competition, Food chain complexity 

& inefficiencies, Financial speculation, 

Cuts in public expenditure, GMs. 

People and communities must have 

control over their food systems in order 

to deliver FS. 

Provide rights to people 

(access to land, water, 

seeds etc.). 

Protect local economies 

through trade barriers. 

Right to decide on the food 

system, tackle power 

imbalances. 

Technology 

Low farming productivity, Soil fertility 

loss, Population growth,  Climate change 

and bad weather, Anti-GM lobby. 

New technological developments would 

deliver FS for all. 

Invest and deregulate 

the development of new 

technologies. 

Scientific evidence, 

Efficiency, Freedom of 

choice. 

                                                           
3 This fra e is a ed solidarity  i  order to refle t the des riptors used i  the edia arti les a alysed. Ho e er, this defi itio  of solidarity represe ts only one of the 
manifold meanings and practices of solidarity linked to food insecurity or food poverty dynamics. For example other radical approaches to solidarity or community building 

rooted in anarchist principles such are food not bombs (see Heynen (2010) are by and large absent in print media outlets. 



17 

 

According to experts interviewed, these frames capture the areas where conversation and controversies hinge  in the UK food security debate. These frames show the 
complexity of food security narratives and the current segmentation of food debates that, 

among other limitations, preclude holistic accounts of food security challenges. This lack 

of holistic understanding is clearly exemplified by the suggested solutions presented by 

these narratives which tend to deal with specific aspects such as food safety, boosting 

production or improving welfare assistance. However, there are clear correlations among 

the different frames, many of them sharing the identification of key problems and in some 

cases elements of the moral basis. Indeed, when presented with these frames several 

respondents identified two main sets of frames that impinge on national policy debates 

reproducing the polarised positions outlined in the literature (see above). On the one 

hand the productionist, free trade and technology frames were acknowledged as the main 

drivers of national policy (and also European policy) which one expert described as a consistent policy position with regard to food production, food systems and the food economy . On the other hand, a second set of frames is made up of ecological, regulatory 
and distributive justice narratives; championed by a diverse set of charities, NGOs and 

think tanks in the UK.  

Experts showed a range of moral and justice concerns when asked about the relevance of 

these frames in public debates. For example, an interviewee supporting a mixture of 

productionist, free trade and technology frames to address food security challenges 

asserted that the UK is benign when it comes to social justice. ) think there is a general 
socio-democratic feel about the way you look at food as sort of an essential part of life . 
On the contrary, another informant downplayed the role of these three frames resorting as well to justice claims and stating that the productionist and the technology narrative 
are quite powerful because it is quite emotive to say we can feed hungry people and we can do it now. But now is not about a fair distribution of nutrition, it is about profits.  In 
order to understand better these linkages between food security and justice, the next 

section analyses in depth how different definitions of justice are mobilised in the UK 

media food security frames. 

 

 



18 

 

4.  What do you mean by justice?  

This section presents the results of the analysis of the UK food security frames under the 

justice analytical framework proposed in section two. The main aim is to understand how 

food security frames converge and diverge around particular justice dimensions, and, 

how these distinct justice definitions underpin support for particular policy solutions.  

4.1 The matter of justice: economic, socio-cultural and political dimensions of justice 

in UK media food security frames 

The individualistic and the distributive justice frame are particularly engaged with 

defining what is the matter of justice, while the other frames generally position 

themselves around specific dimensions. The individualistic frame conceptualises the 

matter of justice as the equalisation of opportunities that arises from freedom of choice 

and de-regulation. Food insecurity is, therefore, the result of making the wrong individual 

choices, like purchasing the wrong foods, spending money on the wrong goods (e.g. TVs) 

or not working hard enough (see figure 1). This narrative enhances the sameness of 

individuals and individual rights, claiming that we all are free to make our own decisions 

and (in the UK) have similar basic conditions to fulfil our needs. Cultural recognition is 

therefore overlooked within this frame, avoiding any reference to distinct needs and 

values that groups in society might hold. This sameness resonates as fairness to part of 

the population, although in some cases is constructed in opposition to others, such as 

highlighting the use of foodbanks by immigrants (see for example The unpalatable truth 

about food banks the left finds so hard to swallow Daily Mail 13/05/2014) or stressing the 

wealth of the UK in front of other countries. Therefore, the initial premise of the sameness 

of individuals is frequently jeopardised by constructions of us  and the others , raising 
questions about who is deserving or entitled to share this sameness.  

 



19 

 

Figure 1. Headlines related to the individualistic frame 

 

 

The free trade frame also champions the distribution of opportunities and appeals to 

sameness, in this case calling for all countries to participate under equal trade conditions 

in the global market. Based on the comparative advantage theory proposed by David 

Ricardo, the definition of food security under this frame is that free flow of goods allows 

food to be produced at the lowest possible cost, building global food chains that assure 

efficient and affordable food provision for all and providing business opportunities. 

Similarly to the individualistic frame, this definition of justice resonates with the neo-

liberal project (Ferguson, 2010), reinforcing the expression of people s freedom of choice 
through the market. Also, these two frames do not consider the different initial 

endowments of individuals or countries that might jeopardise ideals of sameness when 

participating for example in the so-called free markets. 

Contrastingly, the distributive justice frame as deployed in the media appeals to fairness 

and equality, calling for a redistribution of goods and bads that lead not only to better 

opportunities but that result in fairer outcomes. The definition of the what of justice, 



20 

 

therefore, has an important economic dimension that coalesces around policy demands 

to have an effective welfare system and assure living wages. In fact, much of the rhetoric 

around this distributive justice frame refers to austerity measures such as benefits cuts 

and delays as a generator of food insecurity in the UK. This position has been reinforced 

by investigations on food banks showing that many of their users are suffering from 

changes in welfare payments (Lambie-Mumford et al., 2014, Oxfam and Church Action, 

2013). While this frame is sensitive to different groups and needs - showcasing a number 

of individual s situations such as single mothers or disabled people - it does not unpack 

culturally diverse definitions of what is good food for all. In common with the 

individualistic frame, notions of sameness are also brought to the fore, highlighting different life stories and the idea that it might happen to you  see for example article 
Food poverty: You think it doesn t happen to normal people  The Guardian 06/06/2013).  

Figure 2. Headlines related to the distributive justice frame4  

  

                                                           
4 The image of the front page of the Daily Mirror shows a child crying. Following UNICEF ethical guidelines, this 

figure does not sho  the hild s fa e to a oid further stig atisatio  of a  i age that has e o e i o i  i  the 
UK food poverty debate. 



21 

 

The analysis of the media food security frames under the justice framework reveals that 

practically none of them referred to the political dimension of justice or acknowledged 

(mis)representation mechanisms. Even in the distributive justice frame, there is an 

absence of contestation or reflection regarding how people suffering from food poverty 

are represented in this narrative, using (strategically) the rise of food bank users as a 

means to gather support for specific policies such as benefit reforms or living wage 

campaigns. Moreover, the participation of food insecure people in producing - and not 

only benefiting from - a more just system is seldom discussed.  The only frame explicitly 

tackling issues of empowerment and participation is the sovereignty frame which argues 

for people and communities to regain control over their food systems in order to deliver 

food security. However, in the UK context food sovereignty is rarely discussed in the 

media apart from international events related to La Via Campesina and as an umbrella 

term to amalgamate a myriad of food initiatives. 

The diverse strands of independent, sustainable and organic food producers are, at present, 

little more than a glimmer of light in the gloom, but they may represent the beginnings of a 

movement for food sovereignty, restoring the connection between the people of this country 

and more democratic ownership of the chain that brings food from the fields to our kitchens 

(The Guardian, 26/03/2014) 

The food sovereignty frame relies on the right to decide over how food is produced and 

accessed. This clearly aims to tackle power imbalances as a precondition to delivering 

sustainability, justice, and ultimately food security for all. However, there are conceptual 

and practical gaps in linking these global goals to the needs of people actually suffering 

from food insecurity within the UK.  

Other frames do not engage directly in participation issues but draw attention to key 

aspects of the political process of defining justice. For example, the ecological frame 

highlights intergenerational aspects of sustainability and therefore the need to establish 

a temporal dimension in the formulation of policy solutions. In the case of the 

technological and safety frames, they make explicit references to application mechanisms 

of justice; specifically, they share a strong focus on scientific evidence as the basis to guide 

decision making.  



22 

 

The Government has a position on GM foods which is, provided that it's used safely and 

responsibly, it can deliver benefits and help address the challenge of global food security. 

We have to ensure public safety and take decisions based on the scientific evidence (Daily 

Mail, 11/12/2012). 

The technological frame deploys a particular definition of scientific evidence, including 

only experts and mostly natural science findings. Science is therefore seen as an objective 

and impartial tool to guide policy, and opponents to developments such as bio-technology 

are seen as having a lack of scientific understanding. This frame rarely includes as 

scientific evidence studies that highlight socio-cultural impacts of technology or the 

development of low-cost techniques and knowledge. Nevertheless, the safety frame 

includes reports and inquiries that rely on socio-economic data as scientific evidence and 

also highlights the importance of public perception in policy making processes (see for 

example Elliot (2014) on the horse meat scandal).  

 

4.2 The who of justice: sites and scales of justice in food security frames 

The food security frames identified in the UK media engage more actively in constructing 

different sites and scales of justice than in defining the matter of justice. The analysis 

reveals a polarised position between whether the sites subject to justice are individual 

behaviours or the institutions of the basic structure and consequently support very 

distinct policy interventions. In the first case, the individualistic frame portrays food 

security as an individual matter, the site of justice or who is responsible are individuals instead of institutions. People s attitudes and practices are therefore key to being food 
secure, and independent from public policies or market forces, mainly understood as people making the wrong choices .  
(Edwina Currie) declared that food poverty simply did not exist. "It's about choices", she 

said. What she meant was that she believed poor people had enough money, they just spent 

it on fags and booze and getting into debt with loan sharks. (The Guardian 03/03/2014). 

In the UK, this frame has actively been deployed throughout the food banks debate 

contesting the reach or even existence of food poverty in the country. In this context, 

some commentators have argued that some people are taking advantage of the welfare 

system and charity initiatives and call for subsequent policy reform.  



23 

 

Some people like to believe that there has been this enormous upsurge in food poverty. My 

point is that there have always been poor people in this country. … The fact is that food 

banks are a new phenomenon. … )f you provide a service, people use it Daily Mail 

13/03/2014).  

In a more nuanced position, the solidarity frame as deployed in the media avoids pointing 

out specific sites of justice, trying to de-politicise food security solutions through an 

appeal to build strong, active and self-reliant communities. In this line, these communities 

would not expect support from the state, what makes this discourse of building a Big Society 5 compatible with elements of the individualistic frame that locate individual 
freedom and responsibility at its heart. Similarly, these ideas of individual freedom and 

responsibility resonate with the technological and free-trade frame. These last two 

emphasise individual freedom particularly in relation to consumer and producer choice 

that is, by and large, materialised through access to global food chains. Nevertheless, 

these frames recognise the role of the state in delivering reforms that would progress in 

solving food insecurity by reinforcing free competition or the introduction of specific 

technologies.  

The Government sometimes says it can t do anything about the rise in food prices, but there 

are policies that can be adopted. On commodity prices, we need to double our efforts to 

support free-trade agreements in agricultural goods, support global adoption of high-yield 

crops and put food production at the heart of our development programmes abroad. (The 

Telegraph 19/06/2014) 

The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select committee urged ministers to do more to 

bring in GM food and to get the EU to loosen curbs on the controversial crops to boost "food 

security" (The Mirror 01/07/2014) 

On a different note, the regulatory frame emphasises the responsibility of the national 

state to deliver food security for all, deeming markets as inefficient tools that ignore 

                                                           
5 The idea of the Big society  in the UK is by and large mostly associated with the conservative agenda which 
aims to integrate a free market approach with a theory of social solidarity based on voluntarism (Alcock et 

al., 2012). This concept commends that a significant amount of responsibility for the running of a society is 

devolved to local communities and volunteers.  



24 

 

environmental, social and economic costs or the need to fulfil human rights, as illustrated 

below.  

Finally, there is an answer that lies in treating food security as a priority, rather than as a 

soft commodity to be traded like any other. Its production and trading should be much more 

heavily regulated, and protected (The Guardian 01/06/2011). 

 (Tory MP) Laura Sandys called for ministers to take a stronger regulatory approach to 

tackle rampant food inflation, to prevent consumers being ripped off, and to rebuild the UK's 

consumer's declining food skills. That meant controlling food policy she said, rather than 

delegating it to the supermarkets (The Guardian 04/06/2013). 

The safety frame is also related to the regulatory frame, considering necessary the state 

intervention to regulate specific areas such as developing hygienic bureaucratic norms to 

assure minimum standards. Nevertheless, food frauds and scares have brought to the fore 

contrasting positions on responsibility, that is, whether food safety should be more 

regulated and monitored by public agencies or be devolved to the private sector. 

The distributive justice frame clearly posits socio-economic structures as the main root 

cause of food insecurity in the UK, and therefore also proposes that the principles of 

justice should be applied to institutions - which play a key role in solving unjust situations 

such as food insecurity. Indeed, this frame advocates for an improved welfare system and 

other forms of state intervention including raising minimum wages.  

Trussell Trust's chairman, said: )n the last year we've seen things get worse, rather than 

better, for many people on low incomes.' In a highly political intervention, he also called for 

the Government to drop sanctions against benefit claimants and increase the minimum 

wage (Daily Mail 17/04/2014). 

The polarised positions around individuals or structures as legitimate sites of justice 

permeate the definition of the scales of justice where the analysis reveals three main 

levels: global, national and local (including communities). By and large, the frames 

championing the institutions of the basic structure as a site of justice resort to the 

national level. For example, in the case of distributive justice the institutions pointed out 

as key for solving food insecurity are located at the national level and mostly relate to the UK s socio-economic policies. In this regard, global discourses around food security for 
all are rarely included in media articles tackling food poverty  in the UK and therefore 



25 

 

restrict their definition of the who of justice to national boundaries. This particularly 

contrasts with debates and proposals of environmental justice which impinge upon 

global rights, and reinforces the idea that food justice claims tend to remain local and 

potentially exclusionary. The regulatory and safety frame also refers mostly to UK s 
responsibilities towards its citizens.  

Interestingly, the individualistic frame champions individual responsibility mostly in 

relation to the UK context but also in some cases this narrative is applied to justify why 

other countries are food insecure (e.g.  due to corruption, mismanagement or lack of 

knowledge).  While the individualistic frame is very much constructed around the UK and 

its particular dynamics, it does not necessarily stress the nation  as the scale where 
justice principles and norms are implemented. However, as stated above, it does mobilise 

nationality and national borders to construct a compelling narrative. 

The productionist and the technology frame reinforce this global scale of justice, asserting 

that by increasing food production and developing technologies to increase yields in the 

UK and abroad, they are contributing to global food security.  

Children are going blind in impoverished parts of the world because of the "hang-up" of 

opponents of GM foods, Environment Secretary Owen Paterson warned today (The Evening 

Standard, 14/10/2013). 

At the other end of the spectrum, the quality frame celebrates - among other attributes - 

local food or British food, putting emphasis on high-quality products, grow-your-own or 

initiatives such as farmers  markets. Some commentators argue that this construction of 
quality is linked to middle-class concerns that create exclusive spaces where these types 

of food can be accessed (see for example Guthman, 2008). In this frame, local/national 

and indigenous foods are presented as part of the British identity. Nevertheless, uncritical 

approaches to local food have been reported as detrimental in terms of advancing 

towards equality, since they might reproduce power relations and also develop 

narratives only accessible to certain societal groups with specific cultural and economic 

endowments (Johnston, 2008; Moragues-Faus, 2016).  This potential local  trap 
permeates the construction of justice developed by the solidarity frame where solutions 

to food insecurity revolve around the devolution of powers to communities and the 



26 

 

promotion of solidarity spirit by encouraging people to take an active role in their local 

environment. 

In Oxford, a food bank was started up four and a half years ago, based on a sustainable 

model. … As an example of the much-disparaged Big Society , it could hardly be bettered. 

The volunteers – who …  come from every background and represent every political hue – 

have co-operated to build an organisation with local roots, serving local needs, without any 

subsidy from state sources whatsoever. (The Telegraph 19/06/2014). 

This local focus might potentially obscure the distinct capacity of communities to self-

organise and tackle food insecurity. Indeed, having time  to engage in alternative 
practices or voluntary activities often requires a pre-existing class privilege (Gross, 

2009). Furthermore, this local community focus can reinforce negative unintended 

consequences of particular food practices on distant communities given the globalised 

character of existing food chains. Recent literature on food banks has been active in 

highlighting how food assistance programmes can indeed reproduce root causes of food 

insecurity and domination relations (see for example (Minkoff-Zern, 2014)). 



27 

 

Table 3. Analysis of food security frames under justice framework 

Challenges The what of justice The who of justice 

        Dimensions 

 

Frames 

Economic: Redistribution Social and cultural: Recognition Political: 

Representation 

Scales of justice Sites of justice 

Distributive 

justice 

Outcomes and opportunities to 

be food secure 

Difference (vulnerable groups but 

not diverse definitions of good food), 

sameness (it can happen to you)  

Application National Structure 

Ecological  
Outcomes around 

environmental protection 

- *Future generations Global - 

Food Safety Outcomes to be food secure - *Scientific evidence National Structure 

Free trade Opportunities (countries) Sameness (trade agreements, free 

competition) 

Application Global Individual 

Individualistic Opportunities to access food Sameness but disregard of certain 

groups as less deserving 

Application National/global Individual 

Productionist 
- - - Global -  

Quality - - - Local -  

Regulatory - - - National Structure 

Solidarity 
Opportunities - - Local Not 

structures 

Sovereignty 
Opportunities (access to food 

but also rights) and outcomes 

- Production of justice Global/local Structures 

Technology - - *Scientific evidence Global Individual 



28 

 

5. Neoliberal and structural justice narratives in food security debates 

The analysis of media food security frames under the justice framework allows 

identifying new linkages and gaps that result in the characterisation of two main justice 

narratives. Firstly, the free trade, individualistic and technology frames share a neoliberal 

justice narrative revolving around providing equal opportunities, championing 

application of principles and identifying individual practices as key sites of justice. The 

scale of this neoliberal narrative is rather fluid, with a strong global focus but favouring 

the interests and needs of a particular nation and its citizens. The term neoliberal justice 

has been used in the literature to emphasise a formulation of justice that reduces the 

explanations of social and political theory to the behaviour of individual actors rather 

than structures of society (Okereke, 2007), as well highlighting its connection to the 

neoliberal project based on liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms within an 

institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, 

and free trade  (Harvey, 2005:2). However, the neoliberal justice narrative in food 

security public debate combines this policy framework with ideas of sameness and equal 

opportunities to access markets or jobs.  

Secondly, the distributive justice, food safety and regulatory frames construct a structural 

justice narrative that not only focuses on opportunities but is largely occupied with the 

actual outcomes and the application of justice principles. These principles are applied to 

the institutions of the basic structure primarily located at the national level. The term 

structural injustice has been used to reject individualising and blaming justice 

perspectives. According to Young (2006) structural injustice exists when social 
processes put large categories of persons under a systematic threat of domination or 

deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time as 

these processes enable others to dominate or have a wide range of opportunities for 

developing and exercising their capacities  (p.114). Nevertheless, and contrarily to the 
narrow structural justice narrative used in food security debates, Young argues that 

individuals bear responsibility for structural injustice because they contribute by their 

actions to the processes that produce unjust outcome  (p.119). Consequently, the 

structural processes can be altered only if many actors in diverse social positions work 

together to intervene in these processes to produce different outcomes  p. . 
However, the structural justice narrative identified throughout the media analysis falls 

into a rather narrow conceptualisation of structure that hinders the development of a 



29 

 

range of state and non-state led actions to correct current food insecurity dynamics. That 

is, to propose solutions that go beyond welfare reforms and minimum salaries.  

Finally, the rest of the food security frames do not articulate a comprehensive justice 

narrative. However, they bring to the fore specific aspects of justice such the importance 

of considering the temporal aspects in the definition of justice (ecological frame), the role 

of communities and local spaces (solidarity frame) or the importance of questioning how 

justice is produced (sovereignty frame). 

In general, the UK media food security frames show a rather narrow definition of justice 

in relation to the existing justice literature and its development since the 70s - when 

liberal definitions of justice started to be contested. Nevertheless, the results of the 

analysis show that justice claims are central in building an appealing food security frame. 

The structural justice narrative constitutes a clear example of this lack of definition and 

evidences the need to further qualify justice assertions by its proponents - particularly 

since, according to interviewees, the media frames capture the wider UK food security 

debate. This narrative aims to bring to the fore social justice goals in the convoluted UK 

media, however, it fails to articulate a comprehensive account of cultural recognition, 

over-relying on food banks as a key framing device of food insecurity. This results in a 

definition of vulnerable groups in relation to food bank users (a characteristic shared by 

other frames) which highlights specific food practices (mainly at the consumption end) 

and obscures other roles that as citizens all of us might perform. This focus also excludes 

different lived experiences of food poverty that do not necessarily include using food 

banks; as well as different accounts of what is good food. Accordingly, this narrative 

overlooks the existence of vulnerable distant communities and how proposed policies 

might contribute to reproduce or mitigate global inequalities. A more systemic account 

of food security, often absent in food poverty debates, will allow the uncovering of the 

existing linkages with global processes implicated in current and future food insecurity 

outcomes such as climate change or food production. As illustrated above, the sole focus 

on the institutions of the basic structure as the sites of justice precludes establishing these 

multi-level linkages that acknowledge a contingent geography of injustice. This justice 

narrative could benefit from engaging with shared responsibility conceptualisations of 

justice when identifying who is the subject of justice, and therefore its policy targets. 

Finally, this frame also disregards the importance of participation when addressing 



30 

 

inequality which constitutes a key mechanism to redress structural and root causes of 

injustice (see Fraser, 2009).  

 

6. Conclusions: reclaiming justice to deliver food security for all 

This paper contributes to the current food security agenda by exploring the connections 

and disconnections of public food security narratives and their relationality through the 

concept of justice. In order to broaden and deepen the linkages between food security 

and justice literature, and practice, two key justice challenges (the what and the who of 

justice) are expounded to build an innovative analytical framework.  

The application of this innovative justice framework to the analysis of the UK media food 

security debate has revealed gaps and ways forward for food security practitioners and 

the associated scholarship. First, the identification and characterisation of eleven food 

security frames reveal clear disconnections and partial accounts of the systemic nature of 

food insecurity, including the proposal of disparate solutions and policies (see table 2). 

These marked contrasts limit the adoption of integral approaches and innovative 

practices that have proved instrumental in delivering good food for all- as the literature 

shows elsewhere (see for example Brunori et al., 2013). Secondly, the media frames 

engage recurrently with different notions of justice, revealing the contingent relationship 

between food security and justice claims. Furthermore, the concept of justice constitutes 

a bridging device across narratives that has uncovered different controversies and 

relations than those recurrently portrayed in academic and policy debates. Results of the 

analysis show a clear polarisation with respect to the economic dimension of justice (with 

frames championing opportunities vs those focused on outcomes), the cultural 

dimension (where sameness and recognition of difference are seldom articulated) and 

the site of justice (whether the application of justice should pivot around individuals or 

the institutions of the basic structure). These distinct justice definitions have clear policy 

implications since they support different types of policies, for example by setting targets 

regarding access to food vs resulting levels of malnutrition (opportunities/outcomes), 

developing universal policies or working with differentiated groups 

(sameness/difference), and reinforcing state regulation or reducing public intervention 

(structure/individual). The UK media frames also showcase a very limited reflection of 



31 

 

the spatial interdependencies implicated in the food system and their role in achieving 

global food security outcomes, mostly limiting policies or actors  interventions to the 
national interest. 

Despite the centrality of justice in popular perceptions of food security in the UK, the 

analysis reveals a partial engagement with justice definitions and a general overlooking 

of the political dimension of justice – linked to (mis)representation and participation. Yet, 
explicit problematisation of who participates in decision-making process and whose 

rights and values are recognised has proven to be essential in resolving entrenched 

inequalities (see Martinez-Alier, 2014). This lack of engagement in public discourse with 

the ideas espoused in the participative justice literature mirrors the deficiencies of 

academic contributions (see Loo, 2014). Furthermore, experts interviewed 

acknowledged that the media frames identified captured the wider public and policy food 

security debate; thus signalling a generalised failure of civil society, public and private 

stakeholders to include the process of producing justice in current narratives and policy 

solutions.  

In this context, the justice framework proposed is instrumental to unpick further these 

linkages between food security and justice. This framework provides a tool to evaluate 

justice assertions but also prompt polarised narratives and associated stakeholders to 

evaluate (and further define) what type and whose justice they are championing. 

Specifically, this analytical tool acknowledges the role of framing as a key mechanism of 

generating injustice at the economic and social level (Fraser, 2008) by creating powerful 

discourses that outline who is subject to what justice principles and producing social 

realities that translate into targets for policy. This type of analytical tool contributes to 

the implementation of deliberative and reflexive food governance approaches based on 

fostering spaces for learning and adapting social solutions to collectively resolve food 

insecurities (Marsden, 2013). For example, using justice as a bridging concept we start to 

ask individualistic narratives how they address cultural diversity and different notions of 

good food, or how distributive justice proponents tackle the global scale to actually 

deliver good food for all. Similarly, this framework brings to the forefront different 

questions to elucidate in food policy arenas such as where is the site of responsibility or 

who is deserving to be considered in food security interventions. Ultimately, linking food 

security narratives to the justice framework can help to develop integrative and 



32 

 

participative policies that cut across scales, sites and dimensions of justice in order to 

deliver good food for all. 

Consequently, this framework aims not only to guide critique but also to support the 

creation of counter and equally compelling narratives which can begin to reconstruct a 

more democratic and inclusive food politics (Moragues-Faus, 2016). This paper proposes 

to use justice as a common thread to hold new discussions and connect food policy arenas 

to other spaces tackling socio-economic, cultural and political inequalities. Furthermore, and building on Young s and Fraser s work, ) contend that a food security approach that 
aims to provide consistently good food for all needs to incorporate a definition of  justice 

that i) provides opportunities to access good food with a strong emphasis on final 

outcomes, ii) appeals to the equal rights of all peoples to food but also acknowledges 

different needs and definitions of good; and iii) includes the potential for people to 

participate fully in the conditions, situations and decisions that give rise to particular 

distributions of goods and bads in the first place. Recognising and unpacking the political 

elements of justice that are clearly manifested through representation and 

misrepresentation processes are key to advancing in the current conceptualisations and 

practices of participative food justices.  

Truly participative food justices necessarily depart from the acknowledgment of the 

global processes that connect individuals and institutions across different geographies. 

Indeed, multi-scalar approaches to food security and justice are essential to grasp 

contemporary fluid liaisons between place and power (Bauman, 2013; Conversi, 2016) 

which are currently fostering the emergence of multilevel, cross-sectorial and multi-site 

networks that do not conform to administrative boundaries, ranging from transnational 

corporations to sustainable food cities networks or global justice movements. This multi-

scalar approach provides the grounds to dissolve individual-structure dichotomies and 

build shared responsibilities to deliver global and participative food justices.  

 

 

References 

Agyeman, J., McEntee, J., 2014. Moving the Field of Food Justice Forward Through the 

Lens of Urban Political Ecology. Geogr. Compass 8, 211–220.  



33 

 

Alcock, P., Kendall, J., Parry, J., 2012. From the third sector to the Big Society: consensus 

or contention in the 2010 UK General Election? Volunt. Sect. Rev. 3, 347–363.  
Alkon, A., 2014. Food Justice and the Challenge to Neoliberalism. Gastron. J. Food Cult. 

14, 27–40. 
Barnett, C., 2012. Situating the geographies of injustice in democratic theory. Geoforum 

43, 677–686.  
Barnett, C., 2011. Geography and ethics: Justice unbound. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 35, 246–

255.  

Bauman, Z., 2013. Liquid modernity. Jogn Wiley & Sons. 

Brotherton, A., Simmonds, N., Stroud, M., 2010. Malnutrition Matters Meeting Quality 

Standards in Nutritional Care [WWW Document]. Br. Assoc. Parenter. Enter. Nutr. 

(BAPEN ). URL http://www.bapen.org.uk/pdfs/toolkit-for-commissioners.pdf 

(accessed 8.19.14). 

Brunori, G., Malandrin, V., Rossi, A., 2013. Trade-off or convergence? The role of food 

security in the evolution of food discourse in Italy. J. Rural Stud. 29, 19–29.  
Buchanan, A., 2003. Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for 

International Law: Moral Foundations for International Law. Oxford University 

Press, Oxford. 

Cadieux, K., Slocum, R., 2015. What does it mean to do food justice. J. Polit. Ecol. 22, 1–
26. 

Candel, J.J.L., Breeman, G.E., Stiller, S.J., Termeer, C.J.A.M., 2014. Disentangling the 

consensus frame of food security: The case of the EU Common Agricultural Policy 

reform debate. Food Policy 44, 47–58. 
Clancy, K., 1994. Commentary social justice and sustainable agriculture: Moving beyond 

theory. Agric. Human Values 11, 77–83.  
Cohen, G., 2009. Rescuing justice and equality. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 

Massachusetts. 

Conversi, D., 2016. Sovereignty in a Changing World: From Westphalia to Food 

Sovereignty. Globalizations 13, 484–498. 
DEFRA, 2014a. Basic Horticultural Statistics 2014. London. 

DEFRA, 2014b. Food Statistics Pocketbook 2014. 

Department for Work and Pensions, 2014. Households below average income (HBAI): 

1994/95 to 2012/13. 

Elliot, C., 2014. Elliott Review into the Integrity and Assurance of Food Supply Networks 

. A national Food Crime Prevention Network, HM G. 

Entman, R., 1993. Framing: Towards clarification of a fractured paradigm. J. Commun. 

43, 51–58. 
European Commission, 2010. The EU Role in Global Health. COM(2010)128 final. 

Accessed 01/03/2017 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-

content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52010DC0128  



34 

 

FAO, 2002. The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2001. Rome. 

Ferguson, J., 2010. The Uses of Neoliberalism. Antipode 41, 166–184.  
Fraser, N., 2008. Scales of justice: Reimagining justice in a globalizing world. Polity, 

Cambridge. Fraser, N., . Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the  postsocialist  condition. 
Routledge, New York. 

Freibauer, A., Mathijs, E., O´Brien, L., Treyer, S., 2011. Sustainable Food Consumption 

and Production in a Resource-Contrained World (Report), European Commission – 
Standing Committee on Agricultural Research (SCAR). The 3rd SCAR Foresight 

Exercise . 

Garnett, T., Godfray, C., 2012. Sustainable intensification in agriculture. Navigating a 

course through competing food system priorities. 

Godfray HCJ, Beddington JR, Crute IR, et al. (2010) Food security: the challenge of 

feeding 9 billion people. Science 327(5967): 812–818. 
Gordon, D., Levitas, R., Pantazis, C., Patsios, D., Payne, S., Townsend, P., Adelman, L., 

Ashworth, K., Middleton, S., Bradshaw, J., Williams, J., 2000. Poverty and social 

exclusion in Britain, Joseph Rowntree Foundation. 

Gottlieb, R., Joshi, A., 2010. Food justice. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Gross, J., 2009. Capitalism and Its Discontents: Back-to-the-Lander and Freegan 

Foodways in Rural Oregon. Food Foodways 17, 57–79.  
Guthman, J., 2008. Bringing good food to others: investigating the subjects of alternative 

food practice. Cult. Geogr. 15, 431–447.  
Harvey, D., 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, USA, Oxford. 

Harvey, D., 1992. Social Justice, Postmodernism and the City. Int. J. Urban Reg. Res. 16, 

588–601.  
Herman, E.S. and Chomsky, N., 1988 Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of 

the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, USA.  

Heider, F., 1958. The psychology of interpersonal relations. Wiley, New York. 

Heynen, N., 2010. Cooking up non-violent civil-disobedient direct action for the hungry: Food Not Bombs  and the resurgence of radical democracy in the US. Urban 
Stud. 47, 1225–1240. 

Holt Gimenez, E., Shattuck, A., 2011. Food crises, food regimes and food movements: 

rumblings of reform or tides of transformation? J. Peasant Stud. 38, 109–144. (opma J and Woods M  Political Geographies of Food Security  and Food Sovereignty . Geography Compass 8(11): 773–784.  
HSE, 2013. Health Survey for England - 2012. (mr) Web Master, United Kingdom. 

Iyengar, S., 1994. Is Anyone Responsible?: How Television Frames Political Issues. 

University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. 

Jarosz, L., 2014. Comparing food security and food sovereignty discourses. Dialogues 



35 

 

Hum. Geogr. 4, 168–181.  
Johnston, J., 2008. The citizen-consumer hybrid: ideological tensions and the case of 

Whole Foods Market. Theory Soc. 37, 229–270. doi:10.1007/s11186-007-9058-5 
Kirwan, J., Maye, D., 2013. Food security framings within the UK and the integration of 

local food systems. J. Rural Stud. 29, 91–100.  
Kneafsey, M., Dowler, E., Lambie-Mumford, H., Inman, A., Collier, R., 2013. Consumers 

and food security: Uncertain or empowered? J. Rural Stud. 29, 101–112.  
Lambie-Mumford, H.., Crossley, D., Jensen, E., Verbeke, M., Dowler, E., 2014. Household 

Food Security in the UK: A Review of Food Aid [WWW Document]. Dep. Environ. 

Food Rural Aff. URL 

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file

/283071/household-food-security-uk-140219.pdf (accessed 12.16.14). 

Lang T and Barling D (2012) Food security and food sustainability: reformulating the 

debate. The Geographical Journal 178(4): 313–326.  
Little, J., Austin, P., 1996. Women and the rural idyll. J. Rural Stud. 12, 101–111. 
Loo, C., 2014. Towards a More Participative Definition of Food Justice. J. Agric. Environ. 

Ethics 27, 787–809. 
MacMillan, T., Dowler, E., 2012. Just and sustainable? Examining the rhetoric and 

potential realities of UK food security. J. Agric. Environ. ethics 1–24. 
Marsden, T., 2013. From post-productionism to reflexive governance: Contested 

transitions in securing more sustainable food futures. J. Rural Stud. 29, 123–134.  
Martinez-Alier, J., 2014. The environmentalism of the poor. Geoforum 54, 239–241.  
Miller, D., 2008. National responsibility and global justice. Crit. Rev. Int. Soc. Polit. Philos. 

11, 383–399.  
Minkoff-Zern, L.-A., 2014. Subsidizing farmworker hunger: Food assistance programs 

and the social reproduction of California farm labor. Geoforum 57, 91–98.  
Misselhorn A, Aggarwal P, Ericksen P, et al. (2012) A vision for attaining food security. 

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 4(1): 7–17.  
Mooney, P.H., Hunt, S.A., 2009. Food Security: The Elaboration of Contested Claims to a 

Consensus Frame*. Rural Sociol. 74, 469–497. 
Moragues-Faus, A., 2016. Emancipatory or neoliberal food politics? Exploring the politics of collectivity  of buying groups in the search for egalitarian food 

democracies. Antipode 49: 455–476 . 
Moragues-Faus, A., Morgan, K., 2015. Reframing the foodscape: the emergent world of 

urban food policy. Environ. Plan. A 47, 1558–1573.  
Murdoch, J., Lowe, P., Ward, N., Marsden, T., 2003. The Differentiated Countryside. 

Routledge , London. 

Nally, D., 2014. Governing precarious lives: land grabs, geopolitics, and food security.  
Geogr. J. n/a-n/a.  

Nelson, T., Clawson, R.A., Oxley, Z.M., 1997. Media framing of a civil liberties conflict and 



36 

 

its effect on tolerance. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 91, 567–583. 
Nussbaum, M., 2003. CAPABILITIES AS FUNDAMENTAL ENTITLEMENTS: SEN AND 

SOCIAL JUSTICE. Fem. Econ. 9, 33–59.  O Connor, J., . Natural causes: Essays in ecological Marxism. Guilford Press, New 
York. 

Okereke, C., 2007. Global justice and neoliberal environmental governance: ethics, 

sustainable development and international co-operation. Routledge, London; New 

York. 

Oxfam and Church Action, 2013. Walking the Breadline: The scandal of food poverty in 

21st-century Britain. 

Oxfam, 2013. The Power of People against Poverty. Accessed 01/03/2017 

https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/oxfam-strategic-plan-2013-

2019.pdf  

Pan, Z., Kosicki, G., 1993. Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse. Polit. 

Commun. 10, 55–75.  
Pogge, T., 2002. Moral universalism and global economic justice, in: World Poverty and 

Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms. Polity Press, 

Cambridge, pp. 91–117. 
Rawls, J., 1999. The Law of Peoples. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 

Massachusetts. 

Rawls, J., 1971. A theory of justice. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. 

Sampei, Y., Aoyagi-Usui, M., 2009. Mass-media coverage, its influence on public 

awareness of climate-change issues, and implications for Japan s national campaign 
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Glob. Environ. Chang. 19, 203–212.  

Sbicca, J., 2012. Growing food justice by planting an anti-oppression foundation: 

opportunities and obstacles for a budding social movement. Agric. Human Values 

29, 455–466.  
Sen, A., 2009. The idea of justice. Harvard University Press, Harvard. 

Sikor, T., Newell, P., 2014. Globalizing environmental justice? Geoforum 54, 151–157.  
Singer, P., 1993. Practical Ethics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 

Smith, D.M., 2000. Social justice revisited. Environ. Plan. A 32, 1149–1162. 
doi:10.1068/a3258 

Sonnino, R., Marsden, T., Moragues-Faus, A., 2016. Relationalities and convergences in 

food security narratives: towards a place-based approach. Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. 

41: 477–489  
Sonnino, R., Moragues-Faus, A., Maggio, A., 2014. Sustainable Food Security: An 

Emerging Research and Policy Agenda. Int. J. Sociol. Agric. Food 21, 173–188. 
Unger, P., 1996. Living high and letting die: Our illusion of innocence. Oxford University 

Press, New York. 

Walker, P.A., 2006. Political ecology: where is the policy? Prog. Hum. Geogr. 30, 382–



37 

 

395. 

Wells, R., Caraher, M., 2014. UK print media coverage of the food bank phenomenon: 

from food welfare to food charity? Br. Food J. 116, 1426–1445. 
Young, I., 2011. Responsibility for Justice. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 

Young, I., 2007. Global Challenges: War, Self- determination and Responsibility. Polity 

Press, Cambridge. 

Young, I., 2006. Responsibility and global justice: A social connection model. Soc. Philos. 

Policy. 

Young, I.M., 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University press, 

Princeton.