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Food and Nutrition
This page contains information for homelessness services about food and nutrition. Like many people experiencing poverty, homeless people can find it difficult to maintain a healthy and adequate diet but good nutrition can make a significant difference to everyone's physical and mental health and overall well-being.
Lunch is served at a Liverpool day centre
The Issues
Food and homelessness services
Many homelessness services, including hostels, day centres and soup runs, provide food for homeless people. For these services, accessing fresh and nutritious food with limited resources is a constant challenge.
Nutrition and Health
Sustain, "the alliance for better food and farming", has project on food and mental health. In January 2006, it published its first report, Changing Diets, Changing Minds: how food affects mental well being and behaviour in partnership with the Mental Health Foundation. The Sustain site also includes a search function, which can be used to find projects reaching homeless people.
The Mental Health Foundation has also also published its own research Feeding Minds on the issue of nutrition and mental health, as well as mental health related nutritional guidance.
Natural Justice is a research charity that specialises in trying to find out what causes anti-social and criminal behaviour. It says that its research has shown that good nutrition has a positive effect on behaviour.
Food and nutrition as lifeskills
Being able to buy and cook nutritious and health food on a limited budget is also one of the key lifeskills that many homeless people need to acquire or re-learn in order to live independently.
Further Resources
Fareshare is a Homeless Link member organisation that distributes surplus food to homeless people and homelessness services. Summary of Fareshare National Impact Survey 2005