Recent reporting by Patrick Butler for The Guardian on rural food deserts highlighted how lower-income families in Britain’s countryside are increasingly cut off from affordable, healthy food by disappearing shops and weak transport links. Research led by Megan Blake at the University of Sheffield showed how food insecurity can persist even within regions strongly associated with farming and food production.  

That contradiction feels deeply familiar to me.  

I live on a council estate in Kent, often described as the “Garden of England”. My city was recently ranked among the best small cities to visit in Britain. It has independent cafés, farmers’ markets, and the image of abundance associated with heritage and tourism.  

But the reality outside my window looks very different.  

In the shop on my estate - where I have raised my amazing daughter as a single dad – you can buy blueberry-flavoured vapes, blueberry-branded energy drinks, and blueberry vodka, but not fresh blueberries.  

That detail matters because it captures something fundamental about how food inequality is lived day to day within many council estate food environments. “Blueberry” exists here as a flavour, colour, and marketing tool, but not as nourishment.  

I live in what policymakers often describe as a “food desert”. But in practice, that means something very concrete: daily choices are constrained before they are even made. Ultra-processed foods are cheap, visible, and plentiful. Fresh, nutritious food is scarce, expensive, or absent altogether. 

Dominic Watters with Jamie Oliver and Sharon Hodgson MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

This environment is not neutral. It shapes health, stress, confidence, and who is able to participate fully in society. Rates of obesity are significantly higher in communities like mine, yet this is still too often framed as a problem of individual behaviour or “poor choices”.  

When the food environment offers flavour without nutrition, stimulation without sustenance, and branding without care, those choices are already structured by inequality.  

What has struck me most through my ongoing PhD research in Geography is how recognisable these environments remain across very different parts of England. From estates in Kent to estates in Lincoln within the “breadbasket of Britain”, similar patterns emerge: convenience stores dominated by ultra-processed products, fragile transport links, rising energy pressures, and fresh food increasingly difficult to access consistently.  

These are places surrounded by agriculture and national narratives of plenty, yet many families living within them remain nutritionally excluded from the very food systems around them.  

Food insecurity exists in the shadow of abundance. 

I first shared the insight that “you can get blueberry vapes, but you can’t get blueberries” during a conversation on food inequality with Jamie Oliver and the Minister for Public Health, Sharon Hodgson. Since then, the phrase has travelled widely through discussions around obesity, school food, ultra-processed foods, and healthy food environments.  

But there is also something important in how these insights travel. Too often, phrases and observations drawn from communities like mine become detached from the voices and realities that produced them - repeated as compelling illustrations of inequality while the people still living those conditions remain socially and politically distant from the conversations shaping change.  

That is why initiatives like the Citizen Advisory Council – a group of diverse citizens who are helping to develop the government's Good Food Cycle – matter. Through the work supported by the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission and The Food Foundation, there are important attempts being made not simply to “include” lived experience, but to reconnect policy conversations with the people and communities navigating these realities every day.  

Over time, I began documenting these realities visually through what became my Four Visual Pillars: Redefining Food Insecurity framework, first published in The Food Foundation’s Broken Plate report in 2025. The images focus not on food itself, but on the wider structures shaping food insecurity: housing, convenience retail, energy, and transport. 

A convenience store in Dominic’s council estate

Making these environments visible is itself a form of challenge.  

Communities like mine are often discussed politically, academically, and publicly while remaining socially unseen - forgotten people in forgotten places. There can be discomfort when realities from within council estates become visible on their own terms rather than interpreted from a distance.  

The challenge is no longer simply whether poverty is spoken about, but who gets to speak, and what happens when communities long spoken about begin speaking back.  

As a researcher, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with how “lived experience” is sometimes treated as something that can be gathered, summarised, and redeployed once the person speaking is no longer in the room.  

I describe my approach instead as living experience: knowledge produced not after hardship has passed, but while it is still being navigated and endured.  

Recent debates around food-system resilience, including warnings from scholars such as Tim Lang (2026) about geopolitical instability and supply-chain vulnerability, are important and necessary. But from within many council estate convenience-store food environments, crisis is not experienced as a future possibility triggered by war or disruption.  

It is already part of everyday life.  

Communities like mine are often treated as peripheral to Britain’s food system. In reality, they are where many of the system’s deepest contradictions become visible first.  

If we are serious about addressing food inequality and health disparities, then repeating compelling lines is not enough. We need to change food environments themselves. We need to recognise living experience as knowledge in its own right. And we need to ensure that the people living these realities are respected not simply as case studies, but as contributors helping shape the future of Britain’s food system. 

My quote about blueberries travelled further than the conditions it described ever changed. The shop on my estate still does not sell fresh blueberries.  

Until fresh blueberries are as available as blueberry-flavoured products in communities like mine, the problem is no longer talking.  

It is action. 

Dominic Watters is a PhD researcher in Geography at the University of Southampton, founder of Food is Care CIC, and a member of the Citizen Advisory Council. For more information about his work, visit foodiscare.org.uk