Lessons from Scotland: What a Dignity-Based Approach to Food Insecurity Can Teach the U.S.
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March 18, 2026
By Alysia Jimenez, MSc Food Security (LinkedIn)
In the United States, food insecurity is often addressed through a vast network of food banks, pantries, and charitable meal programs. These services matter. They alleviate hunger and provide critical relief in moments of crisis.
Yet, service-based models have limits. Emergency food systems are inescapably fragile, reactive, and dependent on surplus and philanthropy. Moreover, these approaches are largely ineffective at ending chronic food insecurity for millions of people. After more than 50 years, research shows that household food insecurity across the U.S. has continued to grow, despite one of the most extensive charitable food systems in the world. This persistent trend highlights the need to explore more structural solutions.
Following the financial crisis of 2008, the United Kingdom came to rely on food banks as an established mechanism for responding to the persistent issue of food insecurity. For more than a decade however, Scotland’s policy and third-sector networks have sought to counter this rise by increasingly embracing frameworks grounded in dignity, moving their approach beyond traditional emergency food provisioning and towards more right-based approaches. In this way, Scotland acts as a leading case-study for how people can use dignity as a way to engage with rights-centered values that transform policy and practice.
The Scottish Context
In 2016, following reports from civil society organizations about a sharp increase in food bank prevalence across the United Kingdom, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR) recommended that the government take action to ‘address food insecurity in all its jurisdictions’.
Using the CESCR recommendations, local advocates in Scotland were able to encourage the Scottish Government to establish an Independent Working Group on Food Poverty, whose final report outlined a set of ‘Dignity Principles’ designed to guide policy, funding, and practical responses to food insecurity in Scotland.
Since 2016, Nourish Scotland and the Poverty Truth Community have used these principles to work with community food organizations and local governments through the Dignity in Practice Project. Members of the Dignity Project’s Peer Network are engaged in community-based food initiatives including: food pantries, community gardens, shared meal providers, and other grassroots organizations addressing food insecurity at the local level (see examples).
As a case study, the Dignity in Practice Project outlines a real-world example where “dignity” operates not merely as a normative value but as a strategic principle re-shaping community practice, organizational culture, policy, and system design.
Lessons from the Dignity Project
The use of Dignity Principles in Practice by community organizations underpins a shift from food charity towards participation and empowerment, positioning people as decision-makers rather than passive recipients and embedding choice and participation within everyday interactions.
Through the Dignity in Practice Project, community-based organizations were able to engage in structured reflection, peer learning, and training to translate principles into practice. These changes included:
expanding and adjusting service hours to better align with the schedules of those accessing services,
adopting client-choice food pantry models, and
strengthening services that connect individuals to additional support resources.
Additionally, Nourish Scotland, alongside other partners in the A Menu for Change project, developed the first ‘cash-first leaflet’ to strengthen access to existing financial advice and local support resources. Cash-first approaches address the financial crisis underlying household food insecurity, as well as the systemic challenges that leave so many people in precarious financial situations. The leaflet has since been adapted for use in 135 local authority areas across the UK, with support from the Independent Food Aid Network.
Building on these practical initiatives, the cash-first approach was formalized within the Scottish Government’s 2023 anti-hunger strategy: Cash-First: Towards Ending the Need for Food Banks in Scotland. This prioritization of fair income, social security programs, and financial advice over food aid reflects the choice and dignity values inherent to right-based frameworks.
Dignity values were also legitimized in national legislation through the Good Food Nation Act (2022), which reframed access to good food as a matter of public responsibility. Functionally, the Act requires national and local governments to develop coordinated food plans and report on progress towards improving the food system. By institutionalizing these responsibilities in local and regional government planning, the Act embeds values used throughout the Dignity Project within the structural frameworks of Scotland’s entire food system.
Why This Matters for U.S. Advocates
For food advocates in the United States, Scotland is not a blueprint to replicate but a proof of concept. Recent threats and cuts to our most effective anti-hunger program (i.e. the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)) have undermined an important entitlement in the U.S. and affected the realization of our right to food. When concern about the increasing prevalence of food pantries was raised as a matter of human rights in Scotland, the government responded by exploring longer-term solutions to food insecurity.
The Dignity in Practice Project provides us with a straightforward theory: when dignity is embedded in how organizations talk about and deliver food support, people experiencing food insecurity gain greater agency, choice, and participation. The focus moves from counting the number of people fed or pounds of food distributed, and towards the wider question of how communities and governments can work together to ensure that everyone has the means to access the food they need - with choice and agency.
The question for the U.S. is not whether we value dignity, but whether we have the political and institutional will to translate that value into durable systems. Scotland shows us that the uptake of dignity cannot be an isolated organizational effort, but requires a sector-wide collaboration grounded in shared principles that shape language, decision-making, and power.
In the United States, translating dignity into practice requires strengthening the role that state and local governments play while acknowledging the limits of emergency food systems. Advocates can prioritize cash-first approaches by seeking to expand household income supports such as tax credits, pursuing guaranteed income programs, and by reducing administrative burdens that limit access to food access programs. Just as importantly, the U.S. can also pursue avenues that treat food as a component of health and engage with nutrition programs and public health agencies and care systems.
Reflections on Dignity: Shifting Practice and Values
The dignity approach is not without challenges. Advancing dignity requires participants to define clear metrics and commit to consistent evaluation. Without strong enforcement mechanisms, commitments may lack accountability, be inconsistently applied, or fail to translate into actual change.
At the same time, these challenges reflect the ambition of the work itself.
Prioritizing dignity requires food security actors to engage with right to food considerations and meaningfully pursue broader concepts like adequacy (the quality of food people are able to access) and sustainability (of the food we produce in the first place).
The progress seen through this case study has challenged conventional food security frameworks. Centered around availability, access, utilization, and stability, food security work has long been guided by the assumption that food insecurity is the direct result of scarcity. Consequently, this model has prioritized improving food production, distribution, and trade, while overlooking the inequities that continuously restrict an individual’s ability to exercise agency around their own food choices.
The Dignity in Practice Project has helped challenge this conventional framing by advancing the implementation of dignity and rights-based approaches. In doing so, it has acted as a transformative force, pushing food security concepts to expand and encouraging practitioners and advocates to rethink how programs are designed and evaluated. The Dignity in Practice Project therefore provides an important reference point for how language and practice shifts can drive broader conceptual change towards a food system more firmly rooted in dignity and rights.
Alysia Jimenez holds an MSc in Food Security from the University of Edinburgh. Her research examined how agency and dignity concepts are reshaping food security frameworks. Alongside her dissertation, she produced a report examining Nourish Scotland’s role in Scotland’s shift toward a rights-based and participatory food system, later submitted to the Scottish Government. Alysia presented her findings as a guest speaker at our Community of Practice monthly meeting in January 2026.