Zahra Mulla

Profile

More Than Hunger: Understanding Childhood Food Insecurity and Health Inequalities through Lived Experience and Culture in East London

In 2023/24, 7.5 million people across the UK were identified as food insecure with food bank use increasing by 89% (Commons Briefing 2025). London presents striking health inequalities, with children in East London experiencing the highest levels of inadequate food access, and around one third of children in the borough of Newham being food insecure. Local variations in food insecurity provide a tool for exploring the global challenge of urban food insecurity — shaped by culture, austerity, and social policy — and how it affects child development. Food insecurity has profound implications for physical and mental health. Poor access to nutritious food can lead to malnutrition, obesity, anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal, making children less likely to do well academically and reinforcing cycles of disadvantage. Understanding how food insecurity affects cognition, particularly attention and memory, alongside mental health and social functioning is therefore critical for developing equitable interventions. East London, marked by ethnic diversity, gentrification, and uneven access to healthy affordable food, offers a window into the complex environment within which families navigate food insecurity.

This project will: 1) Bring together what is known about how food insecurity affects children’s cognition, mental health, and social skills; 2 )Use validated questionnaires and tasks to understand how much food children have access to, and to measure their cognition, mental health, and their social skills using computer tasks; 3) Complete a pilot study to evaluate how well “breakfast clubs" 
are working; 4) Hold focus groups and run creative art-based workshops to learn about their experiences with food and their hopes for the future.

Research