This project helps us understand what the right to food looks like for families living in Scotland, and how we’ll know if we’re making progress. It starts by exploring what people in Scotland would choose as a healthy and enjoyable way to eat so that rights holders and decision makers can better identify how to make this accessible for all.

In 2021, we worked with groups of Community Advisors to explore what families in Scotland today would choose to eat if income from work and benefits was sufficient. Together, we co-created weekly shopping lists that take into account the realities of people’s lives and preferences, while aiming for a ‘good enough’ fit with current dietary recommendations. These shopping lists are based on detailed work to imagine four case study families and are tools for measuring progress locally and nationally.

In 2022, we are working with partners across Scotland to explore, compare and make sense of how the availability and price of these foods differ within and between local authority areas. For more information or to get involved, read on below.

Our Right To Food: Pakistani households in Scotland

There is not one version of this healthy, sustainable and culturally appropriate diet in Scotland. There are many. We can’t track the right to food if we don’t ask people what a culturally valued diet means to them.

In 2024, we tested the ORTF approach with one of Scotland’s biggest food cultures: Pakistani. We worked with a group of 12 Pakistani women living in Glasgow to understand what a culturally valued, healthy enough way of doing food looks like.

We co-created a persona household that would be ‘recognisable’ to Pakistani households in Glasgow and then worked through a typical week of preparing and eating food. This was translated into a typical shopping basket which can be used as a tool to understand and measure the right to food.