Coining the concept of “lived and living experience”, Dominic Watters is developing a methodological and ethical challenge to how food poverty is currently understood across research, policy and practice. Supported by the AFN Network+ Stakeholder FlexFund, this work moves beyond extractive or representational models of engagement, instead centring knowledge generated within communities experiencing food insecurity as it unfolds.

The project has taken multiple forms, including mapping academic and policy literature, contributing to national food system discussions, and developing a toolkit to support more meaningful inclusion of living experience within research and decision-making spaces.

A key output — presented at the AFN Network+ Big Tent — is a visual redefinition of food insecurity, structured around four photographs taken within Watters’ own council estate. Significantly, none of the images depict food. Instead, they capture the infrastructures that shape food access: an estate shop dominated by ultra-processed products, a prepayment energy meter that restricts the ability to cook raw ingredients, limited transport connectivity, and a wider environment where access to nutrition is systematically overlooked. Together, these images reframe food insecurity as a spatial and structural condition, rather than solely an issue of individual consumption.

This work is closely connected to Watters’ community-rooted initiative, Food is Care CIC, which is developing responses to food inequality from within the estate itself. Bringing together social work, community research and lived realities, Food is Care positions care not as a service delivered to communities, but as something generated through them.

Watters’ perspective is shaped by his dual position as a trained social worker and as someone living through food poverty. This positioning allows him to identify gaps in how institutions engage with inequality, particularly the tendency to prioritise professional or policy-led knowledge over insights grounded in everyday experience. As he reflects in The British Journal of Social Work:

Rather than positioning lived experience as anecdotal or supplementary, this work argues for its recognition as a critical form of expertise. In doing so, it highlights how current approaches to food system transformation risk reproducing the very exclusions they seek to address.

As discussions around food system resilience and net zero continue to expand, Watters’ work offers a clear provocation: that those most affected by food insecurity must not only be included, but recognised as central to how solutions are defined, understood and enacted.