FELS Inaugural Lecture with Professor Dianna Smith Event
- Time:
- 3:30pm
- Date:
- 2025-06-18 15:30:00
- Venue:
- National Oceanography Centre, Southampton
Event details
This was the second Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences Inaugural Lecture in a series that celebrates the careers of our newly appointed Professors. At our event on Wednesday 18 June 2025, Professor Dianna Smith from the School of Geography and Environmental Science and Professor Clive Trueman from the School of Ocean and Earth Science presented their research.
Watch the lecture video
Professor Dianna Smith -Â Food aid and fish fingers: towards a fairer food system
See Professor Clive Trueman's lecture here
Watch all the Inaugural Lecture videos from 2025
Professor Dianna Smith
Food aid and fish fingers: towards a fairer food system
We all need to eat, yet for some people making the daily decisions about what’s for dinner is more challenging because of limited budgets or few choices. Sometimes, there might only be a local corner shop where prices are much higher with less fresh food. These barriers mean that more people are in food poverty and may need help from food aid, like food banks, to get enough to eat.
Some of the food available through food aid is ‘surplus’ (food waste) and would be thrown away by supermarkets or producers. King Charles promoted the importance of dealing with both food waste and food poverty by linking up efforts to get surplus food to food aid. Is this a workable option, or does it lead to a postcode lottery for support?
Professor Smith shares her obsession with food prices (starting with fish fingers) food deserts, and the fairness of our food system, including food aid. Building on work with food charities and local government, she reflects on how we can work together across sectors to develop more equitable food options for everyone.
Biography
Professor Smith specialises in health inequalities, particularly those linked to where people live and their diet. She uses a range of methods from spatial microsimulation to surveys and interviews to understand the range of influences on population and individual health.
During her PhD at the University of Leeds and subsequent MRC postdoctoral fellowship, she modelled the health impacts of local food environments. However, her interest in food price inequalities dates to 2003 and her MSc at Oregon State University.
She moved to Southampton in 2015 to take up a Lectureship and was able to develop research projects in collaboration with local government and third sector organisations, supported by Public Policy|Southampton. In 2016 she first published a neighbourhood level risk measure for food poverty in England. These data and maps are now updated annually and used extensively by local authorities to target interventions such as food aid. Recent NHIR ARC funded research has evaluated the impact of food aid on diet quality, health and wellbeing.
She is deputy director of ESRC’s National Centre for Research Methods and co-Director of Centre for the South, a policy think tank which addresses the University’s civic agenda through knowledge exchange and academic engagement to inform place-based decision making. She is a trustee of Citizens Advice New Forest.