A systematic review of literature regarding food insecurity in Sweden

Abstract

Food insecurity is not a term that is traditionally utilized in relation to Sweden, which has a well-established welfare state. In fact, the discussion around this issue appears to be predicated on the notion that it is a concept existing outside the country. However, European countries are in no way immune to the issue of food insecurity. The Food and Agricultural Organisation to the United Nations holds data on the levels of food insecurity gathered from the Gallup poll and this indicated increasing levels of moderate-tosevere insecurity among the population. This indicated a need to review the research and literature on food insecurity in Sweden. This was carried out using two of the largest databases SCOPUS and Public/Publisher MED-LINE (PubMed) as well as a search for gray data using Google Scholar. Following backward and forward searches, in total only five articles were deemed relevant for inclusion. These were discussed and show very limited analysis of the issue, with their connection to food insecurity in Sweden being either abstract or unfocussed on the issue directly. This demonstrates a fundamental gap in this area of research and leaves open questions as to why this is the case.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.