Feeding Recovery is an Alcohol Change UK project that is about more than alcohol. It is about the poor nutrition and social isolation that often go hand-in-hand with alcohol problems; and about how connecting with others around food can promote wellbeing and reduce harm. It offers a model for services supporting people facing a range of challenges and obstacles in their lives, not just alcohol issues. In this document we have tried to use language that is clear and understandable, and that avoids blaming or stigmatising anyone. In particular, we have not used the terms “alcohol misuse” or “alcohol abuse” unless we are directly quoting others. As the Scottish Drugs Forum have noted, the terms “misuse” and “abuse” can be “judgemental, moralistic and inaccurate” and suggest that the use of alcohol or any other drug by some people is “wholly distinct from other people’s use of the same substance”.

We also know that services sometimes struggle to find the best words to describe the people they support. They seek to avoid terms that define people by the problems in their lives – such as “addicts” or “alcoholics”; but more recent terms like “clients” and “service-users” don’t always feel quite right. This has in turn led to the use of “people-first language”, such as “people who use alcohol”; although this can lead to longwinded terms which then get shortened into acronyms, thereby undermining the original intention. Given that Feeding Recovery is a project with hospitality at its heart, we have referred in this handbook to the people accessing the services at the two project sites as “guests”. That said, any advice about terminology has to come with one big caveat: people must be free to talk about their own lives in their own words. That may include terms and statements that practitioners consider self-stigmatising but which people feel comfortable with, or even empowered by, using about themselves.