The vital politics of foodbanking: Hunger, austerity, biopower (original) (raw)

The geographies of food banks in the meantime

Geographies of food banks have focused predominantly on issues of neoliberal political-economy and food insecurity. In this paper, we trace alternative understandings of food banking – as spaces of care, and as liminal spaces of encounter capable of incubating political and ethical values, practices and subjectivities that challenge neoliberal austerity. Our aim is to develop a conceptual approach to voluntary welfare capable both of holding in tension the ambivalent and contradictory dynamics of care and welfare in the meantime(s), and of underlining some of the more hopeful and progressive possibilities that can arise in and through such spaces of care.

Contested space: the contradictory political dynamics of food banking in the UK

This paper offers a critical reappraisal of the politics of food banking in the UK. Existing work has raised concerns about the institutionalisation of food banks, with charitable assistance apparently – even if inadvertently – undermining collectivist welfare and deflecting attention from fundamental injustices in the food system. This paper presents original ethnographic work that examines the neglected politics articulated within food banks themselves. Conceptualising food banks as potential spaces of encounter where predominantly middle-class volunteers come into contact with ‘poor others’ (Lawson and Elwood, 2013), we illustrate the ways food banks may both reinforce but also rework and generate new, ethical and political attitudes, beliefs and identities. We also draw attention to the limits of these progressive possibilities and examine the ways in which some food banks continue to operate within a set of highly restrictive, and stigmatising, welfare technologies. By highlighting the contradictory dynamics at work in food bank organisations, and among food bank volunteers and clients, we suggest the political role of food banks warrants neither uncritical celebration nor outright dismissal. Rather, food banks represent a highly ambiguous political space still in the making and open to contestation.

Feeding the debate: a local food bank explains itself

Voluntary Sector Review, 2015

The increasing prevalence of food banks in the United Kingdom has attracted considerable public debate. This article brings the authors’ experiences and observations from their involvement in one inner-city food bank into dialogue with both policy issues and the Christian theology that motivates many food bank volunteers. It argues for an attentiveness to what food banks say to society as well as what they do, and highlights their potential as spaces of encounter and mutuality.

The ethical dilemmas of foodbanking: an analysis of the More Than Food programme

Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 2021

This article contributes to debates about the ethicality of foodbanks, a pervasive element of the UK welfare support infrastructure. Drawing on qualitative interview data, we use the concepts of ‘food poverty knowledge’ and ‘lay morality’ to analyse the narratives of those running a major Trussell Trust ‘foodbank-plus’ programme and explore inherent moral sentiments therein about how those who are in food poverty are understood. We identify a contradiction between foodbankers’ ‘structural’ understanding of poverty and the implicitly agential assumptions that underpin the programme. We suggest that this represents a precarious ethical position on which to base practice.

Food banks, actually existing austerity and the localisation of responsibility

Geoforum, 2018

This paper contributes to emerging geographical literature on what is here conceptualised as 'actually existing austerity'-referring to the uneven ways through which austerity is felt, negotiated, embodied and contested in the varied spatial tapestry of everyday life. Through theorisation of the contemporary operation of food banking in the UK, it will be argued that the gaps in provisioning (in this case, of food) left by welfare reform and state spending cuts in the UK under the guise of austerity are engendering new forms of responsibility that are unevenly distributed and performed-often by those already excluded, marginalised and impoverished. This localisation of responsibility has crucial implications for how austerity becomes embodied and negotiated, as well as the unequal material implications it holds for different people and places. This paper concludes by arguing for a future research agenda concerning actually existing austerity, signalling the need for 'thicker' and more grounded accounts of austerity at scales beyond the nation-state and/or city alone.

The Hunger Games: Food poverty and politics in the UK

This 'Behind the News' intervention offers a critique of food aid provision in the UK through two distinct and yet interconnected perspectives. First, it situates the crisis of food poverty within a wider social and historic context, and second, it questions the position and response of the capitalist state to this growing crisis. The piece weaves the two perspectives together, reflecting on the current government's struggle to recognise, accept or address the significance of this crisis.

A genealogy of the food bank: Historicising the rise of food charity in the UK

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

It is widely supposed that food banks and key aspects of the UK’s wider food banking system – referral networks, eligibility tests, food vouchers, corporate sponsorship and the close entanglement of food charity with local and national government – are new to the UK, either imported from North America or emerging ex nihilio with the Trussell Trust in the early 2000s. Drawing on local and national newspaper archives and data from Companies House, the Charity Commission and internet archiving website the WayBack Machine, we present a genealogy that challenges these origins and situates UK food banking in a set of historically contingent practices, alliances and struggles many of which are nowadays forgotten. Contributing to work on policy mobilities in the voluntary sector, we pay particular attention to the development of the UK’s contemporary food banking system through the movement of ideas and practices between different organisations (for example, between food banks, corporate food retailers and US tech companies) and different charitable fields (including overseas aid and homelessness), between the charitable sector and the state, and between different places both within and outside the UK. The resulting genealogy not only extends, and reframes, the history of British food banking – including claims as to the recent institutionalisation of food banks in a neoliberal state welfare apparatus – but works to disrupt the rationalities and ‘regime(s) of acceptability’ that underpin and maintain the modus operandi of many current-day food banks.

A British national scandal: hunger, foodbanks, and the deployment of a Dickensian trope

Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 2020

The normalization of foodbanks in Britain has polarized public debates around issues of hunger. Government supporters laud foodbanks as a timely revival of an earlier tradition of voluntarism or stigmatize foodbanks as new spaces of 'dependency' and 'scrounging'. Critics view them as a consequence of ministerial indifference to growing hunger, a dereliction of a duty of care to those in need and a betrayal of the core values of the welfare state. The very presence of foodbanks in one of the richest countries in the world is denounced as a national scandal, a violation of some intrinsic quality of Britishness signifying a regression to an earlier more heartless era. In mooting this argument, critics have deployed a Victorian trope that evoked familiar figures and narratives from popular culture in a circular social imaginary of 'what we were' in the Victorian era as distinct from 'what we have been' in the postwar welfare state to 'what we are reverting to' now. The paper critically deconstructs the trope as a device to hold government policies to account while also critiquing a nostalgia rooted in a mythic notion of the welfare state which was never as unifying or inclusive as people would believe.