The ethical dilemmas of foodbanking: an analysis of the More Than Food programme (original) (raw)

The moral maze of food bank use

Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 2020

The foodbank symbolises a changing landscape of social insecurity and welfare conditionality. Attending to decision making within the foodbank system, this article argues that foodbanks, and their referral-system creates a bureaucratic ‘moral maze’ identifying people as ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ of help. Maintaining a moral distance, organised religious foodbanks are reliant upon a complex outsourcing of moral decisions and walk a fine balance between supply (donations) and demand (use). Within this article, we argue that the foodbank landscape is akin to navigating a moral maze, and that this creates, and justifies decisions of deservingness.

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 vital politics of foodbanking: Hunger, austerity, biopower

Political Geography, 2019

This paper develops a Foucauldian reading of the phenomenon of UK foodbanking. Rather than providing straightforward subsistence, Trussell Trust foodbanks exercise a vital politics that acts over hungry bodies at a time of austerity. Through conceptualisation of the vital technologies of biopower, this article draws attention to the three underpinning logics of this system: interpretation, provisioning and improvement. These techniques reveal a power over life that not only seeks to provide subsistence, but to transform hunger into a technical object through which needy bodies can be improved out of existence. However, this paper also highlights the limits of this biopolitical and disciplinary system by drawing attention to its scalar politics, specifically emphasising the everyday power of living that undermine techniques over the vital life of bodies and populations. In so doing, this paper calls for more sustained attention to how the politics of life is lived and lively, situated and multi-scalar, through conceptualisation of its vital geographies.

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.

Welfare convergence, bureaucracy, and moral distancing at the food bank

Antipode, 2019

This paper seeks to extend geographic thinking on the changing constitution of the UK welfare state, suggesting the need to supplement ideas of the “shadow state” with an analysis of the blurring of the bureaucratic practices through which welfare is now delivered by public, private and third sector providers alike. Focusing on the growing convergence of the bureaucratic practices of benefits officials and food bank organisations, we interrogate the production of moral distance that characterise both. We reveal the ideological values embedded in voucher and referral systems used by many food banks, and the ways in which these systems further stigmatise and exclude people in need of support. Contrasting these practices with those of a variety of “ethical insurgents”, we suggest that food banks are sites of both the further cementing and of challenge to the injustices of Britain's new welfare apparatus.

Why do people use food banks? A qualitative study of food bank users in an English city

Voluntary Sector Review, 2018

The rise in the use of food banks has renewed debate about the extent of poverty and the adequacy of welfare provision. We conducted interviews with 25 food bank users in Bristol, England, finding that benefit penalties and precarious employment were implicated in food bank uptake, but that usage was more complicated than being an unmediated response to hunger. Food banks provided informal support for people on a low income to manage their food expenditure as well as meeting dietary needs. Some reported shame at needing the food bank, but others suggested that the informality and flexibility of food banks were preferable to some forms of state welfare.

Ways to care: Forms and possibilities of compassion within UK food banks

The Sociological Review, 2021

Food banks are organisations which occupy an uncomfortable position, being seen both as a manifestation of caring communities as well as an undesirable feature of neoliberal government. By focusing on the encounters between volunteers and food bank users within these organisations, we excavate their caring side to find three forms of compassion: compassion ‘for’, compassion ‘with’ and compassion ‘within’. We show that while compassion ‘for’ can lead to countless selfless acts, it remains embedded within neoliberal discourses. This can serve to reinforce distance and inequalities between giver (volunteer) and receiver (food bank user), creating a chain of indebtedness as compassion becomes part of a transactional exchange offered to those seen as worthy. Compassion ‘with’ others focuses on the person rather than the problem of food poverty and manifests itself in expressions of connection and responsibility which can, however, become possessive at times. Compassion ‘within’ is a form...

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.