Exploring the Growth of Charitable Food Aid in the UK

The Politics of Inequality - Lecture 2

Lecturer: Dr Kayleigh Garthwaite

25 August 2022

Since 2019 in the UK, there have been more food banks than there are branches of the fast food chain McDonalds. Austerity measures, amplified by a continual erosion of the social security system, has led to emergency charitable food aid provision in the form of food banks, food pantries, and related forms of food provision becoming an increasingly expected and visible part of daily life.

But is what we are witnessing now really an emergency? Or is it actually chronic and permanent? These questions are even more important given the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on ethnographic work on food bank use since 2013, and current work exploring the permanence of charitable food in the UK, US and Canada, a series of questions will be outlined.

Can food and other services be gathered and distributed by the third sector with dignity and efficiency without building permanent institutions that begin to take the place of what should be the role of government? From a human rights perspective, can the provision of corporate food charity and the fight for social justice co-exist?

And finally, is it possible to move away from a model of charitable food aid, towards one centred on rights and social justice?


Reading

  • Beck, D. J., and Gwilym, H. (2022). The food bank: A safety-net in place of welfare security in times of austerity and the Covid-19 crisis. Social Policy and Society, 1-17.
  • Caplan, P. (2016). Big society or broken society?: Food banks in the UK. Anthropology Today32(1), 5-9.
  • Garthwaite, K. (2016). Stigma, shame and 'people like us': an ethnographic study of foodbank use in the UK. Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 24(3), 277-289.
  • Lambie-Mumford, H. (2019). The growth of food banks in Britain and what they mean for social policy. Critical Social Policy39(1), 3-22.
  • Spring, C., Garthwaite, K., and Fisher, A. (2022). Containing Hunger, Contesting Injustice? Exploring the Transnational Growth of Foodbanking-and Counter-responses-Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Food Ethics7(1), 1-27.
  • van der Horst, H., Pascucci, S., and Bol, W. (2014). The “dark side” of food banks? Exploring emotional responses of food bank receivers in the Netherlands. British Food Journal. 116 (9) pp. 1506-1520.
  • Williams, A., and May, J. (2022). A genealogy of the food bank: Historicising the rise of food charity in the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available at: https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14755661

Resources

Questions for Discussion

  1. Are there examples of alternatives to charitable food provision through food banks, and what can these look like?
  2. Why can it be problematic for corporations to fund food banks?
  3. Is it important that people who are experiencing poverty can share their experiences and advocate for change?