This paper aims to better understand the resilience and further entrenchment of food aid through food banks in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the first months of the pandemic in the Netherlands, concerns quickly rose about the number of people falling into conditions of food insecurity. Adding insult to injury, food banks reported problems in their operations. The analysis shows that after some adaptations to initial problems, food banks were largely able to continue their service. This ability was partly based on organizational flexibility. However, in order to understand the resilience of food aid through food banks, it is imperative to understand food banks as part of a system of food aid that extends beyond the organizational boundaries. This system includes a range of other actors and resources, including donors, public support and governmental backing that contributed to the resilience of the food aid system. While this embeddedness in a system as well as broad public support were essential for the resilience of food aid through food banks, both factors also indicate the further entrenchment of food banks in the understanding and practices of ensuring food security for people in poverty. Ultimately, when the root causes of a need for food aid are not addressed, a resilient system of food aid through food banks can eventually prove detrimental to societal resilience, specifically the ability to ensure dignified access to adequate food.

This paper intervenes in critical debates on the role of charitable food aid in meeting the material, social, emotional, and cultural needs of the people who depend on this aid. It offers a detailed case study of a social grocery in Belgium that attempts to circumvent the power inequalities and negative social and emotional impacts of charitable giving through staging consumer culture, and treating clients as customers. This is accomplished with supporting performances of consumption norms around product choice, the act of paying, and the selection of appropriate foods – which improves the ability of participants to meet their personal needs as well as the broader standards of consumer society that they are otherwise excluded from. These other ways of doing food aid are theorized through the lens of consumer culture, to explain what is at stake in performing the norms of market exchange in a consumer society.

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Scholars have demonstrated that common ways of performing charitable food aid in high-income countries maintain a powerless and alienated status of recipients. Aiming to protect the dignity of recipients, alternative forms of food aid have taken shape. However, an in-depth understanding of dignity in the context of food aid is missing. We undertook a scoping review to outline ways in which the dignity of recipients is violated or protected across various forms of food aid in high-income countries. By bringing scientific results together through a social dignity lens, this paper offers a complex understanding of dignity in the context of food aid. The online database Scopus was used to identify scientific literature addressing food aid in relation to the dignity of recipients in high-income countries. The final selection included 37 articles representing eight forms of food aid in twelve countries. Across diverse forms of food aid, the selected studies report signs of (in)dignity concerning five dimensions: access to food aid, social interactions, the food, the physical space, and needs beyond food. Research gaps are found in the diversity of forms of food aid studied, and the identification of social standards important for recipients. Bringing the results of 37 articles together through a social dignity lens articulates the complex and plural ways in which the dignity of recipients is violated or protected. In addition, this review has demonstrated the usefulness of a social dignity lens to understand dignity across and in particular food aid contexts.