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

Abstract

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.

Solidarity, not charity: Learning the lessons of the COVID‐19 pandemic to reconceptualise the radicality of mutual aid

“…Hence a more radical view of vulnerability -one that sees it as a site of possibility and connection rather than a state of passivity (Butler et al, 2016) -brings a new more constitutive concept of mutual aid into focus. This will resonate with anarchist geographies most closely (Ferretti, 2017;Ince, 2019;Pickerill, 2017;Springer et al, 2012), but also with the existing richness of geographical scholarship that uses the practice of mutual aid for detailing contemporary radical concepts such as social justice (e.g., Travlou, 2021;Williams & May, 2022), anti-capitalism and climate action (Nelson, 2020;Pickerill, 2021), post-statist geographies (Ince & Barrera de la Torre, 2016), anti-racism (Elliott-Cooper, 2021;Liebman et al, 2020) and urban commoning (Ruiz Cayuela, 2021;Tsavdaroglou & Kaika, 2022), among others.…”

“…The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibilities are sisters”. Within the discipline of geography specifically, the conceptual analysis of mutual aid this paper proffers can be transposed, adapted and moulded into important work on intersectional social justice, including (but of course in no way limited to) food insecurity (Williams & May, 2022 ), squatting and housing rights (Vasudevan, 2015 ), anti‐raid activism (Elliott‐Cooper, 2021 ), poverty alleviation (Shaw, 2019 ), the worker co‐operative movement (Rossi, 2015 ) and many other ways in which people are actively seeking more democratic ways of organising beyond unjust versions of capitalist realism (Fisher, 2009 ).…”

Feeding lines: Standing up in the neoliberal charitable food regime

“…There has been much less emphasis on humanitarian food networks even though these lie at the far end of a food system increasingly tailored to a consumer's capacity to purchase different types of food. It is important to note that the contemporary humanitarian logics informing the expansion of charitable food networks are merely a reworking of dynamics that have long undergirded the expansion of capitalist food systems writ large (Williams and May, 2022). We thus understand the contemporary food banking economy, and its attendant charitable food networks coalescing around humanitarian reasons (Fassin, 2012) as a means to further legitimize the corporate environmental food regime.…”

Food bank practices, local development and the potential of community wealth building and universal basic services in the UK

“…Participant B talks openly about organisations seeking to justify their existence, an issue common to many VCOs and not restricted to those who provide food aid and food assistance. Williams and May (2022) have argued there is a complex history behind the existence of food aid in the UK and that food has often been part of political solidarities. It is precisely the forms and function of the contemporary food banking landscape (which they recognise as an increasingly corporate institutionalisation) – set against this history and a wider contemporary political-economy – which needs to be the focus of scrutiny, challenge and action.…”

“…In the UK, the proliferation of voluntary and community organisations (VCOs) providing emergency food aid and food assistance (in response to increasing demand) has been the subject of critical scrutiny (Cloke et al, 2017; Willams and May, 2022), (Lawson and Dowler and Lambie-Mumford, 2015; Loopstra et al, 2015; Caplan, 2016; Williams et al, 2016; Garthwaite, 2016, 2017; Cloke et al, 2017; Loopstra, 2018; Iafrati, 2018; Lambie-Mumford, 2019; MacLeod et al, 2019; May et al, 2019; 2020; Strong, 2021; Lee et al, 2021). Areas of concern (well-articulated by Williams et al, 2016) include: the depoliticisation of food insecurity (see Dowler and Lambie-Mumford, 2015); retreatment of the state (see Garthwaite, 2017; Lambie-Mumford, 2019); subjectification of ‘the poor’ (see Carson, 2014); concerns that the charitable ethos placates political activism and change (see Poppendieck, 1998 from a US perspective).…”