The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

Central to the US – and increasingly global – responses to hunger is the Food Bank. Originally developed in the 1980s in the US as a response to Reagan-era budget cuts to the social safety net, it has endured becoming a global model for how “public private” responses to neoliberal cutbacks can be organized (Riches 2018). This space has been deservedly critiqued by critical scholars for its collusion with agribusiness (Fisher 2018) perpetuation of stigma (de Souza 2019), relationship to surplus and commodification (Lohnes 2021), and its inability to address other aspects of poverty (Dickinson 2020). However, food shelf operations have expanded and become more innovative during the COVID-10 pandemic illustrating the flexibility and durability of this model. In addition, food shelves have evolved to include more access to fresh vegetables and created delivery and drive through services. This session invites scholars and practitioners studying or working at food shelves to explore how these spaces operate, how this system interacts with the Alternative Food Movements, and how foodshelves can can better serve marginalized communities; for example unhoused communities, people experiencing food insecurity, racialized minorities, young people, GLBTQ+, people experiencing chronic diseases, rural communities and other underserved populations.

Possible topics could include:
Anti-racist organizing
Climate change and the food shelf
Encampment support
Food banking and mass incarceration
Food delivery programs and other service
Food justice
Food shelves and food apartheid
Food sovereignty
Increasing cooperation with unhoused communities
Mass incarceration
Political mobilization efforts
Stigma
Technological innovations at the food shelf
The evolving nature of the voluntary sector
Unionization efforts
Whiteness

Dickinson, Maggie. 2020. Feeding the Crisis: Care and Abandonment in America’s Food Safety Net. Oakland; CA: University of California Press.
Fisher, Andy. 2018. Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Lohnes, Joshua D. 2021. “Regulating Surplus: Charity and the Legal Geographies of Food Waste Enclosure.” Agriculture and Human Values 38 (2): 351–63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-020-10150-5.
Poppendieck, Janet. 1999. Sweet Charity?: Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement. New York: Penguin.
Riches, Graham. 2018. Food Bank Nations : Poverty, Corporate Charity and the Right to Food. Abingdon Oxon ; New York NY: Routledge.
de Souza, Rebecca. 2019. Feeding the Other: Whiteness, Privilege, and Neoliberal Stigma in Food Pantries. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Non-Presenting Participants