The dark side to food charity
Reflections on pre-Christmas publicity stunts
The photo of a grinning Prime Minister and his wife, so proud of themselves for packing food parcels at Christmas time, and his subsequent mini sermon to the church volunteers pre-Christmas 2024, turned my stomach. It was all that is revolting about the wealthy and food charity.
Even worse, this naked self-promotion occurred during Advent. The following Sunday, Christians attending churches who follow the liturgical calendar would have read Mary’s Magnificat in the Gospel of Luke. This poem is well known to Christian believers. It includes the following stanza, which starkly contrasts with the self-congratulatory attitudes on display by the PM:
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich He has sent away empty.
Packing a food parcel is not ‘being the hope of the world’ if you are not concurrently addressing the policies, inequities, and unjust practices driving poverty. The current government the PM presides over has steadily implemented a series of policies and legislative changes that have had significant detrimental impacts on New Zealand families.
While ameliorative acts - such as donating, packing, and delivering food parcels to those in need - are valuable for softening the severity of hunger and hardship, they do little to address the underlying drivers of need.
Additionally, there are major issues with charity as a response to food hardship:
Food charities reinforce power and the status quo
Individual and corporate acts of charity maintain the status quo rather than working to address the underlying drivers of poverty and insufficient food. Corporate donors receive tax deductions for all produce donated to food banks (as they are registered charities), enhance their social licence, and receive cheap, positive publicity as good corporate citizens.
Individuals who have food resources to share are viewed as altruistic, compassionate and empathetic when they share food and/or donate charity. In comparison, people in need of food feel a sense of shame and stigma at having their lack and inadequacy exposed to strangers. In a society that values independence, people who need help to feed their families feel humiliated.
Philanthropic giving is no solution to social issues created by inequities. Not only do wealthy donors often struggle to understand the lived realities of food insecurity, but there is a tendency to avoid solutions that may undermine their own wealth and privilege. It is easier - and often more rewarding financially and socially - to donate to charity than it is to challenge the status quo.
Food charities replicate existing inequities
Left unexamined, charitable responses to food hardship replicate and privilege dominant norms and existing inequities. Food charities in Aotearoa predominantly exist within an inequitable social and economic context. While there are individual pockets of change, too many food charities are Eurocentric in nature and dominated by the attitudes of the well-meaning middle-class Pākehā in senior management and staff. This results in approaches that unintentionally privilege Pākehā food practices; the default identity informing the nature of charitable food distribution is Pākehā. The marked absence of non-Pākehā-centric foodstuffs in many food parcels contributes to a wider narrative centering Eurocentric food as ‘ideal’ and ‘healthy’. The perennial debate about donating tinned tomatoes is a classic reflection of unexamined food-related cultural practice.
Who is (and who is not) in positions of decision-making power regarding food charity? Who determines what foods are (and are not) available for those needing food aid? Whose ethnicity and associated food-related practices remain invisible and unexamined?
How food is received, what food is available, and the system by which someone is referred to a foodbank are all dominated by people with access to money and power - not by those living with food hardship and in need of food charity.
Food charities lack capacity to drive change
While most do their best to meet the need presenting at their door, local food charities generally do not have the organisational or staff capacity required to address social challenges at a national level.
If only there was a system whereby individuals could donate a dollar or two to a central organisation who could implement national level policies and practices to address food hardship? We could call the donation tax, and the central organisation a government Ministry. For all their bad press, government Ministries can be surprisingly effective at implementing national-level changes that benefit the entire population.
Fostering the solidarities needed for social change across and between groups is often beyond the purview of foodbanks. Rather, food charities tend to uphold existing inequities, support the false dichotomy of deserving and undeserving poor, demarcate those in need as the ‘other’, and financially benefit from the Kafkaesque systems in play.
I can’t remember who said it, or when - it was the late eighties, early nineties - it was a church leader innNew Plymouth but they may have been quoting someone else, but I still recall them saying that starting food banks was a mistake because it meant the government got away with not doing its fundamental job of ensuring people had the basics of life. It was a Catch 22 of not wanting people to go hungry so filling a gap that shouldn’t have existed (the baseline principle of unemployment benefits was they should cover a family’s basic needs and this was before the 1990 benefit cuts and was mainly due to housing costs as well as inflation)
YES YES! I have said this for a long time: in a good, fair and equitable society there should be no need for dozens and dozens of food banks, to me it is fundamentally unjust that so many "good" people think that the answer is bags of white bread, tinned tomatoes and teaching the poor to cook and grow their own vegetables ( never mind that we know how to cook and waiting twelve weeks for the potatoes and carrots to grow in a plastic pot on the concrete doorstep is a lesson in futility)
Way back in the days of Ruth, (she of the mother of all budgets) I had to feed my kids on what was left of my benefit after paying 2/3 into my mortgage, the father having left and locked himself into a denial of family support obligation with Social Welfare which went on for years after the youngest had left home.
When a stray church offered charity I was humiliated, but accepted. Nothing like hungry kids to lower your pride. My own family looked down their nose and referred to me as a "dole bludger"
We as a nation are so much better than this, yet I fear that as more people think taxes are a personal insult and that their own accumulation of money is because they are somehow superior to others and don't want to lose that sense of self importance, assauge their guilt by donating inedible budget brand food to a charity, we are well on the road to the horror of deliberately sustaining a huge, deprived and desperate underclass.
I wait until the day the worm turns and gets to wear the silk pyjamas and pose innanely grinning whilst every self appointed political "expert" finally learns what humiliation and inequity really feels like.