Abstract
The persistence, and international expansion, of food banks as a non-governmental response to households experiencing food insecurity has been decried as an indicator of unacceptable levels of poverty in the countries in which they operate. In 1998, Poppendieck published a book, Sweet charity: emergency food and the end of entitlement, which has endured as an influential critique of food banks. Sweet charity‘s food bank critique is succinctly synthesized as encompassing seven deadly “ins” (1) inaccessibility, (2) inadequacy, (3) inappropriateness, (4) indignity, (5) inefficiency, (6) insufficiency, and (7) instability. The purpose of this paper is to examine if and how the contemporary food bank critique differs from Sweet charity’s “ins” as a strategy for the formulation of synthesizing arguments for policy advocacy. We used critical interpretive synthesis methodology to identify relationships within and/or between existing critiques in the peer-reviewed literature as a means to create “‘synthetic constructs’ (new constructs generated through synthesis)” of circulating critiques. We analyzed 33 articles on food banks published since Sweet charity, with the “ins” as a starting point for coding. We found that the list of original “ins” related primarily to food bank operations has been consolidated over time. We found additional “ins” that extend the food bank critique beyond operations (ineffectiveness, inequality, institutionalization, invalidation of entitlements, invisibility). No synthetic construct emerged linking the critique of operational challenges facing food banks with one that suggests that food banks may be perpetuating inequity, posing a challenge for mutually supportive policy advocacy.
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Notes
For an in-depth discussion, see the 2014 special issue of the British Food Journal 116(9).
Poppendieck’s (1998, Ch. 7) definitions for these terms were: inaccessibility (food is difficult to obtain because of poor location, hours of operation or transit options); inadequacy (food provided is not nutritious/lacks nutrients); inappropriateness (food provided does not meet dietary needs, or personal/cultural preferences of clients); indignity (using the food bank is a stigmatizing experience in which people may be treated with suspicion, depersonalized or lose some of their independence); inefficiency (emergency food is less efficient than the food stamp system and both systems are less efficient than the cash system, emergency food systems give the illusion of efficiency because they do not count donations as inputs); instability (emergency food supplies depend on donations of money, food, and labor that may be variable or unreliable); and insufficiency (the inability to provide sufficient food to meet clients’ needs).
These were exclusively articles from the US, which has a long history of distributing surplus commodities and food vouchers to people living in poverty. See Daponte and Bade (2006) for further information.
It should be noted that although these five “ins” were not identified in Sweet charity as part of the “seven deadly ‘ins,’” issues identified elsewhere in the book could be classified as describing many of the “ins” described here. We should also clarify that authors did not use the new “in-word” but it is rather the concept that they articulated that was so labelled.
Our definitions for these terms were: ineffectiveness (a critique that questions whether the food bank has met the goal of reducing food insecurity); inequality (creation or replication of unequal relationships in the food bank, usually between different classes); institutionalization (a process in which food banks become institutions and concerns for sustainability supersede service to clients); invalidation of entitlements (a process in which the establishment of the food bank as an acceptable response to hunger overrides the right to food); invisibility (the process by which the presence of food banks gives the impression that poverty is managed and thereby unseen).
This special publication was excluded from the synthesis because of its futurist perspective. Included articles examined the contemporary food bank problematic.
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Funding for this project was provided through the CIHR Operating Grant: Programmatic Grants to Tackle Health and Health Equity, ROH—115208.
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McIntyre, L., Tougas, D., Rondeau, K. et al. “In”-sights about food banks from a critical interpretive synthesis of the academic literature. Agric Hum Values 33, 843–859 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9674-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9674-z