Introduction

Food poverty is an area that has been overlooked in Slovenia, attracting very little public attention. There was barely any media discussion of food poverty in 2014/15, despite a temporary shortage of food supplies from intervention stocks of the European Union's (EU’s) Food Distribution Programme for the Most Deprived Persons of the Community. At the same time, the redistribution of food waste has been increasing in importance and scope. Instead of household food poverty, the focus of public discussion is on national food security and food safety issues, such as sustainable development, food self-sufficiency, the use of pesticides and the scale of organic food production. Moreover, the discussion of food consumption and food waste is thematised within the framework of ecological discourse by emphasising the unacceptability of wasting food because of the negative consequences of food waste for the environment (Bašič Hrvatin, 2014). For these reasons, measures that were taken in France several years ago to force supermarkets to redistribute their food surpluses to those at risk of food poverty have gained considerable public attention, with active discussions also taking place on social media and in daily newspapers (Šoštaršič, 2013). There is broad public support for the idea that surplus food and waste food should be given to the poor (Lončar, 2015), with such activity enhancing the positive image of the actors involved in the food redistribution system (Stenmarck et al, 2016).

This chapter presents the results of the first study of charitable food assistance in Slovenia. Taking into account the fact that nothing was previously known about the link between waste or surplus food and food poverty in Slovenia, the aim of the study was to identify the main actors – and their positions – in the redistribution chain in order to understand the modes of operation and the extent of the system. The authors are interested in the role of the state in facilitating the redistribution chain as part of its anti-poverty policy, and a key question is whether policy changes indicate that the welfare system in Slovenia is undergoing a transformation. This chapter briefly introduces the main actors identified in the study to enable a better understanding of the findings. Three types of organisation were identified in the redistribution chain: donors (the sources of food donations); distributing organisations (delivering donated food to recipients); and food banks (members of international food bank organisations).