Introduction: what is the need for theory?

In a study of a topic such as food insecurity – or hunger – it is justifiable to ask why a theoretical framework is needed at all. What difference can theory make to those reluctantly visiting food banks or parents skipping meals to ensure enough food for their children? This is an important and worthwhile question which should be asked of all research – theoretical and empirical. But, however abstract, theory has a purpose: while we may be unaware of it, theoretical frameworks shape how we think, how we act, and what questions we ask. Interrogating existing theoretical paradigms – such as neoliberalism – shines a light on why the status quo is as it is, and how behaviours and systems that seem normal and taken for granted are in fact creations, first of individuals and ultimately of society collectively. Scrutinising the theoretical frameworks that underpin and are used to explain food insecurity and food aid illuminates not only the nature of these phenomena but why they exist at all, and why they are increasingly accepted as everyday parts of society. Constructing a new theoretical framework for analyses of food insecurity and food aid may, therefore, enable fresh understanding, elicit different questions and inspire new challenges to the status quo. This chapter sets out to do just that. It critiques key conceptual frameworks surrounding food insecurity and food aid – neoliberal political economy, rights-based frameworks, and mutual aid – and explicates concepts that inform the empirical analysis in subsequent chapters: religious neoliberalism, racial neoliberalism and the post-racial, and Whiteness. In so doing, the chapter attempts to construct a ‘new’ theoretical framework, one which is reflective of multi-ethnic, multi-faith Britain.

Political economy of food charity

In First World Hunger Revisited, Riches and Silvasti (2014a) document the advance of neoliberalism in rich, food-secure, post-industrial nations, showing how it has been accompanied by the institutionalisation, corporatisation and globalisation of charitable food banking – phenomena documented in detail by Poppendieck in the US (Poppendieck, 1999) and Lambie-Mumford in the UK (Lambie-Mumford, 2017). The growth of food charity in countriessuch as Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, the Nordic welfare states of Finland and Denmark and, especially, the US is symbiotic with sociopolitical change from post-war Keynesian social democracy to neoliberalism.