Introduction: from religious to racial exclusion

Emily, a White British woman, volunteered in a large Trussell Trust food bank in Bradford. With support from her own church and those in surrounding parishes,1 she and others started the food bank when another food bank in Bradford restricted its catchment area, excluding many people in a “very deprived” part of her parish. The people who accessed the food bank, in which she volunteered, were almost entirely White. Emily ascribed this to the purported demography of the local area, which she described as “very White”. The implication was that food banks located in ethnically diverse areas would have a multi-ethnic population of service users. But this was in fact not the case. The vast majority of food banks in Bradford catered to predominantly White service users.

Emily seemed surprised when I asked her why those using the food bank were almost entirely White; she could see no barrier to anyone accessing the service so their absence must reflect the absence of ‘non-White’ people in the local area more broadly. There was no reflection on how the food bank could be exclusionary, including via her own role in maintaining its Christian identity. Emily may not have been racist, but she was colourblind: race was immaterial in her consideration of food charity; she met the need that was set before her and that was deemed sufficient to her volunteer role. And yet the food bank itself, shaped by Christianity and by paradigms of Whiteness, was arguably institutionally racist. Emily, steeped in unchallenged ideas of Whiteness, failed to recognise this.Chapter 4 described the influence of religion on contemporary food aid, drawing attention to religious motivations for food charity but also to the manifestation of religion in the context of the food aid encounter: faith could shape how food was given as well as why it was given.