Image Source: U.S. Food and Nutrition Service – Public Domain
Once, it was thought a good thing. Before people got charity, they needed to beg, either jostling for handouts or waiting in the cold under the disdainful gaze of passers-by. That way they would try to get themselves out of poverty.
‘Learning the lesson of shame’ (1) had its heyday in the 19th century. Now social services and charities try to help poor people regain their ‘autonomy’ and ‘dignity’ through social grocery stores and solidarity supermarkets, which give an illusion of freedom with their choice of mostly unattractive products. There are even apps that allow people to contact stores directly and ‘spare students and the working poor the stigma of visiting food banks’, in the words of two researchers who want to make aid ‘socially acceptable’ (2).
But those who need food aid still feel shame, to the point that some would rather go without. They’re ashamed of needing help, ashamed of being unable to feed their families, ashamed of what others might think. In 2022 there were seven million of them in France; there were already 5.5 million in 2018, twice as many as in 2008. Food aid was supposed to be an emergency measure but, because of unemployment, austerity, Covid and now inflation, it has become a new normal. Each new crisis brings new recipients, and the numbers don’t fall once the crisis is over.
Year after year, commentators are surprised to see new applicants swelling the ranks – hard-up students, single mothers, pensioners, even workers on permanent contracts (CDI). In distinguishing between the old and new poor, according to historian Axelle Brodiez-Dolino (3), they are ‘repeating a refrain that recurs time and again over the centuries, which stigmatises some and shows (temporary) sympathy for others, distinguishing, with harmful political consequences, between people who are often in similar demographic groups, some just above and some just below the poverty line’. All this increases the shame felt by those who are forced to ask for help.
Although food aid has not become socially acceptable, it hasbecome profitable. It enables major retailers to offload products past their sell-by date in return for tax concessions, and meat producers to recycle cheap cuts, skin, fat and cartilage in low-cost processed foods going to charities. It allows farmers to sell fruit and vegetables that would otherwise be unmarketable. Now an integral part of the agro-industrial complex, food aid has become the crumbs nobody wants but many now make a profit on.
Translated by Charles Goulden.
Notes.
(1) Benjamin Sèze, Quand bien manger devient un luxe: En finir avec le précarité alimentaire (When a healthy diet is a luxury: Ending food precarity), Éditions de l’Atelier, Paris, 2023.
(2) Le Monde, 18 September 2022.
(3) Axelle Brodiez-Dolino, ‘Pauvretés durables, pauvretés nouvelles: les conséquences sociales de la crise vues des associations’ (Old and new poverty: the social consequences of the crisis as seen by civil society organisations), paper for France’s National Council Against Poverty and Social Exclusion (CNLE), April 2021.
This column originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Benoît Bréville.
Benoît Bréville | Radio Free (2023-05-01T05:45:51+00:00) Feeding the Poor is Now Profitable. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/01/feeding-the-poor-is-now-profitable/
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