Surviving the permanence of precarity, when security is no longer a right

This paper explores the ways that the lived experience of independent food bank users challenges mainstream discourses of emergency, short-term provision and the need to avoid food ‘dependency’ so common in foodbank literature. It situates over twenty in depth qualitative interviews undertaken across a number of independent food banks and pantries in Birmingham and Greater Manchester within a wider context of social security reform that has, for the first time since the founding of the welfare state, divorced findings of need from the provision of government support. The Trussell Trust’s requirements for appraisals of need and strict limitations on parcels distributed to individual households to limit ‘dependency’ are underpinned by a rhetoric of ‘emergency relief’ and a need for temporary support for households briefly run afoul of austerity-driven changes to welfare policies or other situations of personal emergency. While many of the in-depth interviews point to a single point of emergency resulting in often extreme hunger and deprivation which precipitated the first visit by a household to a food bank, almost all respondents were in fact surviving situations of indefinite and often extreme precarity in which few could foresee a future realistically free of food poverty. This paper questions the underpinnings of often hard and fast rules around accessing food relief and the focus on short term emergency given that many are experiencing long-term deprivation where the intersection of Universal Credit with various punitive austerity policies requires multiple strategies for survival. It looks to the breadth of benefits respondents found in accessing foodbanks and pantries, and explores the experience of food, community and resistances large and small that might contribute to deeper kinds of change and how these might connect to the wider movement for a right to food in the UK.