The Taste of Austerity: exploring the everyday of food aid in East Bristol

This thesis examines the everyday of food aid and food insecurity in East Bristol by exploring three different community-based models of food aid – the food bank, the community kitchen, and the community food centre. Since austerity, food insecurity has increased exponentially, and community-based sites of food aid have emerged to provide much needed support for people experiencing hardship. However, where academic and political attention has been focused on the food bank, other emergent forms of food aid have been underexplored. Addressing this gap in knowledge, this thesis takes a place-based approach to the study of food aid, and explores the wider landscape of food aid, revealing how they work, why people use them, what happens in these spaces, and how they are used, in order to better understand the value, significance and experience of food aid for people experiencing food insecurity. Informed by a multi-sited ethnography built on 11 months of fieldwork, this thesis is produced using data collected through participant observation, semi structured interviews (35), a focus group, and photo documentation. Centering the voices of those accessing and providing food aid, this thesis engages with themes of precarity and power, to highlight these spaces as sites of multiplicity with the potential for care, discipline, control and sociality.