Assessing the Transformative Potential of Food Banks: The Case Study of Magazzini Sociali (Italy)

Giaime Berti,Claudia Giordano,Mariavaleria Mininni

doi:10.3390/agriculture11030249

Abstract

Food poverty and/or food insecurity have become a substantial problem in the advanced capitalist world, with growing portions of people struggling to eat healthy food every day. At the same time, just in the European Union (EU), around 88 million tonnes of food waste are generated annually. We call this paradox the “food paradox”. The question is, how to tackle food paradox? Food banks are usually presented as a win–win solution to tackle the food paradox, despite being quite controversial. Indeed, food banks are highly contested because, according to critics, they do not aim to address the structural causes, but rather they only intervene on the effects of the food paradox. This paper develops the PAHS conceptual framework, the acronym of prefiguration, autonomy, hybridization, and scalability, which provides the four categories through which to explore the transformative potential of food surplus redistribution initiatives. The PAHS is adopted to investigate the case study of Magazzini Sociali, a food bank project developed by IoPotentino, a not-for-profit organization operating in Potenza. The results show a good transformative potential of the organization and provide an example of social innovation that can be replicated in other contexts.

Highlights

Food poverty and food insecurity are two terms interchangeably adopted to describe the condition that occurs when individuals and households do not have regular access to a supply of healthy and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs [1]
Food poverty and/or food insecurity have become a substantial problem in the advanced capitalist world, with growing portions of people struggling to eat healthy food every day [2]
Just in the European Union (EU), around 88 million tonnes of food waste are generated annually, with associated costs estimated at 143 billion euros [3]

Summary

Introduction

Food poverty and food insecurity are two terms interchangeably adopted to describe the condition that occurs when individuals and households do not have regular access to a supply of healthy and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs [1]. Food poverty and/or food insecurity have become a substantial problem in the advanced capitalist world, with growing portions of people struggling to eat healthy food every day [2]. The combination of food poverty and food waste, what we call the “food paradox”, is a form of the broader paradox of “scarcity within abundance” [4,5] characterizing advanced capitalist societies and one of the most ethically unacceptable of our times [6]. With the widespread growth of food poverty in the EU caused by the 2007 and 2012 financial and economic crises [6,7], the food paradox has gained growing interest in the political realm and, owing to the emergence of COVID-19, it has reached main prominence in the political agenda. In Italy, for example, during the months of COVID-19 crisis, Banco Alimentare, the most important national food bank, usually assisting about 300,000 people every month, assisted about 450,000 per month [8]

Objectives

Methods

Results