Lived experiences of food insecurity and food charity among asylum seekers in England: racialized governance and a “culture of suspicion”

Abstract

ABSTRACT We critically examine the lived experience of food insecurity among asylum seekers in England, adopting a framework of racialized governance to consider how experiences are situated within historical and political processes. We draw upon longitudinal interviews from January 2023-February 2024 with people, including asylum seekers, living on a low-income in the North and South of England. Food insecurity was unavoidable for asylum seekers subject to No Recourse to Public Funds; food charities did little to mitigate food insecurity and could be sites of racialized stigma. The racialization of food insecurity among asylum seekers was fuelled by a politics of “racialized governance” which gained cultural traction through media narratives and manifested in everyday interactions around food. Developing literature on food insecurity among asylum seekers through new empirical and theoretical insights, we show how food charities can be racialized spaces where “non-white” asylum seekers are responded to according to a differential humanity.