Taking back taste in food bank Britain: on privilege, failure and (un)learning with auto-corporeal methods

Abstract

Food banks are a growing feature of austerity Britain. Despite this, little research has focused on the object central to their operations: the food they provision. In charting an attempt to “open” food bank parcels to greater scrutiny, this article highlights the need to take back taste from predominantly nutritionist framings of food. Drawing on recent work in more-than-representational and visceral geography, it is argued that taste must be understood as an embodied, sensorial and social phenomenon. However, this article highlights the ethico-political dilemmas that accompany such an undertaking, and the wider implications raised by studying the tastes of socially and economically marginalised groups. These tensions are explored through recourse to the political, ethical and epistemological stakes of auto-corporeal methods – in this case, employing my own tasting body in consuming a “food bank diet.” In arguing that such an approach is necessarily wedded to forms of failure and privilege, this undertaking reveals the need to scrutinise the more-than-tasted features of power and space that shape the relational landscapes of Food Bank Britain. By working with these failures, this article concludes that the potential of such corporeal methods lies not in producing “data,” but instead in unlearning and scrutinising one’s embodied privileges in the face of poverty.