Grounding the Right to Food in Community-led Solidarity Responses: An Interview with Dr. Kayleigh Garthwaite

June 9, 2026

From 2022-2024 Dr. Kayleigh Garthwaite – who lives in the Northeast of England – traveled across Britain, Canada, the U.S. and some cities in Europe, working with food banks, co-ops, urban farms and food justice organizations. In her newest book Hunger Inc,: Building Solidarity Beyond the Food Bank, she documents similarities in the limitations of institutionalized charity across "advanced capitalist countries" and analyzes how food aid absolves governments of their responsibility to ensure people have a right to food. In her book, she proposes radical key policies for governments based on alternative community-led responses grounded in solidarity, not charity, to end the need for chronic food aid.

We had the pleasure of hosting Kayleigh at a recent members’ meeting of the National Right to Food Community of Practice where she discussed the themes from her book.  She sat down with our staff afterwards to answer a few follow-up questions.

Q: What are the key messages in your book?

The book is built around three core messages that challenge how we think about hunger in rich but unequal countries.

First, hunger is political. Food insecurity is not the result of individual failure. It is the outcome of policy decisions over time — inadequate wages, rising and untenable housing costs, weakened social security systems, and increasingly insecure work. Food charity has expanded because welfare systems were rolled back, not because need suddenly appeared. What we now call “emergency” food aid has become a permanent feature of a system that has normalized crisis.

Second, hunger is profitable. Corporations benefit from donating surplus food: it’s cheaper than paying for waste disposal; it improves public image; and can come with tax or reputational advantages. At the same time, it diverts attention from the structural causes of hunger, including low wages and precarious work that contribute to food insecurity in the first place. 

Third, alternatives already exist. Across different countries, we see practical models that move beyond charity, such as cash-first approaches, social security for food pilots, food cooperatives, and community-led, rights-based distribution models. These approaches treat food as a right rather than a gift. 

Taken together, the book argues that we cannot food bank our way out of hunger. We need to shift from emergency responses to structural solutions grounded in rights, income, and dignity.

Q. Can you tell me more about what you mean when you say ‘hunger is profitable’?

Hunger has become an industry, not just a social problem. The corporatization of hunger has its roots in North America. In his 2017 book Big Hunger, Andy Fisher argued that corporations have become deeply embedded in charitable food systems, helping to shape how hunger is managed and understood. His critique was an important inspiration for my own research, which explores how these dynamics have spread and intensified across other wealthy countries, particularly in the years following the pandemic.

In the UK, for instance, food insecurity is increasingly managed through systems that generate value for corporations and parts of the charitable sector, even as they respond to real need. A key example is surplus food redistribution. Supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Aldi in the UK now work through large charities like Felix (formerly FareShare) and platforms like Olio to move unsold food into charitable and community channels. This reduces disposal costs and generates reputational benefits, while leaving the underlying causes of surplus and low incomes largely unchanged.

Since the pandemic, this system has expanded and become more formalized. Emergency food provision scaled up rapidly, and food aid became more integrated into corporate supply chains and logistics systems. What was once framed as a temporary crisis response is now more structured, data-driven, and professionalised. Alongside this, supermarket-funded food clubs and branded community food initiatives have grown. These are often presented as “solutions” to food poverty, but they also extend corporate presence into community spaces and strengthen brand value in the process.

The result is a paradox: charitable food aid appears to be expanding and improving, while the structural drivers of hunger — low wages, insecure work, and rising living costs — remain largely untouched.

Q. All of the countries in your research, including Canada and the United Kingdom, have codified the right to food by signing the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which entered into force in 1976, while the United States has not. What might this difference mean for the realization of the right to food in practice?

Countries that have signed and ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) have formally recognized the right to adequate food as part of international human rights law. Even if enforcement varies, this creates an important normative and policy framework. It gives advocates, courts, and civil society a language of rights rather than charity, and it anchors food security within state obligations.

We know that the United States is one of only a handful of countries that has not ratified the ICESCR, which means there is no formal federal commitment to the right to food within international human rights law. As a result, food security is more easily framed as a matter of private responsibility, market access, or charitable provision rather than a legally or politically enforceable right.

In practice, this difference can matter in several ways. Where the right to food is recognized, even imperfectly, it strengthens arguments for income support, social protection systems, and accountability mechanisms. Where it is absent, policy tends to lean more heavily on fragmented welfare programmes and charitable food aid.

However, it is also important not to overstate the distinction. Even in countries that have signed the ICESCR, the right to food is often not being implemented. Food banks still expand, and hunger still exists. So the issue is not only whether the right is recognized on paper, but whether it is translated into enforceable policy — adequate income, housing, and social protection that make reliance on charity unnecessary.

Q. How can we manage the tension between not wanting to alienate folks who are doing the work of charitable and community food aid work when thinking through the limitations of food charity?

This tension is real, and it is important to name it directly - people working and volunteering in food banks are not the problem.

Kayleigh volunteering at the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

The challenge is that charitable food aid has expanded far beyond what it was designed to do. What began as an “emergency response” in the 1960s and 1980s in North America has become a long-term system of welfare substitution in many high-income countries. That shift creates pressure, burnout, and emotional strain for frontline workers who are constantly trying to meet rising need with limited resources.

The key is to separate critique of the system from recognition of care within it. Most people involved in food aid are responding to urgency, not choosing the structure they operate within. Their work often involves extraordinary acts of solidarity, creativity, care and dignity protection under very difficult, complex conditions. A critical analysis of food charity does not diminish that work — it highlights why it is being asked to carry responsibilities that should not belong to mostly unpaid and underpaid workers.

One way to hold this tension is to shift the focus from “Food charity is good / bad” to “Why is food charity required at this scale?” That reframing allows us to value the care and commitment of frontline workers while still asking difficult questions about policy failure and structural causes.

It also helps to emphasize that many of the most effective advocates for change are those working inside the system, because they see its limits most clearly. The goal is not to alienate food aid workers, but to support them in translating their lived experience - which can also include experiencing food insecurity themselves - into collective pressure for change.

Q. What examples are there from other countries that show how alternatives can work in practice?

Across different contexts, there are already clear examples of systems that are trying to move beyond charitable food provision.

In Scotland, the government is supporting a cash-first approach, positioning direct financial support as the primary response to income crises. This reduces reliance on food banks by addressing the root cause of food insecurity, which is a lack of income.

In Brussels, Belgium and certain cities in France, social security for food pilots treat food as a social right rather than a charitable good. These pilots are testing the extension of welfare principles to food, with a universal, contribution-funded allowance designed to guarantee access to healthy, sustainable food while reshaping the food system around solidarity and democratic control.

Community-led initiatives like No Javel in Brussels also show a different approach to food distribution — one based on horizontality rather than hierarchy. These collectives organize food access through shared decision-making, mutual responsibility, and collective cooking, deliberately avoiding the division between “giver” and “receiver.”

Elsewhere, cooperative farms, solidarity emporiums, and local food sovereignty movements are reconnecting production and consumption. These models shorten supply chains, improve affordability, and embed food systems within local communities rather than relying on surplus redistribution, while also seeking to secure fair and stable incomes for farmers and food producers.

What connects these examples is not a single policy model, but a shared principle - shifting from managing hunger through emergency provision to building systems that guarantee access to food as a right.

Q: What are some of the most inspiring solidarity projects you've encountered?  

What’s been most striking to me is that the most inspiring projects are the ones that shift power — not just where the food comes from, but who decides how it’s organized. 

As I mentioned above, I visited the social security for food pilot at the BEES Coop in Brussels, where participants received €150 per month to spend directly on food in the store. Rather than queuing for donated surplus, people could shop like anyone else, choosing fresh, organic and staple foods within a system designed to make good food accessible regardless of income. As a member‑run co‑operative, BEES Coop also involves participants in how the system operates. In the evaluation one person said, ‘Finally, I don’t have to eat the garbage of other people’.

Kayleigh visiting New Roots Community Farm in West Virginia.

In Chicago, the Chicagoland Food Sovereignty Coalition is a grassroots network of more than 30 mutual aid groups working across the city to build a more equitable local food system. It brings together volunteers who recover food from supermarkets and other sources and redistribute it to communities on the South and West sides, prioritizing people who are most affected by poverty and food insecurity. The Coalition is deliberately structured as a non‑hierarchical, solidarity‑based network rather than a traditional charity, with an emphasis on shared responsibility, care, and consistency. Much of the work is labor‑intensive — coordinating food rescues, sorting, and distributing supplies — and it relies heavily on relationships and trust. What it points towards is a different way of organizing food support, where provision is collective and grounded in solidarity rather than something delivered through a charitable model.

Q: Through a right to food lens, what do you think the government's role should be in supporting communities to help one another through solidarity projects?

I think the starting point is that government needs to stop seeing community action as a substitute for doing its own job. Communities stepping up is important, but it shouldn’t be carrying the responsibility of trying to address hunger on their own. So the first role is making sure people actually have enough money to live on — through wages, social security, housing, healthcare — so fewer people need to rely on charitable food aid in the first place. But alongside that, governments should be playing a positive role in backing community-led work — through funding, spaces, infrastructure — without trying to control or reshape it. 

The best solidarity projects I’ve seen are locally driven and participatory, so they work because people have ownership. The role of government is to support that, not replace it — to create the conditions where solidarity can flourish, rather than relying on it to plug the gaps.

Dr Kayleigh Garthwaite is an Associate Professor of Social Policy at the University of Birmingham. She researches poverty, inequality and the realities of food insecurity using ethnographic methods. She is the author of Hunger Pains: Life Inside Foodbank Britain (2016) and Hunger Inc.: Building Solidarity Beyond the Food Bank (2025). Kayleigh also co-founded the Global Solidarity Alliance for Food, Health and Social Justice (GSA) in 2018. 

Hunger Inc.: Building Solidarity Beyond the Food Bank can be bought here. Sign up to the Pluto Press newsletter for 50% off!