Discourses of food support and perspectives for the right to food in Ghent: A photovoice exploration

The increasing presence of food banks in the charity landscape has been a familiar pattern within high-income countries. As food banking is growing in importance, it is more and more integrated into existing welfare arrangements to supplement states’ efforts to challenge food poverty, causing widespread fear of a depoliticization of the issue. However, using a multimethod approach, this study set out to investigate whether food banks could contribute to politicizing the issue of food poverty by framing it as a structural and collective issue shaped by policy, inequality, and power relations rather than as an individual or charitable concern, and whether they could contribute to the shift towards a right-to-food approach in the context of Ghent (Belgium). Specifically, the project relied on interviews, focus groups, and a photovoice project with food support volunteers to capture both their discursive framing of food poverty and their lived, practice-based perspectives across diverse institutional contexts. The data revealed that although a politicized protest stance is slowly taking shape and the need to engage in activist action is better understood in the studied context, depoliticized messages rooted in neoliberal values or fatalistic views are still present within the sector. Moreover, the right to food is resisted as a mobilizing concept by organizations, keeping them from developing actions targeted at the roots of the unjust food system. We argue that for a successful shift to a right-based approach, food support organizations need to address power dynamics within their groups and commit to consistently looking at the structural roots of poverty, not only in the realms of housing, health and income but at the level of the food system itself.