The revival of food support as an anti-poverty strategy: hunger as the canary in the coalmine?

Poverty and social inequality is a central challenge to the social justice aspirations of diverse European societies and social work is historically strongly involved in this struggle against poverty and social inequality. However, actually social protection and social security rationales resulting from welfare state orientations have increasingly receded into the background. This resonates in changing and hybrid relationships between formal and informal social work arrangements in the welfare landscape. The emergence of ‘neo-philantrophy’ or ‘new charity economy’ is part of this major re-establishment in the political struggle against poverty. In this contribution, we focus on the mushrooming number of initiatives of food support in Ghent, offered as forms of emergency relief for people living in poverty. Within these practices, we explore the central fields of tensions between private and public approaches in which charity- and rights-based orientations are at play.