Introduction: individualising and responsibilising food Insecurity

Gemma lived in Bradford with her partner and two young children. Her partner worked long days in a local restaurant while she looked after their children. They had struggled for money since the children were small, when she stopped work to care for them, and now they lived payday to payday, eking out their last few pounds until another pay cheque arrived and they could relax, just for a while. She avoided food banks and instead sought support from her husband's mother, who lived close by. Gemma was highly critical of others who received benefits and used food banks. She considered them to be greedy and selfish – they bought clothes, beer and flatscreen televisions, which left them with little money for food. Gemma distanced herself from these people; she was poor, but she saw herself as making good, respectable choices. She wanted a better life for herself and her family but the only route she could see to achieving this was by criticising other people and thereby attaining a form of social status that her poverty prohibited. But Gemma's criticism of other people, in fairly similar situations to herself, could be seen as in fact compounding her own struggles; her criticism individualised the poverty which she and her peers experienced and negated the government's role in ensuring a decent standard of living for its citizens. She strove to be the ideal neoliberal citizen – independent of government support, hardworking and successful – but her own circumstances made this impossible, so instead she denigrated other people.

Gemma's juxtaposition of her own behaviour with that of her peers closely aligns with broader neoliberal narratives individualising and stigmatising poverty and food bank use, narratives which have become sharper and meaner as food bank use has increased. Indeed, political responses to rising destitution have largely characterised individuals as responsible for their poverty (Caraher and Dowler, 2014), with a specific focus on poor financial management and faulty behavioural practices (see discussion in Garthwaite, 2017).