Assembling caring food infrastructures: grassroots foodwork in an incomplete welfare city

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes grassroots foodwork as caring food infrastructure and examines how it is assembled and sustained through everyday practices of care in Stockholm, Sweden, amid welfare retrenchment and the Covid-19 pandemic. Although Sweden is often portrayed as resisting welfare retrenchment, research suggests that Swedish exceptionalism is waning, as civil society organizations and volunteers increasingly support those experiencing food insecurity. While existing research has examined this shift primarily through churches and large charitable organizations, this paper centres grassroots foodwork. Methodologically, I apply a patchwork ethnographic approach centred on participatory foodwork undertaken within three grassroots organizations providing meals and other essential items to people experiencing food insecurity and homelessness. The paper thereby makes two contributions. First, by extending the feminist concept of foodwork beyond the domestic sphere, it shows that grassroots foodwork is not only the labour of feeding people but also the physical, emotional, relational and organizational labour through which care is enacted. Second, the paper contributes to debates on caring infrastructures by demonstrating that grassroots foodwork does not simply fill gaps left by welfare retrenchment but actively assembles, sustains and continually renegotiates caring food infrastructures within incomplete welfare cities.