Resistance and workarounds in rural food access spaces

Authors: Julie Schweitzer, Oklahoma State University, USA, and Tamara L. Mix, Oklahoma State University, USA.

“I had to break their rule, on not being able to go to multiple food pantries … we didn’t have enough money to make it,” notes a food assistance recipient, as she illustrates the reality of navigating access to food for people who experience food insecurity. When facing limited options, people find ways to make systems work better for them, through patterns and practices of everyday resistance and workarounds.

In our article “Negotiating dignity and social justice in community food access spaces,” we address people’s experiences with rural community food access spaces, which represent a network of organisations, agencies, and churches that provide rural food assistance. In particular, we explore the ways people deploy resistance strategies within these highly constrained spaces to maximise their food outcomes and promote feelings of dignity.

We conduct interviews with food recipients, volunteers, employees, and managers – stakeholders of food access spaces – to get a better understanding of how people participate in dignity work under difficult circumstances (Bedore 2018). Our study illustrates that everyday resistance strategies - mundane, unassuming ways to resist unfair or ineffective systems (Johansson and Vinthagen 2016) – and workarounds, “improvised solutions to systemic constraints” (Schweitzer, Mix, and Esquibel 2024), are common practices in food assistance spaces with uneven or unpredictable access.

Our work highlights the limitations of community food access spaces. Such places are often designed to provide temporary relief for people experiencing food insecurity, yet in reality, and in the absence of better alternatives, they often represent stable options for food access. While individuals managing, working, or volunteering at food banks and food pantries frequently impose rules to limit how people use community food access spaces, recipients who are seeking food are often compelled to break or bend the rules in order to have enough to eat.

Resistance in food systems can take many forms. To resist, people visit multiple food access places within a specific time period, even though this is against prevailing rules. As a workaround, they trade food items to better match their own food preferences or dietary restrictions. One participant explains, “If you go out to the parking lot of a food bank – watch people going in and coming out – it’s a swap meet!” Workarounds provide opportunities to promote dignity as they are part of a broader set of practices used to navigate uncertainty and prompt individual agency. Should one pay rent or buy food? Which takes precedence? Our respondents explain the difficult choices they have to make. As such, workarounds in this case are not passive. They are implemented to increase positive food outcomes: feeding oneself and one’s family.

Our study shows that everyday resistance and related workarounds are complicated and fundamentally an individual response, reflecting practices that challenge the structural dysfunctions of food access spaces. Often, food conscious respondents are disappointed by the lack of available nutritious food as food assistance heavily relies on processed foods which have a longer shelf life. Similarly, individual practices do not challenge persistent stigmas related to food assistance use. Recipients are often thought to take advantage of food assistance programs. Workarounds remain an individual form of resistance embedded in the collectivity as people respond to their situations within the larger food system.

Efforts toward dignity, and food and social justice, are enacted by and embodied in people’s day-to-day lives, even if not always recognised as such. Individual agency is key as the first mobilising step toward change. Our work illustrates that even though everyday resistance strategies and workarounds are often overlooked, they are both powerful and empowering. To be sure, swapping food in parking lots is unlikely to dismantle ineffective food systems, but these practices are not completely disconnected from the collective either. Everyday resistance and workarounds have the potential to act as a bridge for individuals within their communities to encourage further transformation (Raridon, Mix, and Einwohner 2021).

In order to bring about long-lasting change, future research should investigate how food sovereignty, whereby people have access to sufficient, nutritious, and culturally appropriate foods, is collectively implemented in centralised or fragmented food systems. Beyond food assistance, research should continue to address food access in the broader context of government assistance and anti-poverty struggles. In the meantime, given current on-going threats to rights and justice in numerous forms, everyday resistance and workaround strategies are important tools in confronting fragmented, unjust, or hostile systems – both food or otherwise.

References

Bedore, Melanie. 2018. “‘ I Was Purchasing It; It Wasn’t given to Me’: Food Project Patronage and the Geography of Dignity Work.” The Geographical Journal 184:218–28. doi: 10.1111/geoj.12251.

Johansson, Anna, and Stellan Vinthagen. 2016. “Dimensions of Everyday Resistance: An Analytical Framework.” Critical Sociology 42(3):417–35. doi: 10.1177/0896920514524604.

Raridon, Andrew, Tamara L. Mix, and Rachel L. Einwohner. 2021. “‘Workarounds and Roadblocks’: Risk and Resistance among Food Movement Activists.” Social Currents 8(2):182–98. doi: 10.1177/2329496520965627.

Schweitzer, Julie, Tamara L. Mix, and Jimmy J. Esquibel. 2024. “Negotiating Dignity and Social Justice in Community Food Access Spaces.” Safer Communities. doi: 10.1108/SC-08-2023-0036.