Introduction
Finland identifies itself as a Nordic welfare state. The ethos of Nordic welfare refers to a public responsibility for society and its citizens based on strong democracy, a determination to reduce poverty, inequality and vulnerability based on the principle of equality, as well as recognising basic rights of all citizens and implementing them in the spirit of universalism (Hänninen, Reference Hänninen and Pajukoski2010). Accordingly, during the expansion of the welfare state in the 1970s and 1980s, people became accustomed to the idea that the basic needs of all citizens would thereby be satisfied. Food insecurity or hunger was unimaginable.
However, the exceptionally deep economic recession at the beginning of the 1990s ended the expansion of the welfare state, leading Finland somewhat away from the Nordic welfare regime in the direction of the Anglo-Saxon model, entailing more means-testing for welfare benefits. This change was partly an outcome of cuts in social security during the economic slump, especially towards the end of the decade, with an increasingly explicit transformation in national social policy. In line with workfare, employment was strongly emphasised as the best social policy via incentives and activation measures, and, thus, the status of income support as specific means-tested social assistance, previously considered to be a marginal form of social welfare in the Nordic context, also changed (Keskitalo, Reference Keskitalo2008). Instead of being seen as the very last and supplementary form of social welfare benefits, it became the primary source of basic security for a growing number of people relying on income support. The number of people on the dole doubled between 1990 and 1996, increasing from 300,000 to 600,000; it was about 400,000 in 2014. This was a truly significant rise in the number of people compelled to rely on means-tested social assistance, mainly due to increasing long-term unemployment (Heikkilä and Sihvo, Reference Heikkilä, Sihvo, Heikkilä and Uusitalo1997; THL, 2014: 2).
At the same time, measures endorsing increased income inequality consequent on a focus on supporting economic growth and international competitiveness were strengthened (for example, VM, 2005; Taimio, Reference Taimio2010; Saari and Pessi, Reference Saari, Pessi, Pessi and Saari2011). This clearly demonstrated that those in power had also given up the traditional welfare policy goal of eradicating poverty, and had adopted a more modest social aim of merely managing it. Under these circumstances, income differentials, as measured by the Gini coefficient, increased from 22.2 in 1995 to 27.2 in 2012 (Statistics Finland, 2013). Research across OECD countries showed that, from the mid-1990s until the financial crisis in 2008, growth in inequality was faster in Finland than in any other OECD country (Ruotsalainen, Reference Ruotsalainen2011).
The most important drivers of increasing income differentials were a taxation policy favouring well-paid people, a relatively high unemployment rate compared to the years before the recession, and a decade of freezing basic security benefits under an austerity policy. In contrast to the Nordic ethos of welfare, these social policy developments increasingly left people with insufficient income to meet their basic needs. Income levels of people relying on welfare benefits lag significantly behind other Finns, and poverty among benefit recipients has increased (Ahola and Hiilamo, Reference Ahola and Hiilamo2013: 18). For example, residential costs have run well ahead of the level of housing benefits, which are supposed to help meet them. In many cases, labour market support, standard housing benefit and income support together are failing to ensure sufficient means for minimum subsistence (THL, 2011). One consequence has been the generation, promotion and maintenance of a growing need for charitable food aid. According to the latest systematic welfare survey produced by the National Institute of Health and Welfare, 20 per cent of people who are living on income support also replied that they had relied on food aid when asked about that. This figure was under 2 per cent among other respondents (Lehtelä and Kestilä, Reference Lehtelä, Kestilä, Vaarama, Karvonen, Kestilä, Moisio and Muuri2014). In other words, it can be argued that changes in social policy have meant the social security system now fails to guarantee food security for the most vulnerable people in Finland. Bread lines, organised by the Salvation Army, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF) and some private actors, emerged for the first time during the deep recession in the mid-1990s. Since then these have become permanent and have been supplemented by the food banks organised by the ELCF and the canteens managed by associations of the unemployed. There is no official estimate of the numbers dependent on charitable food, and assessments of such figures vary widely. For example, the ELCF, the largest distributor of food aid, calculates that the number exceeds tens of thousands of people (out of a population of 5.5 million) per year (Kirkkopalvelut, 2014). In addition, according to ongoing research covering the ten biggest cities in Finland, 20,000 people receive food aid every week (Saari, Reference Saari2014).
However, the emergence and persistence of food aid in the Finnish context cannot be explained solely as a consequence of particular social policies; in practice, it was the outcome of policy actions to support economic development by different sectors working independently and without any coordination, during the 1990s. This article firstly examines how charitable food aid has been entrenched as a solution to Finnish problems of hunger within a Nordic welfare regime; secondly, it traces the links between the establishment of food charity and problematics in the current food system, in particular the generation and usage of so-called ‘surplus food’. It therefore explores whether, in the context of the Nordic ethos of welfare, systematising the use of surplus food as emergency food aid should be seen as part of a solution to, or, in fact, is part of the problem of, entrenched food poverty.
Origins and development of food aid
During the 1970s and 1980s, people in Finland came to believe that the welfare state would guarantee the basic needs of all citizens. The deep economic recession at the beginning of the 1990s, however, revealed weaknesses in the social safety net for the most vulnerable people. The first news of food poverty or even actual hunger was made public through some non-government organisation (NGO)-activists working in voluntary organisations (Hänninen and Karjalainen, Reference Hänninen, Karjalainen, Hänninen and Karjalainen1994: 274). By 1993, the National Research and Development Agency for Health and Welfare estimated that, during the previous twelve months, approximately 100,000 Finnish people (3.2 per cent of the population over fifteen years) had experienced such an extreme situation where ‘the fridge was empty and there was no money to buy food’ (Kontula and Koskela, Reference Kontula and Koskela1993).
According to Karjalainen (Reference Karjalainen, Hänninen, Karjalainen, Lehtelä and Silvasti2008), in the early 1990s politicians showed no real interest in the political circumstances surrounding evidence of food insecurity. The primary reaction was to deny the problem completely. The results of these studies and headlines in the media were basically argued to be exaggerated; the hunger of Finnish people was belittled or denied by comparing it with ‘starvation in the third world’. Where such situations were recognised, the reason for them was mainly attributed to characteristics of the hungry people themselves by stigmatising them as the ‘new helpless’, ‘new poor’ or as excessively indebted. And, finally, the hunger problem was simply ignored by claiming that the supply of free food in the bread lines and food banks inevitably created demand. The defects in the social security system were not seriously scrutinised (Silvasti and Karjalainen, Reference Silvasti, Karjalainen, Riches and Silvasti2014). In general, even though food is a basic prerequisite for a healthy active life, and such a serious problem of hunger had emerged, this issue did not awaken the authorities to pay any particular attention to food needs and nutrition as a social policy issue. Since domestic food security was seen as a self-evident part of basic income support, which itself is a legal right for everyone living permanently in the country, it was presumed to be automatically addressed.
However, minimum social security in Finland has been repeatedly shown to be too low for decent living (for example, Kuivalainen, Reference Kuivalainen2010). The lowest benefits are not always sufficient to enable people's basic needs for food, medication, housing, heating and electricity to be satisfied. Of life's necessities, food is usually the most ‘elastic’ part of the budget (for example, Riches Reference Riches and Riches1997a: 10; Poppendieck, Reference Poppendieck1999: 57). Hence, people living in vulnerable economic situations may face such hardships that they cannot afford to buy enough food after they have paid for all other essentials.
When the Finnish welfare state did not respond to the hunger problem, the ELCH became the largest distributor of food aid over and above other faith-based organisations and associations for unemployed people (Mavi, 2011). The first charitable food distributor, and still the largest actor in the field, is the ELCH in Myllypuro, Helsinki, which has organised a bread line with the help of voluntary workers since 1993. The first food bank was also founded by the ELCH in Tampere in 1995. The stories behind the establishment of both of these pioneering operations are almost identical: the deacony workers of the church noticed in the early 1990s that, during the night time, mothers and fathers from ordinary Finnish families suffering from serious economic distress because of the slump were digging in rubbish bins behind supermarkets to find food for themselves and their families. These deacony workers went to the supermarkets and asked if they themselves could collect food that was to be thrown away as ‘waste’, but which was in fact still edible, and take it to the church building so that people could come and pick it up there to avoid the humiliation of digging in rubbish bins. The supermarkets agreed to this practice, which became an established means of redistributing ‘waste’ food to needy people in a more acceptable way. It has to be underlined that, originally, the delivery of food aid was considered an expression of a state of emergency; it was meant to be a temporary relief in the deep recession. Nobody within the ELCH imagined that public responsibility for the most vulnerable in society would be permanently delegated to the third sector (Karjalainen, Reference Karjalainen, Heikkilä, Karjalainen and Malkavaara2000; Malkavaara, Reference Malkavaara and Mäkinen2002).
The economic recession was over by the end of the 1990s, and in the first years of the 2000s economic growth in Finland was strong. However, the social policy practiced during the recession had seriously damaged the social safety net for the most vulnerable people, and during this period of growth no notable improvements to the safety net were made. As a result, economic inequality between socio-economic groups grew significantly (THL, 2011).
Thus, given these circumstances perpetuating inequality, by 2013 183 congregations delivered food aid in more than 200 places of distribution (Kirkkopalvelut, 2014). Many of the recipients today are totally dependent on charity food. Moreover, according to the Church Resource Agency, some of them would starve without food aid (Pajunen, Reference Pajunen2012). That is because the levels of welfare benefits are so low that they simply cannot afford to buy enough healthy, good quality food once they have paid for all the other essentials. Thus, it is reasonable to argue that, during the last twenty years, charity food aid that was originally meant to just be provisional emergency relief during an exceptional recession has become a regular established way of ‘fixing the holes’ in the social safety net of the Finnish welfare state. This implies Finland has moved from an ideal of universalism towards a situation that has been dominant in other countries, for example in North America, for a long time: namely, that vulnerable people are increasingly dependent on church and charity organisations for survival while, at the same time, the state and the public sector refuse to officially recognise the existence of food insecurity or refuse to engage adequately in concrete actions to eradicate food poverty which, again, induces food insecurity (Riches, Reference Riches and Riches1997b; Poppendieck, Reference Poppendieck1999).
According to the Church Resource Agency (Kirkkopalvelut, 2014), during 2013 large families with many children were recipients of the most food delivered in Finland. Other groups in continuous need of help are low-income pensioners and people with problems of mental health and/or substance abuse. In addition, students and immigrants make up growing groups of recipients. The parts of the country were most food aid was delivered were Eastern and Northern Finland, where geographic or physical access to food has become even more difficult due to the closure of village shops and lengthening distances needed to obtain groceries. This evidence suggests that food poverty is at least as much a rural as an urban problem (Lehtelä and Kestilä, Reference Lehtelä, Kestilä, Vaarama, Karvonen, Kestilä, Moisio and Muuri2014).
Inconsistent policies and practices in food policy
A particular national food policy addressing socio-economic inequalities in food access and consumption has not been deemed necessary in the Nordic regime of welfare which makes it a priority to meet these needs. However, in the circumstances of welfare state restructuration due to the financial crisis of the 1990s, the lack of such a coherent national food policy has turned out to be problematic in Finland (for example, ETL, 2011). In addition, some serious policy mismatches have occurred which have had a strong impact on policies to address poverty, and which have served to entrench charity food delivery. To make sense of the origin and development of food aid practices, the involvement of charitable food aid in Finland can be understood as an intersection of the normally separate policies of trade, environment, social welfare and agriculture. Lang and Barling (Reference Lang and Barling2012) argue that such connections between policies should be made visible and democratically accountable. Under these circumstances, it is reasonable to examine food aid within the matrix of the food system.
According to the OECD (1981: 10), the food system is a set of activities and relationships that interact to determine what, how much, by what means and for whom food is produced. The food system is a sub-set of the overall national, international and global economy, involving a complex set of operations and transformations of inputs which ultimately result in food being supplied to consumers. The quality of the food system can be judged as to how well it guarantees access to food to all people. The food system consists of four types of activities: producing, processing and packaging, distributing and retailing, purchasing and consuming food. All these categories comprise social, economic, political and environmental processes and dimensions. Until now, the dominant industrial food system has been regarded as a great success. However, in the current context of environmental, social, political and economic changes, the capacity of the food system to produce food security, previously considered self-evident in first world countries, is endangered. Yet, food security at all levels, including the household, should be the main outcome and a principal policy objective of a functioning food system (Ericksen, Reference Ericksen2007).
In Finland, the entrenchment and the development of practical forms of charity food delivery were strongly determined not only by the economic recession and the freezing or cutting of social security, but also by reaction to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and acceptance of the European Union's Food Distribution Programme for the Most Deprived Persons of the Community (MDP) in 1996. The acceptance of the MDP resulted in the entrenchment of food aid as part of Finnish national food policy, because EU food offered, for the first time, a regular, nationwide, large-scale supply of food for third sector distributors. Thus, the MDP aid became the most important stock for delivered food for many congregations and associations and, most importantly, it was very well organised and institutionalised. During the mid-1990s, a professionally organised and highly institutionalised corporate food donation system, coordinated by processors, retailers and wholesalers to direct surplus food to the charities, did not exist. It is thus fair to say that the acceptance of MDP stabilised and institutionalised food aid delivery in Finland by offering a steady, reliable, nationwide supply of food for distribution to those in need. It is striking that a decision which had considerable implications for social policy and poverty was made by the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry as part of their responsibilities under the CAP (Ohisalo, Reference Ohisalo, Niemelä and Saari2013).
At the EU-level, the MDP meant, in practice, the management of agricultural surpluses (effectively, overproduction) by buying them up as intervention stocks when prices fell below a certain level. These stocks could then be redistributed as ‘food aid’, by taking certain products (for example, milk powder, butter or grain) out of intervention stocks and directing them to the MDP. Furthermore, when there was insufficient surplus in intervention stocks, some products were bought directly on the market for distribution as food aid (Mavi, 2010). This meant that publicly funded emergency food was used as a kind of safety valve for the global food marketing system, and, at the same time, food aid for poor people offered a morally and politically acceptable way to deal with agricultural overproduction without causing excessive heavy fluctuations in market prices. The importance of EU food aid in institutionalising charitable food delivery is also recognised in some other MDP participant countries, for example in Spain (Pérez de Armiño, Reference Pérez de Armiño, Riches and Silvasti2014) and in Estonia (Kõre, Reference Kõre, Riches and Silvasti2014).
However, current ongoing reforms to the CAP, together with increases in food prices on global markets, are predicted to mean that agricultural commodity markets in the EU will stay balanced without the need for market intervention. Without the decline in intervention stocks, the MDP lost the rationale underpinning it as a part of the CAP and was discontinued in 2013. Nevertheless, Finland, unlike the other Nordic countries, supported the establishment of a new Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD). A new replacement fund, as well as a new programme, came into effect during the summer 2014; so far, there has not been sufficient experience for a proper ex post impact assessment.
Essentially, the MDP was never actually part of a social or poverty reduction policy, but, rather, it was an integral part of the CAP, intended as marketing support and, therefore, directly tied to trade policy. Moreover, the EU does not have any mandate to regulate the national social policies of the member states. Under these circumstances, during the period 1996–2013, social policy and governance of EU food aid belonged to different domains of administrative responsibility in Finland. Poverty relief fell within the remit of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health (MSAH), whereas the MDP, as a part of the CAP, was within the remit of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF). There was no cooperation or coordination of issues relating to food aid between the ministries responsible for social and poverty policy and for the CAP and agriculture.
It is clear that in Finland decisions regarding the MDP were made first and foremost in the name of agricultural and trade policies, posing particular challenges for social policy. As a Nordic welfare state Finland should not have accepted or even needed the MDP aid (Silvasti and Karjalainen, Reference Silvasti, Karjalainen, Riches and Silvasti2014). Nevertheless, the MAF annually adopted a resolution to accept it, and the Agency of Rural Affairs, which governed the MDP, operated directly with the ELCH and the NGOs in distributing EU food. This institutional connection partly explains why delivering food aid in Finland ended up as a mission of churches and NGOs. Firstly, the ELCF and some NGOs had taken voluntary responsibility for addressing the problem of hunger during the recession in the early 1990s. The ELCF thus not only had some experience, but also, by the time of the MDP, a nationwide network for the delivery of food aid through congregations and an educated deaconry personnel. In addition, abandoning the most vulnerable was not an acceptable option within the Christian community. Secondly, the official social policy executed by the MSAH had nothing to do with the acceptance of MDP, nor had it any mandate for policy actions whatsoever within the remit of the MAF. Consequently, the MSAH completely opted out of the activity. This is partly because of political and ideological reasons, but also because, being without mandate within the CAP or national agricultural policy, the MSAH was powerless. It is unlikely that the situation will change under a new FEAD, which will not act under the CAP and the MAF, but as part of the EU's Cohesion Policy; it will thus be administered in Finland by the Ministry of Employment and the Economy. Consequently, as far as EU food aid is concerned, the position of the MSAH probably remains unchanged (Silvasti and Karjalainen, Reference Silvasti, Karjalainen, Riches and Silvasti2014).
A further element of policy mismatches is provided through the Finnish corporate sector grocery markets, where the distribution of food is controlled by a strong oligopoly. There are two retail chains, the S-Group and the Kesko Group, who dominate 80 per cent of grocery trade. One of the consequences of these chains rebuilding their logistics to maximise profits has been the closure of small grocery shops, particularly in remote areas. For those living in these parts, physical access to food has been significantly reduced. According to the Church Resource Agency, most of the food aid in 2013 was delivered in Eastern and Northern Finland precisely because of difficulties in accessing food. The most remote areas are also probably the most dependent on the EU food aid due to lack of private donations. This means that in the prevailing market-based food system it is possible to be food insecure not only because of affordability of food but also because of lack of physical accessibility to food. It is also notable that, in the context of corporate social responsibility, donating food to those in need does not compensate for strategies which increase household food insecurity in the more remote countryside.
Surplus food as food charity
The prevailing food system is socially and morally questionable in richer countries in terms of the huge amounts of edible food it generates which is not purchased or consumed, and therefore regarded as ‘waste’. Even the EU Parliament has recognised the problem. In 2014, the Commission's communication Towards a Circular Economy: A Zero Waste Programme for Europe, and the related legislative proposal to review recycling and other waste targets puts forward objectives for food waste reduction. It includes a proposal to develop national food waste prevention strategies with the aim of reducing food waste by at least 30 per cent by 2025 (European Commission, 2014).
Large-scale charities delivering food often claim that they have two parallel goals: poor relief and environmental protection. This is where environmental policy can be argued to overlap with social and poverty policies, often without careful reasoning about fundamental questions of social justice and equality. For example, it is typical that the motto of the European Federation of Food Banks (FEBA, 2015) is, ‘Against hunger and food waste’, while the Global FoodBanking Network (2015) claims that ‘food banking is the link between food waste and hunger’. Few openly challenge this linking of ‘waste’ as a solution to ‘hunger’.
In Finland, the level of food wasted is moderate by international comparisons (Koivupuro et al., Reference Koivupuro, Jalkanen, Katajajuuri, Reinikainen and Silvennoinen2010) but, nevertheless, it is recognised as a problem. Consequently, as part of the efforts to combat waste, food supervision authorities have relaxed previous regulations on the use of food stocks near their expiry dates from grocery stores to charities, which are now allowed to freeze food donated on the expiry date, or to offer food as part of a hot meal one day after expiry (Evira, 2013). However, environmental motives for food aid distribution are not usually clearly expressed, although awareness of the amounts and environmental impact of waste is growing. Rescuing edible food from landfill as a resource for people in need seems to be the right thing to do, and resonates well with the efforts by food supervision authorities to cut food waste by directing more food near its expiry date from retailers to charities.
Reducing food waste is necessary not only for environmental but also for ethical reasons. Nevertheless, the critical question here is whether we should accept charitable food aid as a means to reduce waste. Such a linkage might be supported by neo-liberal economic thinking, but what kind of human or moral message is signalled by such policy? Why is it inappropriate in the Nordic countries for charitable food aid to be accepted as the solution for poverty relief? Firstly, food security is usually understood as ‘access by all people at all times to enough food for an active healthy life. Food security presupposes the ready availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food and the assured ability to acquire acceptable food in socially acceptable ways’ (Andersson, Reference Andersson1990: 1560). Food banks, soup kitchens and bread lines are not socially acceptable ways of acquiring food for oneself or for one's family in the Nordic countries. It should be underlined that charity food is never an entitlement, it is a gift. This means that, although clients of the charities are usually well treated, they do not have a legal right to food aid. Under these circumstances, charity is by no means comparable to public social services, which are accessible, and for which all citizens are eligible, equally (Silvasti, Reference Silvasti, Matthies and Uggerhöj2014).
Secondly, there is no precise regulation for unofficial help offered by the third sector, and, consequently, the principles and practices of giving aid can, and do, vary widely between charitable organisations. Clients cannot presume that they will be treated as equals or equally. It is common that people relying on food aid experience humiliation, indignity and shame. Food aid based on charity depends strongly on both donated food and money. Often, there is simply not enough food, or the food does not match the needs of recipients, and the selection of food available may be unpredictable (Kirkkopalvelut, 2014). Consequently, having to rely on charitable food aid may be interpreted as a form of residual social policy supplemented by private donations, not as the universalism traditionally integral to the Nordic welfare model.
Thirdly, food aid is often demotivating and, at worst, its receipt can be a humiliating experience. Independence is one of the core values in western cultures. People who need help to meet one of their basic needs are, by definition, dependent on others, and dependence is often associated with inadequacy (Poppendieck, Reference Poppendieck1999: 240). Moreover, in a consumer society, freedom of choice and consumer sovereignty are important principles. People dependent on food aid lose part of their freedom of choice, because they have to accept charity food even if it is not what they want or actually need (Tarasuk, Reference Tarasuk2005). Indeed, it can be argued that the expression of the right to food under a capitalist food system, where citizens are constructed only as consumers, can mean that human rights are reduced to mere private business relationships. Thus, if consumers, for some reason or another, do not have money, they do not have a right to food either, and simply have to accept charity.
Fourthly, a fair or efficient solution to waste food should not be by organising a secondary (second class) food market to distribute residual food for residual citizens underneath the primary (first class) market (Teron and Tarasuk, Reference Teron and Tarasuk1999). In the capitalist market economy, consumers with purchasing power in fact pay the costs of the secondary markets. Instead, the primary market and prevailing global food system needs to be rationalised, reorganised and made more effective, with the connection between national and international agricultural and trade policies and poverty relief made transparent. As alluded to above, it is the decisions in agricultural and trade policy which have created the grounds for both overproduction and intervention stocks; poor people are seen as a way of using overproduction in legitimate and politically correct ways (DeLind, Reference DeLind1994; Tarasuk and Eakin, Reference Tarasuk and Eakin2003). At the national level, donating food to charities offers retailers and processors a means of improving their public images as socially responsible enterprises.
Conclusions
The emergence and entrenchment of food aid cannot be fully explained as a social and poverty policy issue in Finland; thus food aid needs to be understood, firstly, as an intersection of the normally separate national polices in social welfare, agriculture, trade and environment and, secondly, as a reflection of the complexities of the global food system. Analysis of the Finnish case has revealed the incompatible aims of separate sectoral policies and their impacts on charitable food aid. The most serious policy mismatch was between national social and poverty policy on the one hand, and the Common Agricultural Policy on the other. The acceptance of the MDP under the CAP led to a stabilised and institutionalised food aid delivery in Finland, offering, for the first time, a steady, reliable and nationwide supply of food for those distributing charitable food. As far as one can tell, the MDP was never intended to be part of a national poverty reduction policy; more, it was integral to the CAP as marketing support and directly tied to international trade policy.
Nevertheless, during 1996 to 2013, there was no cooperation or coordination of food aid management between the MSAH responsible for social policy and the MAF responsible for the MDP. On the contrary, the MSAH completely opted out of any involvement in charitable food aid, partly for political and ideological reasons, but also because, without any mandate within the CAP, the MSAH was practically powerless in relation to EU food aid. It was the Agency of Rural Affairs which governed use of the MDP, operating directly with the ELCH and the NGOs to distribute EU food. Thus the delivery of food aid became a mission of the churches and the NGOs.
In summary, therefore, given the different goals and contexts of different sectoral policies, it is apparent that there was probably no clear intention to establish permanent systems for delivering charitable food in Finland. It was, instead, an unfortunate result of different policy actions and economic developments during the 1990s that occurred in tandem but which were, in practice, largely independent of one another.
Moreover, the acceptance of charity food aid as a central mechanism of the new Finnish poverty policy drastically disconnects Finland from the Nordic welfare model. It makes clear society's unwillingness to challenge increasing social inequality, including widening income differentials, and loss of the spirit of universalism. It also serves as a reminder that society has abandoned former political aims of eradicating poverty. Under the Nordic welfare regime, it is not enough to aspire to a society where voluntary workers and charities take care of the nutritional needs of the most vulnerable. The solution for poverty is, firstly, by refurbishing the basic social security system, and secondly, where people's ability to provide for their own food needs is weakened, because, for example, of problems with substance abuse or mental health, they should be offered access to treatment and services which address those problems, and which thus also help improve their food security. Finally, for those facing under- or unemployment, the solution should be in strengthening their labour market position (Hiilamo and Karjalainen, Reference Hiilamo, Karjalainen and Taimio2010).
In practice, reliance on a system of charity food aid seems to open the door to political forces seeking to reduce the existing social security system and to increase inequality (Poppendieck, Reference Poppendieck, Magdoff, Bellamy Foster and Buttel2000). Charity food aid can be interpreted as a form of residual social policy supplemented by private charity opposing the universalism integral to the Nordic welfare model.
Charitable food aid cannot be accepted as a viable solution in the Nordic welfare regime, which has been constructed in the egalitarian and universalistic spirit of public responsibility. In the framework of neo-liberal thinking, the acceptance of food aid as a means of decreasing food waste may be an appropriate strategy, but the moral message of this kind of policy is inevitably cruel and inappropriate within the Nordic framework. The right to food is a human right. Charity food, by contrast, is never an entitlement, only a gift: recipients have no legal rights to food aid and charities are not comparable to public social services: they do not offer legitimate access to all citizens, equally. Furthermore, the positive cultural status accruing to charitable work normalises poverty and legitimates personal generosity as an answer to major social, political and economic disorders. This implies that the flip side of charity is decreasing social justice: charity in general, and charitable food aid in particular, readily disguise the attack on social rights (Poppendieck, Reference Poppendieck1999: 6).
Acknowledgements
The research was supported by the Academy of Finland, project number 21000015231.
