Learning mutual aid: food justice public pedagogy and community fridge organizing online

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes how participants within the community fridge movement use social media to facilitate informal learning and organize improvisational food justice through mutual aid. I offer a qualitative analysis of 20 community fridge Instagram accounts from the US and Canada over three years, with attention to how they disrupt dominant food charity discourses – scarcity, saviorism, and surveillance – and disclose tensions with sustaining their work such as uneven labor burdens and the limits of online activism alone. As such, these accounts offer entry points into critical reflexivity about neoliberal stigma and learning alternative ways to practice radical care amid compounding crises and conditions of food apartheid. Bringing together research on mutual aid organizing, food justice communication, and public pedagogies online, I offer theoretical and applied insights into the role of mediated public pedagogy in food justice activism and the contingent everyday labor of sustaining decentralized mutual aid.

KEYWORDS:

• Food activism
• care work
• political education
• social media
• solidarity

Introduction

Living within crises requires learning and practicing mutual aid. Mutual aid refers to the often informal, radical care work that communities do for each other in the face of state and institutional neglect or catastrophe (Ghazal Aswad, 2024; Hobart & Kneese, 2020). Mutual aid’s emphasis on solidarity, not charity, invites reimagining our relationships, meeting each other’s immediate needs, and facilitating deeper political education for sustained collective action (Spade, 2020). In the context of food organizing, mutual aid lowers barriers to food access amid food apartheid, while bringing others into more liberatory food systems change (Giles, 2021; Roman-Alcalá, 2020). During recent crisis multipliers, however, public pedagogical encounters with mutual aid began to circulate more widely online (Google Trends, n.d.). This essay takes up how participants within one of the most celebrated mutual aid projects of late – community fridges – utilized social media for informal (un)learning about mutual aid principles and food justice praxis, although not without challenges.

Bringing together research on mutual aid organizing, food justice communication, and public pedagogies online, I analyze how those within the community fridge movement use their platforms to challenge prevailing food charity impulses and organize improvisational food justice. I offer a qualitative analysis of 20 community fridge Instagram accounts from the US and Canada over three years (2020–2023), with attention to how they disrupt dominant food charity discourses – scarcity, saviorism, and surveillance – thereby countering neoliberal stigma (de Souza, 2019, 2022) and bringing others into more relational and interdependent organizing. These accounts also disclose challenges with sustaining their work by candidly sharing testimony about uneven labor burdens, external threats, and the limits of online activism alone. In doing so, community fridge organizers invite critical reflexivity about tensions that can emerge within the everyday labor of food justice mutual aid and why they must be addressed. I conclude by offering theoretical and applied insights into contingent processes of mutual aid and the mediation of food justice public pedagogy online.

Mutual aid, food justice, and public pedagogies online

Research in communication on food justice organizing is growing (Broad, 2016; Dempsey, 2023; Gordon et al., 2022; LeGreco & Douglas, 2021; Schraedley et al., 2019). This essay contributes by focusing on community fridge organizing as one example of mutual aid. Mutual aid can be understood as informal and improvisational care work to meet each other’s basic needs ‘usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them’ (Spade, 2020, p. 7). Broadly, the community fridge movement refers to networked collectives that support free food access through the maintenance of ‘24/7’ public refrigerators and pantries where people can ‘take what you need, leave what you can.’ While community fridges fill in critical food infrastructure gaps to circumvent the barriers associated with food banks and pantries, they also serve another purpose online: to make visible the often invisible work of everyday mutual aid and bring others into distributed food justice organizing. I begin by first theorizing mutual aid, its histories, principles, and communicative practices of organizing. Then I describe how informal mutual aid food distribution networks can be conceptualized as improvising food justice, informed by research on intersectional food justice organizing and communication. Finally turning to research on public pedagogies, I explore the role of informal (un)learning in food justice mutual aid, as well as contingencies with doing so through social media.

Theorizing mutual aid organizing

Mutual aid offers a lifeline for collective survival. It fosters greater access to life-sustaining resources and encourages interdependence among otherwise disparate people (Hayes & Kaba, 2023; Spade, 2020). Cultivating infrastructures of care is especially vital amid deepening organized abandonment and structural vulnerabilities that reproduce grossly disproportionate classed, raced, gendered, and ableist harm (Gilmore, 2008; Gordon, 2024; Hobart & Kneese, 2020). Care networks are necessary for enacting disability justice as well as for those ostracized from well-resourced institutional and biological familial structures, to strengthen collective access and build more interdependent communities (Mingus, 2017; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). Such communities are often hit first and worst by economic, health, and environmental crises, yet are the last to receive adequate and comprehensive relief (McKane et al., 2023; Reese & Johnson, 2022). In response, mutual aid helps materially redistribute life-sustaining needs – like food, shelter, safety, electricity, medical aid, legal services, bail funds and money, child and elder care, and more – through both ad hoc acts of solidarity or more sustained collectivized groups.

Historically, mutual aid finds its roots within and alongside anti-ableist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial worldmaking. Perhaps some of the most well-known are exemplified in the survival programs of The Black Panther Party, The Young Lords, and connections forged among the Mexican American Sociedades Mutualistas (Heynen, 2009; Rivera, 1984; Wanzer-Serrano, 2015). African American cooperative economics is rich with practices of mutual aid – from the planning and survival networks among enslaved Africans to cooperative farming post-emancipation, and well into the establishment of hundreds of formal and mutual aid societies, fraternities, and secret societies into the twentieth century (Du Bois, 1907; Nembhard, 2014; White, 2018). From Indigenous water protectors caring for each other on the frontlines (Estes & Dhillon, 2019), to the shared labor of Zapatistas’ solidarity economies (Gahman, 2017), centuries-held values of reciprocity also inform oppositional organizing for a less violent world. Organizing autonomously is not without risk, however, as some face criminalization and coordinated infiltration (Giles, 2021; Gordon, 2024).

Those who participate in mutual aid organizing often describe their work as solidarity, not charity (Hobart & Kneese, 2020; Spade, 2020). In doing so, they distinguish themselves from the nonprofit industrial complex whose dramatic growth since the 1980s corresponds with extreme divestment from the public sector (Gilmore, 2007; Wolch, 1990). Such a historical development, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) argues, transformed state agencies into essentially ‘policing bodies, whose role became to oversee service provisions rather than provide it themselves’ (p. 45). As the nonprofit sector has swelled, its newly professionalized relationship with state and corporate actors has limited the kinds of funding streams, direct services, and advocacy efforts that are accessible to even smaller social justice-driven nonprofit groups (Ganesh & McAllum, 2012). To secure funding, charitable 501(c)(3)s increasingly must narrow their organizational priorities, reinforce hierarchies, and compete for resources. Nonprofits face other tensions like pressures to professionalize, widening power differences between funders and beneficiaries, bureaucratic barriers to directly providing resources to those in need, and hesitancy to advocate for systemic change (Dempsey, 2012; Jensen & Meisenbach, 2015; Sanders & McClellan, 2012). Anti-hunger organizations are not immune from these pressures within the existing corporate food regime, like their increasing reliance on corporate philanthropy and their failure to address the root causes of hunger and poverty (Fisher, 2017).

Given this neoliberal restructuring, learning to work differently through mutual aid requires critical education and communicative interventions. As long-time mutual aid organizer and legal scholar Dean Spade (2020) writes: ‘Learning to work differently is vital for our movements and for our own well-being and survival’ (p. 127). Coordinating people with vastly different needs, positionalities, experiences, skills, and constraints requires ongoing communicative work. Unreflexive involvement of those new to mutual aid – especially those without experiential knowledge of intersectional harms – may inadvertently sideline the voices and participation of those who already depend on mutual aid to survive (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2021). Learning and unlearning are needed to resist defaulting to engrained hierarchies, secrecy, competition, overpromising, paternalism, perfectionism, reinforcing scarcity cultures, or formalizing in such a way that co-opts the more radical and oppositional intentions of mutual aid (Lachowicz & Donaghey, 2021; Spade, 2020). Instead, mutual aid takes practice facilitating equitable discussion, making decisions, managing conflict, organizing teams, receiving and negotiating money, welcoming new people, and showing up in dialogue over time (Fernandes-Jesus et al., 2021; Spade, 2020). While mutual aid can be the connective tissue that helps prefigure alternative relations and worlds, organizing is an ongoing communicative accomplishment.

Improvising food justice

Mutual aid food distribution networks, such as community fridges, offer examples of the informal and creative ways communities improvise food justice. Food justice refers to collective action to address intersecting structural inequities in the food system while deepening one’s political analysis of why those injustices exist. Food justice acknowledges the raced, classed, gendered, and colonial dimensions of food system inequalities, like racialized food apartheid (Reese, 2019), labor, health, and environmental injustices (Alkon & Guthman, 2017), and contests the monopoly of corporate anti-hunger philanthropy (Fisher, 2017; Poppendieck, 1998). As an expansive orientation, food justice invites political education about dominant food system ideologies and organizing strategies to facilitate individual and collective transformation (Gordon et al., 2021; Levkoe, 2006). Although food justice communication and praxis take different forms (Dempsey, 2023; Gordon & Hunt, 2019) and are not without tensions, mutual aid is an ‘inherently politicized approach’ to self-organizing to meet people’s needs in the present alongside a long-term vision for food systems change (Roman-Alcalá, 2020, para 4).

Food has long played a role in mutual aid organizing (Giles, 2021; Reese & Johnson, 2022). This is because controlling food, and thus the body, remains a technique of power organized through ideals of ‘deservingness’ and the absence of a right to food (Heynen, 2009; Pine & de Souza, 2023). Food justice mutual aid challenges the belief that food is a scarce resource that must be hoarded or wasted and that one must prove their worth to eat. Communication scholars have highlighted varied epistemologies and practices that inform the care work of informally distributing food – from the ‘community keeping’ among Liberian market women’s susu groups (Cruz, 2015, p. 434) to seed and food sharing of dalit women farmers organizing against global agribusiness in India (Dutta & Thaker, 2019). In the US, crises affect how food distribution networks reorganize their communication infrastructures to keep people fed (LeGreco et al., 2021) and reframe the importance of food waste recovery amid already impacted supply chains (Cooks, 2021). While partnerships between social justice-oriented community-based groups can scale and sustain the work of mutual aid, participants also must reflect on how to garner funding, negotiate different political values and organizing strategies, or tell persuasive stories that bring others into collaboration (Broad, 2016).

Community fridges in particular aim to circumvent the extensive paperwork, eligibility requirements, and ongoing scrutiny that many food assistance recipients traditionally encounter. Rebecca de Souza (2019) describes how food assistance systems are upheld through ‘neoliberal stigma’ that subjects recipients to poverty governance where they are ‘surveilled, disciplined, and brought into submission through stringent and less than adequate social programs’ (p. 29). These programs are particularly racialized and operate through carceral logics of suspicion and shaming participants as if hunger is a result of individual failure or inherent deficit (de Souza, 2022). Accessing SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) in the US also requires extensive and ongoing documentation (income, citizenship, disability status, and more), and many states place restrictions on what one can purchase. Maggie Dickinson (2020) argues that SNAP operates as essentially a workfare program requiring recipients to seek and accept low-wage work to receive much-needed services. At food pantries and food banks, recipients may again be required to prove their deservingness through documentation so provider organizations can maintain their tax-exempt status. Recipients may also encounter implicitly biased volunteers that perpetuate racist and classist tropes by surveilling recipients’ behavior or making patronizing remarks (de Souza, 2019, 2022).

In contrast, mutual aid aims to disrupt the ‘giver/receiver’ binary that positions food insecure communities as without agency (Ivancic, 2021, p. 1041). Mutual aid’s emphasis on mutuality and solidarity reframes power dynamics reinforced through communicative practices and upends hierarchical models of food organizing that perpetuate them. However, the deeply engrained beliefs within neoliberal capitalism – scarcity, individualism, meritocracy, and others – and the colonial and racializing ways they are affirmed, may still influence participation in informal food organizing. Reflexively unlearning these impulses is a necessary part of enacting food justice and mutual aid.

Public pedagogies online

As discussed earlier, learning and unlearning are often inherent in mutual aid, constituting opportunities for political education through public pedagogy. Public pedagogy describes the learning that takes place outside of formal schooling (Giroux, 2004), including among activists and resistance efforts (O’Malley & Nelson, 2013), and through digital social movement organizing (Karsgaard, 2023). As the legacy of Freirean popular education teaches us, revolutionary potential can emerge from reflexive, horizontal learning. Opportunities for iterative and co-constructed knowledge production are fundamental to the everyday life of social movements (Choudry, 2015) and within participative spaces of social justice organizing (Parker, 2020). Heather Zoller (2021) observes that ‘creating spaces for mutual learning facilitates shared strategizing in the face of resource challenges, and also aids in managing tensions,’ especially in food justice collective action (p. 6). Although co-constructing knowledge with others face-to-face is valuable for movement building, doing so during a global public health crisis like COVID-19 posed additional and disproportionate risks. Social media became a key organizing space to bring people into shared learning about both food justice and mutual aid.

Critical education and communication scholars have long named the public pedagogical potential of social media (Clark, 2020; Reid, 2009; Trifonas, 2012). Social media facilitates the constitution of counterpublics, the creation/circulation of knowledge, and the emergence of counternarratives that shape the terrain of public culture and debate (Jackson et al., 2020). Collectives use their platforms in ways that are not only oppositional but create a ‘discursive structure that generates shared meaning and knowledge among [their] participants’ (Satchel & Bush, 2021, p. 175). Virtual spaces can facilitate dwelling and coalition building, aid in the documentation and collection of resources, and amplify stories that may otherwise go unheard (MacDonald et al., 2021). Depending on a platform’s affordances and constraints, organizers must consider how to amplify knowledge that can translate into everyday material action offline as well (LeGreco & Leonard, 2015; Mann, 2018). Social movements must also navigate extractive infrastructures that contribute to data colonialism, surveillance, algorithmic bias, and seas of mis- and disinformation. Navigating tensions and impure politics is an inevitable part of making movements stronger and sustaining networked cultures of care (Pezzullo, 2023).

Social media helped amplify and circulate awareness about mutual aid, especially at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice uprisings in the summer of 2020 (Ferrari, 2022; Kneese, 2021). Instagram was among the platforms where this amplification of everyday mutual aid began to take place. As Carrie Karsgaard (2023) shares, ‘Instagram is indeed a space of political learning’ as it ‘supports local-based expression, not only via location tagging but also through the representational power of images and location hashtags, which enable exploration at the intersection of geography and social issues’ (p. 11). While counterhegemonic narratives may not always emerge from a platform like this, Instagram has facilitated horizontal learning, organizing, and dialogue across geographies as well as within situated locales.

Therefore, by bringing these conceptual framings together – mutual aid organizing, improvisational food justice, and public pedagogies online – my purpose is to consider how learning food justice and mutual aid occur through a platform like Instagram, and how this learning may foster critical reflexivity and materialize into emplaced direct action. Turning now to the community fridge movement, I explore the potential for food justice public pedagogy and some cautionary limitations shared by organizers themselves.

Community fridge organizing online

For many, recent compounding crises have exposed the fragility of the corporate food regime and increased attention to the importance of mutual aid. During the onset of the pandemic, for example, as states left many abandoned and nonprofits were strapped for resources, communities began addressing critical food infrastructure gaps on their own terms. Community fridges and pantries emerged as a tangible way to do so, serving as autonomous distribution hubs that facilitate free food sharing without eligibility restrictions to directly accessing food. Despite the colonial complexities of thermal dependence (Hobart, 2023), or a refrigerator’s vulnerability to climate impacts and breakdown, community fridges offer a generally low-barrier way to practice care work alongside sustained social movement.

Community fridges may begin with the labor of a single individual ‘host’ or ‘founder,’ and scale to large non-hierarchical networks of hundreds or thousands of people maintaining multiple fridges throughout dispersed locations over time. Organizers (also referred to as community members, participants, neighbors, or volunteers) sustain fridges by donating, stocking, and cleaning them, and strengthening relationships with others (neighbors, growers, vendors, kitchens, businesses, food rescue groups, and more) that can help keep fridges sanitary and full. Community fridge social media accounts provide a platform to post photos of donations, amplify events, and host crowdsourced artwork and other visuals to story narratives about their work. Core collectives may also form as participants communicate frequently through apps or text. Monetary donations garnered online help hosts pay for electricity or grocery runs when donations and gleaned food are irregular or low.

Some trace the origins of mediated community fridge organizing to Berlin, Germany’s peer-to-peer food saving and sharing web platform foodsharing.de in 2012 (Morrow, 2019). This model was amplified in 2016 when volunteers in Davis, California began documenting ‘freedges around the world’ on a website and crowdsourced map, which now lists over 550 locations globally (Freedge, n.d.). During the onset of the pandemic, knowledge about community fridges spread quickly online. Many were inspired by a long-standing New York City anarchist collective, In Our Hearts NYC (IOH NYC; @iohnyc) that had been organizing free stores, food sharing, community dinners, and disaster relief as part of Food Not Bombs since 2001 (In Our Hearts NYC, n.d.). Their expertise allowed them to adapt quickly and virtually assist other autonomous collectives in setting up fridges throughout New York City and New Jersey, and eventually others across major cities in the US, Canada, and temporarily in Mexico. For example, in the Instagram bio of Los Angeles Community Fridges – a network with now over 28,000 followers on the platform – they name their debt: ‘Powered by the community. Inspired by @iohnyc.’ Another, West Side Community Fridge in New Jersey, posted similarly: ‘Bigups to @iohnyc for helping me get set up.’

Instagram became a primary organizing tool for community fridges. The affordances of the platform – ability to circulate a bricolage of images, videos, and infographics, use geotagging, live reels, stories, captions, hashtags, bios, and highlights – helped draw people into everyday labor and tell stories about the value and ethics of their work. Regularly posting calls for volunteers or photos of filled or empty fridges, provided real-time updates of need. Most fridge accounts also attach ‘Linktrees’ to their account bios, allowing them to connect websites, fridge location maps, sign-up sheets (for drop-offs, cleaning, events, etc.), fundraising, legal resources, news articles, and readings about mutual aid. Some also linked crowdsourced toolkits to help others start their own community fridges. If a social media follower desired to deepen involvement, many accounts provided opportunities to attend planning meetings over video calls or communicate with core teams via end-to-end encrypted messaging apps. As time waned, social media content also served as a public memory archive of current and past organizing. Thus, while the material success of community fridge work requires in-person labor, distributed networks, awareness, and as I will show pedagogy, were facilitated substantially online.

Methods

As someone whose research has typically involved emplaced encounters with food system organizers, the onset of the 2020 pandemic transformed my own engagement with food justice communication research and practice. I, too, crowdsourced resources, attended calls with others developing mutual aid networks, distributed food and PPE, and witnessed the uptake in communication about mutual aid online. Later, I became involved with community fridge organizing through a former student, Sam Silva, who was both a participant and social media coordinator for their local community fridge. What emerged was an awareness that more were becoming familiar with the concept of mutual aid – including community fridges – through their more frequent, albeit not exclusive, encounters online. Therefore, while not a totalizing account of community fridge organizing, this project takes seriously the public pedagogical function of these accounts’ virtual communicative labor.

The archive for this qualitative analysis included Instagram accounts of 20 community fridge projects across cities in the US and Canada that were active between March 2020 and March 2023. Accounts chosen represented a range of locations, size of social media following (from 1,000 to over 20,000), and active presence on social media (see Table 1). While not exclusively an urban phenomenon, fridges that had active social media accounts tended to be in cities or adjacent suburbs. In some cases, individual Instagram accounts were made to provide updates about an individual fridge, while other accounts represented multiple or many fridges in their network. At the time of writing, the accounts analyzed altogether have posted over 5,000 Instagram ‘posts’ (captioned photos and videos) as well as thousands of temporary ‘stories’ (some of which were archived under ‘highlights’). Supplementary materials linked through Linktrees, provide additional context for how collectives articulate the values and philosophies informing their work. Linked material included their websites, fridge location maps, organizing toolkits, sign-up sheets, legal resources, videos and stories, and scholarly and activist readings to foster accessible political education.

Table 1. Community fridge collectives and networks.

Instagram handle	Location	Fridges*
@iohnyc	New York City, NY, USA	169
@lacommunityfridges	Los Angeles, CA, USA	18
@miamicommunityfridge	Miami, FL, USA	10
@seattlecommunityfridge	Seattle, WA, USA	7
@cf___to	Toronto, ON, CAN	6
@southphlcommunityfridge	Philadelphia, PA, USA	5
@marincommunityfridges	Marin County, CA, USA	4
@denvercommunityfridges	Denver, CO, USA	4
@evanstoncommunityfridges	Evanston, IL, USA	4
@buffalocommunityfridge	Buffalo, NY, USA	3
@fridgetalktv	Fort Worth, TX, USA	2
@westsidecommunityfridge	Jersey City, NJ, USA	1
@communityfridgevictoria	Victoria, BC, CAN	1
@thesolidarityfridge	Las Vegas, NV, USA	1
@communityfridgecle	Lakewood, OH, USA	1
@abqfreefridge	Albuquerque, NM, USA	1
@reginacommunityfridgecathedral	Regina, SK, CAN	1
@kelowna.community.fridge	Kelowna, BC, CAN	1 (No Host)
@free99fridge	Atlanta, GA, USA	1 (New Host)
@fgcommunityfridge	Fort Greene, NY, USA	1 (Closed)

*Table only includes Instagram accounts analyzed for this project, updated as of December 2023 (check handles as these numbers are subject to change). Other fridges may also exist in these listed cities and be affiliated with different collectives. For example, in Buffalo, NY, USA, Rooted In Love Inc. operates other successful fridges.

For this project, I narrowed my analysis to visual and textual material that served to communicate organizers’ understanding of mutual aid and/or food justice as different from dominant food charity models, its influence on their organizing practices, and tensions that arose over time. Using a phronetic iterative approach (Tracy, 2018), the following research questions guided analysis: (1) How do community fridge organizers use their online platforms to disrupt dominant food charity discourses and facilitate learning about food justice and mutual aid? (2) How do community fridge organizers communicate challenges with enacting food justice and mutual aid beyond the initial exigency of crisis?

Analysis: disrupting scarcity, saviorism, and surveillance

As the following analysis demonstrates, community fridge organizers facilitated critical learning opportunities, including for those new to both food justice and mutual aid. Across many accounts, organizers contrasted their work with already existing institutional food assistance and nonprofit food banks and pantries. In doing so, organizers disrupted three prominent charity discourses – scarcity, saviorism, and surveillance – that elicit harmful impulses and uphold food system myths.

Disrupting scarcity

Mutual aid usually arises out of an awareness of organized abandonment or conditions of manufactured scarcity. In contrast, organizers amplify food abundance and more interdependent collective action. This section discusses how community fridge Instagram accounts denounced scarcity culture directly, both disrupting the belief that food is a scarce commodity and that systemic hunger can be resolved through neoliberal individualism.

Challenging manufactured scarcity, community fridges celebrated food abundance by regularly sharing photos and videos of fridges bursting with colorful displays – fresh produce, beverages, baked and frozen items, packaged meals, and more – freely available to all. In many cases, these items would have otherwise been wasted as ‘abject capital,’ or ‘once-commodities that are still useful but that are more profitable to throw away than to sell’ (Giles, 2021, p. 5). One post by Fort Greene Community Fridge highlights a pantry full of packaged goods thrown out by a nearby school: ‘Reminder: Scarcity isn’t the problem. All of these unexpired & sanitary foods were being thrown out. SO MUCH FOOD!’ The caption continues, ‘We carried the bags to the fridge and unloaded the bounty #ScarcityIsAMyth … ’ Another by Marin Community Fridges displays a fridge overflowing with mangos, nopales, lentils, fruit cups, and cereals. A caption celebrates what’s inside: ‘There is an ABUNDANCE of food on this planet. No one should be hungry.’

Contextualizing hunger in a system that overproduces yet incentivizes wasting food, is a counternarrative many community fridge accounts told. For example, Cathedral Community Fridge in Regina, Saskatchewan explains in a multi-panel series titled ‘Charity Financially Benefits from Maintaining Poverty’ that hunger is exacerbated by ‘Planned Scarcity’ where ‘perfectly edible products’ are wasted and destroyed. Similarly, In Our Hearts NYC documented wasted food in a video with the following text superimposed:

Nearly half of the food produced in the United States is thrown away before anyone can eat it. That’s 80 billion pounds of food thrown into dumpsters and landfills each year […] There is no shortage of good food but politicians don’t want to ensure access for everyone because they think people who have enough to eat might not work the crap jobs that the economic system runs on.

Beyond acknowledging such excess and waste, IOH NYC describes the manufactured conditions of scarcity, where food overproduction is incentivized, and food assistance programs create barriers for everyday people to access direct support. Barriers abound from the criminalization of food sharing to eligibility restrictions and work requirements that incentivize the acceptance of low-paid work to eat. Continuing in the caption hashtagged #FoodIsARight, #ScarcityIsALie, among others, IOH NYC writes: ‘There is no shortage of food in this country but some people don’t have enough by design.’

Community fridge accounts also denounced scarcity cultures as a broader condition of capitalism characterized by individualism and competition over resources. Much like celebrating food abundance, community fridges amplified stories of interdependence, cooperation, and reciprocal benefit instead. Some did so through artistic storytelling, like Community Fridges Toronto, in a multi-panel illustrated story about a collaboration among their collective and BIPOC entrepreneurs who were hired by caterToronto to stock fridges with ready-to-eat meals. The illustration emphasizes how these entrepreneurs were paid a living wage through the Toronto Restaurant Workers Relief Fund and purchased ingredients for their meals from local greengrocers and food businesses owned by people of color. Five consecutive slides tell the illustrated story of how fresh cooked meals for community members, accessed through the fridge, came together through this series of relationships that their collective cultivated. ‘Our community deserves to feel cared for,’ the illustrated story reads, ‘Here’s how we came together to support our communities and give our neighbours the boost they deserve from a delicious safe meal made with care.’ Stories like these demonstrate the creative possibilities for mutual benefit in otherwise undervalued jobs and the care involved in purchasing, cooking, and distributing accessible meals.

Improvising collaborations can support and sustain mutual aid. This may include working with food rescue groups, vendors, grocers, and businesses over time as individual capacity to donate wanes. Even temporary partnerships can be materially impactful. For example, the Free99Fridge in Atlanta, Georgia held a brief local collaboration with The Grocery Spot to host a free grocery pop-up that redistributed tens of thousands of pounds of food for free. Beyond food distribution, Miami Community Fridge (which is part of Buddy System Miami’s network of fridges) uses its platform to host live video discussions with local artists, and food rescue groups, and in one case an informative discussion on a local Tenants Bill of Rights, thereby connecting food justice to housing justice and tenant protections. By improvising interdependence, sharing labor can yield mutual support instead of competition among them. While some partnerships may compromise the more radical aims of mutual aid, organizers can learn how to discern and generate alternatives to manufactured scarcity and scarcity cultures as well.

Unlearning saviorism

Emphasizing solidarity instead of saviorism, community fridge accounts also encouraged followers to reflect on the political implications of their work. Saviorism reinforces paternalistic hierarchies of social, moral, and economic superiority and deepens division between the givers and receivers of food. Solidarity, instead, means a shared struggle against conditions of food apartheid and a commitment to more transformative food systems change. Community fridges emphasized solidarity over saviorism in at least two ways: educating followers about the root causes of food injustice and affirming the right rather than privilege to food.

Community fridge organizers leveraged the relative approachability of food to invite deeper political education about the corporate food regime and the harmful systems that perpetuate racialized poverty and hunger. In an infographic post, Funky Town Fridge in Fort Worth, Texas asks: ‘IS FOOD POLITICAL?’ juxtaposed over an open white and blue fridge filled with pineapples, bananas, eggs, apples, and other rich greens.

Superimposed text in a subsequent panel denaturalizes the ‘food desert’ deficit metaphor often used in food policy and by charitable institutions. Rather, they name how food injustice is born from ‘Anti-Black capitalism, systemic racism, and oppression in the form of zoning codes, lending practices, and other discriminatory policies rooted in Anti-Blackness’ that deny many communities of color access to nutritious and affordable food. Instead, describing mutual aid as a response to food apartheid, Funky Town Fridge writes in the caption:

We get lots of questions daily about the wording and language we choose to use to describe the communities we serve to give us all a better understanding of what we’re truly up against when fighting the war against Anti-Black Capitalism […] Language, communication, and understanding is important in mutual-aid. Otherwise, how do you build healthy communities with others?

Their concluding question poses that shared political consciousness is a precondition to building healthier communities. As such, Funky Town Fridges suggests that developing this mutual understanding helps foster solidarity, where participants can better challenge systems that cause harm beyond the feel-good practice of temporarily giving food.

Most community fridges voiced some version of the slogan ‘solidarity, not charity’ to describe their work and invited opportunities to reflect more deeply on what this meant. Some also linked readings by mutual aid authors on their websites such as Dean Spade, Peter Kropotkin, and readings on the legacies of mutual aid in social movement organizing. Seattle Community Fridge, Kelowna Community Fridge and others all have made posts about the role of mutual aid in the Civil Rights Movement and describe practices of solidarity as a cornerstone of social change. A newsletter by Community Fridge Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia states further: ‘Mutual aid is local, direct, reciprocal, and non-hierarchical. Mutual aid recognizes that the need for food and other resources in our community is the failing of our systems, not the failing of individuals.’ Instead of just ‘giving out groceries’ they frame their work as a political endeavor of solidarity within systems that uphold food as private property and deny access to care.

Eliminating barriers to food assistance is one tangible way to organize through an orientation of solidarity, thereby affirming the right rather than privilege to food. The Solidarity Fridge, an Indigenous-led fridge, pantry, and seed-sharing initiative in Las Vegas, Nevada, illustrates this commitment in a caption: ‘Leave what you can, take what you need <3 No judgments. No questions. No forms. No explanations.’ Other fridge collectives affirmed the right to food through hashtags: #FoodIsARight, #FoodIsARightNotAPrivilege, #CommunitySolidarity, and others. Organizing in the over 30-year legacy of the anarchist network Food Not Bombs, which has long declared ‘food is a right, not a privilege,’ IOH NYC locates their solidarity as a form of shared struggle against the corporate food regime and ordinances that criminalize food sharing (Food Not Bombs, n.d.).

While not all community fridge collectives explicitly affirmed the right to food, those that did paired this declaration with more overt critiques of the corporate food system and the limits of charity to solve hunger. As a result, collectives stress distinctions between the saviorism of food charity and the shared solidarity of mutual aid. Beyond merely naming the organizing philosophies that inform their work, these community fridge collectives foster political education about distinct orientations to the problems and solutions to radical food systems change. They also emphasize care work as part and parcel of movement organizing beyond charitable giving.

Challenging surveillance

Most accounts openly recognized how volunteering can elicit carceral impulses to police through surveilling and questioning fridge-goers. In response, community fridge organizers urged followers to self-identify these impulses and reflect on implicit biases that may be at play. They also offer counternarratives and alternative more humane responses to use in interactions instead.

Across many accounts, community-developed artwork, infographics, or links to FAQs explicitly discouraged ‘policing’ at fridges. An infographic series by Los Angeles Community Fridges stresses:

DO NOT POLICE AT THE FRIDGES […] Please do not insert or intervene yourself into anyone’s actions at a community fridge, unless you see that they are actively causing harm to another individual […] Do not attempt to regulate a system for people coming to collect from the fridges by making people form lines or limiting how many items people can take. People coming to the fridge should be able to come and go as they please and take as much as they need.

Similarly, Kelowna Community Fridge ‘absolutely discourag[es]’ shaming others for ‘how much they need or how often they use the fridge.’ ‘Members of our community deserve the respect and autonomy in accessing their needs,’ they conclude. By emphasizing respect and autonomy, organizers trouble language and behaviors that deny fridge-goers agency, as well as one’s impulse to assume authority over another. In response to these tendencies to police and control, some have attached ‘guidelines’ and ‘shared agreements’ on the fridges that reimagine interpersonal and institutional policing. Denver Community Fridges even offers a packed PDF guide of ‘alternatives to 911’ should visitors need mental health, substance use, housing, and other health and legal support including and beyond access to food.

Encouraging critical reflexivity of one’s implicit biases, Evanston Community Fridge offers an infographic list of common phrases one might use that ‘look like’ and ‘sound like’ surveillance and policing. For example: ‘That’s a lot of food … ’ or ‘Staring at or glaring at community members using the fridge.’ They clarify that it is impossible to ‘scam’ or ‘rob’ the fridges because, indeed, the food is free. Similarly, Community Fridges Toronto reposted an illustration from Community Fridge KW entitled ‘How we respond … with care.’ This post series features word bubbles that illustrate troubling thoughts (e.g. ‘They didn’t even look like they were in need’ or ‘They brought bags to the fridge! People can be so greedy’) and alternatives to them (e.g. ‘Everyone shows need differently. Care can’t exist with judgment’).

Some contextualized the harms of policing and debunked fears about taking ‘too much food.’ For example, South Philadelphia Community Fridge begins one infographic post: “One of the most common messages we receive is from people concerned that some neighbors are taking ‘too much food’ from the fridges and pantries. As a mutual aid organization, we are dedicated to not policing how much food our neighbors take.” They continue in the caption:

It is also worthwhile to consider that there are many reasons why someone may be taking so much food. We’ve learned from talking to our neighbors that many of them live in multi-generational households with many people to feed. Others are shopping for community members who can’t physically come to the fridge. Some of our neighbors have experienced trauma around food including famine, extreme rationing, seizure or theft of food and resources, and malnutrition.

The post was liked by hundreds and received affirming comments, including from other fridge collectives who agreed. One commenter added the sentiment that due to the stigma around accessing food, some may even refrain from visiting the fridge as often as they should to avoid hunger. Such a statement and subsequent dialogue situates South Philadelphia Community Fridge as an intermediary that facilitates indirect learning about food-related deprivation and harm, while simultaneously protecting fridge goers’ anonymity.

Likewise, Fort Greene Community Fridge explains: ‘A bounty of research shows that food hoarding is a response to extended periods of food deprivation’ and fridge goers may not be gathering food only for themselves. Instead, they ask participants to withhold judgment of their neighbors and suggest ways to make their donations go further. Moved to reflection, a follower posted a comment in response to Fort Greene’s post: ‘This is an authentic opportunity to remember that the fridge is a place to give and receive without judgment.’

While organizers cannot always guarantee that shared agreements will be upheld, posts like these encourage critical reflexivity and invite others to adopt alternative communicative behaviors. They also urge for a deeper understanding of the complexity of hunger and multi-generational care. Suggesting more humane practices – even when they cannot be regularly enforced – redirects attention to the purpose of the fridge, which is to foster collective care, rather than establish a new way to control.

Navigating challenges, burnout, and closure

In the years after the start of the pandemic and long after community fridges sparked a wave of public support, some faced risks of being trashed, volunteer burnout, and even closure. This was not the case for all fridges, but some organizers who did face challenges were candid about their reality and voiced justified frustrations. In what follows, I illustrate how over time, organizers communicated two prominent challenges to enacting food justice and mutual aid.

Not a dumping ground

A major challenge was the ongoing dumping of trash, boxes, and raw perishables near community fridges. Usually, this occurred not because of those who need access to fridges, but by donors dropping old and expired food or treating the fridge as a trash bin. It was not uncommon for community fridge organizers to post pictures of strewn boxes and other careless dumping to urge donors to stop or ask visitors to clean up. Some organizers and fridge hosts became more expressly frustrated. ‘We already receive many unwanted items,’ Albuquerque Free Fridge writes, ‘We have received items that have expired over a decade ago. We also receive non-food items that are dumped at the fridge. The free fridge isn’t a dumping ground. It’s a way to care for community.’ Los Angeles Community Fridges underscores: ‘IF YOU BRING GROCERIES, PLEASE UNPACK THEM IN THE FRIDGE AND SHELVES RATHER THAN DROPPING A BAG. LET’S TREAT EACH OTHER WITH DIGNITY + RESPECT. UNPACK YOUR FOOD WITH CARE.’ The all-caps post suggests a level of exasperation.

Repeatedly, posts emphasized that fridges and pantries may not have the capacity to hold large donations of even excess food. Buffalo Community Fridge described this concern under an image of trash bags full of bread left outside. The photo’s caption reads:

!!!! Whoever is dropping off massive amounts of bread each week please please stop. We have to throw the majority of it [away] from contamination. It also causes the fridge to get congested and other food is not being able to be dropped off. This bread is not getting rescued properly. We are appreciative of drop offs but not like this. If there is no room in the pantry or fridge the food can simply not get dropped off. This looks terrible and creates a huge mess. Please let’s do better to help each other.

Directing messages toward donors underscores that care is not merely gifting or dumping anything of excess that businesses or food secure residents may deem worthless to discard.

To address these challenges, fridge collectives have posted or attached food safety guidelines, cleanliness guides, COVID safety resources, cleaning volunteer days, and other tips to encourage regular care of the fridge and its surrounding space. Collectives also encourage donating elsewhere, by posting links to other mutual aid collectives, buy-nothing groups, or encouraging drop-offs at nearby encampments where unsheltered residents reside. Expressions like these reframe radical care as an ongoing practice, rooted in the mundane and everyday labor of unpacking, maintenance, and the health of visitors, who neighbors may or may not know. Thus, care is an iterative practice, not feeling, that requires listening to others’ needs and not discarding just anything at all.

Uneven labor and closure

Sustaining community fridges alone is incredibly hard work. Long after the follows, likes, and reshares gain traction, community participation can dwindle. In numerous cases, the labor of sustaining – purchasing, transporting, distributing, stocking, cleaning, posting, responding, and more – falls on a small central collective or even just one person. Core fridge organizers shared candid remarks about declining participation and its impact. ‘We’re just coming out and saying it – we don’t have enough volunteers to continue running the fridge,’ writes Fort Greene Community Fridge. This is the reality of sustaining mutual aid long after the initial excitement runs dry, yet needs remain. Soon after the Fort Greene Community Fridge permanently closed.

In some cases, these uneven labor burdens had fallen primarily on Black women founders/hosts of fridges, who were urging for more in-person volunteer labor. Using posts and recorded videos, some expressed exhaustion and needing to place necessary boundaries between themselves and the work that had become entirely unsustainable. After a year and a half in operation, Tatiana Smith, founder of West Side Community Fridge in New Jersey announced a temporary closure of the fridge writing in part:

Thank you to all the partners, volunteers and neighbors who have consistently and respectfully shown up to support. You are what makes this work. Unfortunately, I have to shut the fridge down because the community has not responded in the way that is needed. And so the work has fallen on me and I’m exhausted. The final straw was when I came home from my lunch break on Saturday only to find boxes and boxes of unopened food at the fridge and empty boxes strewn on the sidewalk. I was nearly in tears as I thought of all the work I’d have to do to clean it up and avoid a ticket […] I’m taking a break. I’ll be back when I’m ready.

Smith further explained that donors had left frozen raw meat outside the fridge, despite visible signs stating that this was a health and safety hazard. Regrettably, experiences like these were not uncommon, and dedicated hosts pressed their wider networks to do better and more.

Other community fridge collectives responded to this post in the comments with care and mutual recognition. For example, Chelsea Community Fridge and Pantry commented they were, ‘Sending love and support!’ Others supported Smith for choosing to take care of herself. ‘Support is a verb’ a fellow fridge founder commented, ‘Founders can only do so much for so long.’ Despite occasional setbacks like this, West Side Community Fridge remains in operation as of December 2023. They continue to celebrate partnerships and volunteers, while also asking for regular support in doing the ordinary, yet vital, daily labor needed to sustain their work. Such support is critical so hosts can continue to anchor the fridge but not do so alone.

Even fridges with thousands of followers must remind followers of their need for in-person support. The Free99Fridge in Atlanta frequently urged community members to get physically involved. One such post from founder Latisha Springer read:

I really appreciate everyone’s enthusiasm for seeing this project come to life, but [*clears throat] we can’t fuel this movement with likes. The community needs to show up in a BIG way if we’re gonna sustain + scale solidarity fridges for our city. Don’t worry about what others are/aren’t doing. What are YOU doing?

Founders shared valid frustration that posts on social media would receive hundreds of likes and shares, yet sometimes not even one person would reach out to respond to a need or an ask. ‘The truth is, everybody wants to be an activist till it’s time for action,’ writes Springer in another post, ‘The frontline is lonely.’

While many fridges sustained beyond these setbacks, others had to make the challenging decision, like Fort Greene Community Fridge, to eventually close. Therefore, although organizers can leverage their platforms and amplify their work, mutuality must be sustained together offline as well. Without doing the daily and often mundane, yet laborious work, uneven labor risks burnout, which risks closure altogether.

Conclusion

While the onset of the pandemic spurred rapid and widespread knowledge about mutual aid, the uncaring systems that organize inequity rage on. Challenging global food and economic systems that perpetuate poverty, hunger, and harm must be ongoing. Community fridge organizing can help facilitate solidarity and radical care, but individual and collective action requires iterative learning and unlearning. In what follows, I describe the theoretical contributions this study offers to food systems communication and applied insights for those empowered to participate more deeply in food justice through mutual aid.

Theoretical contributions

Bringing together research on mutual aid organizing, food justice communication, and public pedagogies online, this essay speaks to the role of informal learning in collective action, mediating food justice, and organizing mutual aid. Contributing to research on food justice communication and organizing which has focused largely on formalized entities, nonprofits, and hybrid collaborations with community-based groups (Dempsey, 2023), this essay offers insights into alternative models of collective action that may appear more improvisational, emergent, and informal. It builds on critical insights about the negative impacts of neoliberal stigma, and the racist, classist, and carceral logics of food assistance (de Souza, 2019, 2022), by offering examples of how community fridge organizers are intervening in the engrained and ubiquitous nature of these impulses through mutual aid. Further, this essay shows how counterhegemonic food justice knowledge is mediated, a largely understudied aspect of food justice communication research, with some exceptions (Broad, 2016; LeGreco & Douglas, 2021; Mann, 2018; Zoller, 2021). Future research on the public pedagogical work of food justice education on and offline can further extend and complicate these findings.

This project also adds to the relative lack of communication research on mutual aid organizing, a largely omitted aspect of social movement scholarship. Rather than sidelining or invisibilizing the often ordinary work of radical care (Hayes & Kaba, 2023; Hobart & Kneese, 2020; Spade, 2020), food justice mutual aid supports social movement organizing by decreasing barriers to survival and provides an entry point into transformative action through political education, relationship building, and skills-development (Roman-Alcalá, 2020; Spade, 2020). Organizing is a practice of learning (Choudry, 2015) as it has the power to shape vocabularies, shared values, and movement tactics into the future. Of course, mediated public pedagogy alone is not enough to keep people fed, but it can be a powerful strategy to bring others into food justice organizing and related social movements that intersect with food systems (Alkon & Guthman, 2017; Gordon & Hunt, 2019).

By following activism beyond the initial rupture of crisis, when attention to mutual aid is often paid (Spade, 2020), this study also recognizes how organizing tensions can arise over time, and how participants navigate maintaining their food justice commitments even through setbacks and conflict. The improvisational quality of food justice mutual aid offers space for situated opportunities to collectively re-organize when necessary and facilitate learning through instability and uncertain times as well. This means learning generatively through mistakes and anticipating discrepancies. Amid unfolding and compounding crises, enacting radical collective care is a practice of mutuality that must continually be learned.

Applied lessons

There are also applied lessons for those who desire to deepen their participation in food justice through mutual aid. Most prominently, community fridges are tools to practice improvisational food justice, instead of reinforcing food assistance barriers, stigma, or the colonial, raced, classed, and ableist norms of deservingness and need (de Souza, 2019, 2022). Organizing rooted in collective abundance, interdependence, and mutuality can facilitate more just outcomes, in contrast to the harm of scarcity, saviorism, and surveillance. Such work requires iterative relational and communicative practice. Community fridges can lower food access barriers, and in some cases, access to culturally situated, nutritious, and desired foods depending on how donations are facilitated by collectives. Working with others toward mutuality can deepen connections among those resourced – food providers, markets, businesses, farmers, and community-based social infrastructure – to redistribute food surplus and otherwise waste. However, organizers must also be cautious about partnerships that compromise their values and should learn what trusted capacity and limitations already exist in their locale.

Informal organizing is facilitated through communication, by learning through reflexivity, and creatively sharing knowledge among participants within and across geographies. Many accessible organizing resources have already been made public and have circulated widely online. Among them include toolkits to start and fund fridges, FAQs, fridge maps, sign-up sheets, artwork, narrative strategies, readings, legal resources, and more. In 2022, a collective of four US legal centers also published a 40-page ‘Community Fridges: Legal Questions and Answers’ document that covers liability, fiscal sponsorship, donations, and questions related to nonprofit partnerships or incorporation (Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic et al., 2022). Research and writing shared by collectives will be valuable to new and seasoned organizers, like Dean Spade’s (2020) Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), a theoretical introduction and practical guide to mutual aid. These resources will be especially informative for those navigating organizational and interpersonal challenges. Together these materials can help demystify the ordinary, yet difficult labor of care work, or the harm that dominant orientations to volunteering can enact. However, building on the work of others will require situated adaptation, repair, and relational accountability to learn with others through mistakes.

Learning mutual aid, ultimately, is processual, with contingencies and challenges that will inevitably emerge. It necessitates critical reflexivity about the dismissive and controlling impulses that show up in anti-hunger relief work. Learning must be iterative beyond a singular crisis, or merely encountering an infographic occasionally online. Similarly, organizing radical care is not an independent gesture or temporary moment of charitable goodwill. Radical care is a commitment to the continuous process of unlearning, reorientation, and everyday action to undo the harmful systems that organize life and abandonment by design. Therefore, we must remember that community fridge organizing is not an endpoint, but can be an entry into more transformative and liberatory food system possibilities.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Editor Heather Zoller, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Sam Silva, and two anonymous reviewers for their insights on this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.