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ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on how the food banks, in working to allocate resources appropriately, constantly generate appropriate subjects, the “deserving poor”, and through processes of identification and verification, unmask the “undeserving poor”. The paper argues that process of identification, which includes practices of identification, registration, and documentation, push the applicants to self-identify and self-register as “the poor”. Next, process of verification, which includes practices of categorization, surveillance, and verification, divide the applicants into “deserving” and “undeserving”. While the “deserving poor” become the recipients of food aid from the food banks, the “undeserving” are characterized as lazy, greedy, and cunning and attempting to claim more than what they are entitled to. Even though the recipients resist this categorization, the separation is maintained to ensure that the aid is allocated appropriately. What is appropriate, however, is closely related to who is appropriate, which, in turn, is dependent upon who the food bank staff prioritize in terms of age, ethnicity, gender, employment, and marriage status. As such, not only some experiences of poverty and food insecurity are recognized as public problems, but also associations of reproductive and productive labor, public and domestic realm with specific gender roles and identities are reinforced.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Dried and powdered soup-based made up of yogurt and vegetables.
2. Usually larger the household, lower the monthly income and lower the literacy and education level, higher the store credit is. In all the institutions I have visited there was also a cap which was adjusted according to the resources each food bank was able to draw on.
3. For example, unless there are babies – registered – under a household, a recipient cannot pick up diapers. Moreover, number of diapers they can pick up at once are limited; and that limit is determined by the number of registered babies and toddlers to that household. Similarly, a recipient cannot pick up only diapers with her (usually her) store credit.
4. Almost all the transactions between the citizens and the state require this number. Citizens would need to have it on their ID in order to get the “proof of need” document too. If they have not yet updated their ID card to a new one with a number, they are automatically eliminated from accessing the food bank.Approved resident aliens, who can use the food banks, also need to have this number which they can get through the Bureau of Immigration.
5. As I have discussed elsewhere (Turkkan, Citation2020), roughly there are three types of food banks operating in Istanbul: Private nonprofit (Model#1), private for-profit (Model#2) and public nonprofit (Model#3).Though different types of food banks have different sources for donations (corporate, public funds, private donations) and receive different types of donations (in cash vs. in kind), receiving aid from them is subject to same procedures I discuss below. In other words, regardless of what type of food bank applicants go to, they will have to go through the same streamlined process I describe here. As such, I do not differentiate between different types of food banks throughout the paper.
6. As Deniz (Defector, a former food bank and a soup kitchen volunteer) put it, “in order to survive in the nonprofit sector, you have to be either pro-government or faith-based. If you are neither, then you better have international support or have a super wide, resource-secure supporter base that won’t leave you to scrap for public funds”. They have also reported that in an effort to look favorable to the government and in an environment of increasing political pressures, corporate donors have also begun to take their donations to implicitly and/or explicitly government-supported organizations that distribute food aid.Exploring this aspect further is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper. It will have to wait, as a further research agenda item, until stakes of engagement shift.
7. Berna (food bank operator).
8. Due to confidentiality reasons, all the names of informants cited are pseudonyms. I do provide the informants’ roles however I do not mention where they work or have worked.
9. Total number of food banks in the city is unfortunately not known, and as such, it is impossible to determine the relative size of the sample for this study.This is partially because opening and operating a food bank is notoriously easy. As Koc notes, any association and/or foundation that states in their charter that they will have a food bank and assist “people in need of food, clothing, cleaning and heating materials” (Koc Citation2014, 155). Not only there isn’t much of a regulation on how to operate a food bank and how to collect and distribute donations, the state does not keep (or at least, publish) a record of how many associations and/or foundations have taken up food banking. As I note elsewhere (Turkkan, Citation2020), the problem is exacerbated by the fact that although quite a few charities, foundations, and associations mention food banks in their charters, they may not be operating one at the moment. Others, meanwhile, may not mention food banking in their charters, but receive donations and distribute food aid as if they were a food bank. As such, it is almost impossible to know exactly how many food banks are operational in the city or the amount of donations they receive and the aid they distribute.Though this blurriness has potential for “aid fraud” perpetrated by the recipients (Koc Citation2014, 155–6), the Defectors I interviewed remarked upon a different type of fraud: Because it is relatively easy to establish and operate food banks and because the state – surprisingly – does not collect (or publish) information about how much money is donated and how much aid is distributed, food banks can be, and according to some of my interviewees, are, used to launder money. Exploring this aspect of food banks in Istanbul, unfortunately, is beyond the scope of this paper.
10. Orhan (Defector from a food rights nonprofit and alternative food network).
11. Integrated Social Assistance System.
12. For a full list of agencies connected to the database from which the applicant’s records are combed, see (SYGM Citation2017, 16–17).
13. The state also provides direct food aid. These, however, are limited to twice a year, delivered right before legally recognized Islamic (Sunni) holidays (SYGM Citation2019).
14. Gizem (municipal food bank operator).
15. Nermin (staff). One of the implications here is that people who are unemployed are unemployed – not because of structural problems of the economy, but because they lack the qualifications (“they don’t know how to fish”) necessary for employment. This is yet another way in which burden for exercising of certain social and economic rights (shelter, food, employment, education among others) is shifted away from the state onto the citizens and mediated through the market.Unsurprisingly, this is not unique to Turkey. Following the structural adjustments in the 1980s, similar shifts occurred pretty much all of the Global South. For examples, see: (Greenhouse Citation2009).
16. Nermin.
17. Ibid.
18. Nisa (staff).
19. Ibid.
20. Gizem.
21. Another noteworthy aspect of this catch-22 is informal employment. With informal employment here, I mean both criminalized work (dealing drugs and prostitution are the most common) and unreported yet legal jobs (domestic work, construction, for example). When I asked the food bank operators how common informal employment is, all of them denied their recipients ever being involved in such an activity though some of the volunteers admitted it as a possibility. This response was actually quite funny, since some of the food banks were located in areas known to be high in criminal activity; and the tone and the intensity of the operators’ rejections suggested that they themselves were aware of the possibility.
22. Social Assistance Information System.
23. All the food bank operators remarked upon how easy checking up the recipients have become after SOYBİS and BSYS. At the same time, especially the volunteers underlined that some recipients, particularly the women in safe houses, continue to get the same type of aid from multiple municipalities or from both their local municipality and the district governorate. Because these women are in safe houses, their address is not visible in the databases; so, they could file for “multiple applications around the city and collect the aid” (Mehtap (food bank staff)).During my time in the food banks conducting participant observation, I have not met any woman – at least that I know of – who resides in a safe house and/or gets aid from multiple sources.
24. On types of food banks in Istanbul, see footnote #4 and (Turkkan, Citation2020).
25. Gizem.
26. Dicle, (volunteer).
27. Ibid.
28. Nurgül, volunteer.
29. Nurgül.
30. Gizem.
31. Deniz, Defector, a former food bank and a soup kitchen volunteer.
32. Tercan, Defector.
33. Ibid.
34. Emphasis in the original; Orhan.What Orhan is alluding to here is the deliberate restriction of hunger, food insecurity and poverty (and arguably others) into the social and the private spheres. What this does is to prevent these problems to be recognized as public and political problems – meaning, the state, as the body representing entire political community, neither takes charge in nor develops policy for addressing them. Moreover, their a-politicization – and dis-publicization – contributes to shifting of the burden of exercising of social and economic rights (shelter, food, employment, education among others) away from the state (see footnote#18) onto the citizens. In the long run, not only exercising these rights become a privilege, but at the same time, failure to exercise them become the individuals’ personal failures.
35. Tercan.
36. Interviewee#13.
37. Ibid.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Candan Turkkan
Candan Turkkan is an assistant professor at Ozyegin University Department of Gastronomy and Culinary Arts. She has received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Political Science. Her work is at the intersections of political theory, political economy, and food and urban studies, taking up questions on (bio)politics, neoliberalism, food politics and agrarian political economy. Her book Feeding Istanbul: Political Economy of Urban Provisioning, is due to come out from Brill in 2021.