Community Fridges: The Question of Race, Power, and Mutual Aid in Context

• In Event: Securing Food Futures

Abstract

The popularization of community fridges emerged in 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Community fridges are uniquely situated due to the contemporary needs of providing for people with food security in a shame free, solidarity-centered environment. Central to this premise is the utility of mutual aid in the creation and sustainability of the community fridge.

Mutual aid, however, is not a novel phenomenon. While it has been a buzzword in the age of the global pandemic, “collective caring is not new for Black folks in Canada who have practiced mutual aid as a way to deal with anti-Black racism for at least a century” (Singh 2021, p. 123). Many Black and Indigenous community members continue to lead the way in exemplifying care in the margins.

Community fridges and pantries, having existed long before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, began to expand into ‘networks’ of fridges that often relied on social media to promote the localized needs of the community fridges. Discussion around the rise of community fridge and pantry projects have expanded and shifted prolifically in many ways all while supply chain issues and manufactured food scarcity continue to leave folks stranded. Rather than predetermined choices favoured by non-profits who place those in need in a system of surveillance, community fridges created direct and immediate solutions to problems of food insecurity.

The relationship between the mediation of these mutual aid projects on platforms in conjunction with the rise of ‘social media activism’ can provide insight into how even in regimes of power, underserved people continue to resist and take care of one another, particularly in times of urgency and crisis. Elisabetta Ferrari discusses the context of this through “how crisis conditions can give rise to a compression of latency and mobilization” (2022, p. 429). However, this plays out very differently at the actual sites of refrigeration.

This research will contextualize the responses to the popularization of these fridges, focusing on two instances of community fridge shutdowns in Canada — Chinatown in Toronto, Ontario and East Vancouver in British Columbia.

Take the Toronto Chinatown community fridge: a decision was made at the request of community members to phase out the fridge. Food insecurity at this site saw “a demand that far exceeds the capacity of the fridge [which] has resulted in conflict arising at the fridge, leaving community members feeling unsafe” (Friends of Chinatown TO, 2021). Consultation with Chinatown community members led to the decision to pivot to a mutual aid fund strategy instead including grocery drop off and catered meals for the community and political education awareness events, including vaccine pop ups.

As sites that intermingle our ideas of what private and public are, community fridge projects open up the concepts of who can and cannot take food, and who gives and how they can give. At the site of mutual aid, epistemologies of care activism and neoliberal mediated spaces of survival are constructed, mutually reinforced, co-opted, re-appropriated, and re-imagined all at the same time.

Author

• Michelle Phan, Simon Fraser University