In Between Meals: Deservingness, Discretion, & Discipline in Food Pantries

• In Event: Student Forum Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Roundtable 13: Food Access and Inequality

Abstract

This paper examines how volunteers in a faith-based food pantry exercise discretion to enforce moral categories of deservingness. Drawing on five months of participant observation at a Southern California food pantry, the study reveals how volunteers, acting as street-level bureaucrats, use moral lenses and narratives to police clients’ behavior and regulate resource distribution. Clients are subjected to monitoring, uncertain resource outcomes, and potential public embarrassment, which serves to discipline and regulate their behavior. The study introduces the concept of benevolent surveillance to describe how charitable institutions use surveillance and moral judgment to regulate clients, simultaneously providing aid and showing concern with improving their moral character. This form of surveillance produces informal moral stipulations on aid recipiency, as clients are judged by moral virtue. By highlighting the interactional mechanisms through which the poor are controlled, this study contributes to sociological literature concerning poverty governance, the role of charitable organizations, and the reproduction of societal inequalities. The findings underscore the need for continued research into how the poor are disciplined in nongovernmental settings and how these practices reflect and reinforce broader societal inequalities.

Author

• Adian Dobyns, University of California-Irvine