Food Aid – Normalising the Abnormal in Finland

Abstract

In Finland, food banks and bread lines emerged for the first time during the deep recession in the mid-1990s and, since then, have become permanent. This was partly an outcome of cutting or freezing social security costs during the economic slump, but there has also been an increasingly explicit transformation in national social policy. However, the emergence and persistence of food aid cannot be explained purely as a social and poverty policy issue. This article examines charity food aid as a solution to the hunger problem within the Nordic welfare regime and traces connections linking the establishment of food charity to the prevailing food system. This article focuses on different policy actions and economic developments that took place independently during the 1990s, producing, apparently accidently and without conscious co-ordination, entrenchment of charitable food aid in Finland.