“You should be able to eat that meal and feel like someone cares”: Community food carers, good food, and the emergence of food-aid mutualism during Covid-19

• Pandemic community foodwork in Manchester centred care, dignity and sensory pleasure, countering depersonalised food-aid norms. • Attending to the visceral dimensions of food-aid is a political practice, revealing how taste, memory and emotional nourishment matter materially under austerity. • Food-aid mutualism illustrates how reciprocal affective relations which emerge through community foodwork, are intertwined with political tensions. Austerity policies in the UK have fostered a ‘foodbank society’ by reducing state support and normalising reliance on charitable aid and poor-quality food. As a result, individuals’ physical, emotional, and mental relationships with food are being reshaped. This paper draws upon on geographies of mutual aid and care and the visceral framework in food geographies, to examine the improvised community foodwork that emerged in Manchester during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using qualitative interviews and participatory foodwork in a local food bank, I show how community food workers reintroduced good food into emergency food provision by attending to dignity, agency and sensory pleasure rather than prioritising scarcity and functionality. At the same time, I found that these practices also supported the food workers own emotional wellbeing during the uncertainty surrounding lockdown events. Whilst this foodwork forged reciprocal affective relations, it also sits in an ambivalent political space shaped by welfare retreat, is vulnerable to neoliberal co-optation and is also over-reliant on unpaid gendered and racialised labour. I therefore conceptualise this convergence of material and affective care as food mutualism , a form of reciprocal nourishment that emerges through foodwork and both challenges and reproduces the inequalities produced by austerity. By engaging with both the political stakes of mutualism and viscerality this work provides insight into how community-based food aid might be reimagined beyond the neoliberal foodbank model in ways that centre dignity, reciprocity, and sensory pleasure.