Popular Soup Kitchens: Loving, Feeding and Sharing

Abstract

Popular soup kitchens multiplied rapidly during 2020 in Latin America in the Covid-19 context, seeking that those who do not have guaranteed food access achieve some predictability in their daily food intake. Managing these kitchens requires specific practices, such as organising goods, resources, services and actions that make food, health and personal hygiene viable, as well as the management and emotional care associated with care. The main objective of this chapter is to analyse the emotions associated with food in soup kitchens as a care practice that is configured as an interstitial practice and an affirmation of love and hope. For this, a virtual ethnography and virtual interviews were carried out with people participating in the organisation of soup kitchens in Latin America during the second half of 2020. We will focus on two aspects of our records: the registered groups’ names and ‘logos’ and the photos of six countries that appear as ‘identifiers’ of the groups reported there. To achieve this objective, the argument is structured as follows: (1) The relationship between love, interstitial practices and food is conceptually defined, (2) the methodological strategy used and a vision about bodies/ emotions are synthesised, (3) the results of the empirical information are presented and (4) some traces of the emotions surveyed and their connection with love are outlined. It ends by emphasising it is necessary to continue investigating how the set of collective practices that elaborate day-by-day love.