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Abstract In contrast with most social theories, which are inclined to see the world and its problems as a matter of scarcity, this paper discusses poverty and religious organizations as actors in the field of poverty alleviation from the viewpoint of excess and abundance. The analysis draws from two essays that deal with the question of excess and excessiveness from the perspectives of social theory and moral philosophy, and applies their ideas in order to understand and reconsider the social practice of food assistance and the role of religious organizations as food assistance providers. This paper suggests that charitable food assistance is an excess rescaling strategy, which brings together food insecurity and food waste and thus makes food excess more desirable and less disturbing. Via the processes of rescaling and decriminalizing food excess, excess becomes a utility and a resource for helping people who suffer from poverty. Religious organizations, in turn, become middlemen in rescaling and decriminalizing excess and transforming it into a virtue.

Purpose Recent decades have witnessed a rise in food charity provided by faith-based and other charitable agencies. Previous research has noted that besides material assistance, these occasions provide a social and communal event for many participants. The purpose of this paper is to examine this notion by exploring how the social organization of breadlines contributes to the social relationships between the food recipients and their experiences of these places as communities, and what qualities these communities eventually develop. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on ethnographic data from four breadlines in one Finnish city. The study approaches the breadlines as queues, that is, social systems that govern waiting, mutual order and access. Findings The social organization of queue practices mirrors the users’ experiences of the breadlines as communities with many concurrent faces: as communities of mutual surveillance and as demanding communities that call for skills and resources from the participants, as well as socially significant communities. The findings show how the practices of organizing charitable assistance influence the complex social relationships between charitable giver and recipient, and how the food recipients accommodate themselves to the situations and social roles available on a given occasion. Originality/value Analysing breadlines as queues and using qualitative data from the everyday assistance events gives voice to the experiences of food charity recipients and allows a more nuanced picture to be painted of the breadline communities than studies based merely on surveys or interviews.

This article explores what Christmas entails to people with limited consumer options and how they cope in their difficult life situations. Previous research suggests that in the contemporary consumer society in which people construct and maintain their identities by participating in consumer culture, those who lack the means to consume face social exclusion. Secondary consumption is a way for poor consumers to come closer to prevailing consumption standards. Drawing from an ethnographic study of Christmas celebrations in four faith-based food assistance organizations within one Finnish city, this study shows that for secondary consumers, Christmas simultaneously entails both more resources and a more intense sense of social exclusion. Christmas highlights the paradoxical dual position of secondary consumers where they are both excluded from and dependent on the prevailing practices of consumer culture. To cope with their situation, food receivers use different strategies: they may refuse to celebrate, distance themselves from their dependence on charity or reframe their situation by considering the food donations as gifts from God.

The first Canadian food banks started in the 1980s because of increasing poverty due to the economic crisis. They mainly shared the common understanding that their work was intended as a supplement, not as long-term solution to food insecurity. However, three decades later, neither food banks nor food insecurity have disappeared. Today, the proliferation of the food charity system begs the question of how the new food banks view their work in the era of institutionalized food charity. The data consist of eight key informant interviews carried out in 2014 with nine people in leadership positions in the recently initiated food banks in Toronto. The interviews were analysed by applying Goffman’s frame analysis. The interviewees discussed their work through four frames: feeding the hungry, building the community, advocating for change, and putting religious beliefs and teachings from pulpit to practice. The faith frame of food banking interlocks the other three frames. Food assistance is heavily rooted in the social and cultural constructions of hunger as amatter for charity, often with strong religious underpinnings. The findings encourage the food charity agencies to critically reflect the aims, practices and implications of the charitable work that they engage in.

Since the economic recession of the 1990s, Finland has experienced the proliferation of charity food aid as a means of helping people who are afflicted by poverty. However, so far little research has been conducted regarding the food aid recipients. This article gives discursive, demographic, and experiential insights into charity food provision and reception in Finland. Drawing on quantitative survey data, online discussion data related to news published on Finnish newspapers’ web pages, and observation and interviews with food aid recipients, this article sheds new light on Finnish food aid recipients from three perspectives. First, public perceptions about food aid often portray food recipients as dishonourable and responsible for their own poverty. Secondly, the survey data shows that the main reason for people resorting to charity food aid is deep economic disadvantage, and further, that there is an unequal accumulation of disadvantage among the food aid recipients, illustrating internal diversity. Third, observational and interview data show that from the food recipients’ perspective, the food aid system has only a limited ability to answer even their immediate food needs, and for the recipients, food aid venues can become not only socially significant, but also socially demanding and emotionally burdening places.

This chapter provides insights into research on lived nonreligion by exploring how ordinary nonreligious people—living in one neighbourhood in Ottawa, Canada—see themselves and their relations with other people through their everyday food consumption practices. The focus is on how these people present themselves, how they approach negotiations over delicate issues with other people and how they frame their positive visions of living together via food. The findings point to three issues that aid understanding ordinary food consumption as “quasi-nonreligious”: distancing from extreme stances when describing one’s own food choices; navigating influencing others’ food choices in a way that avoids giving the impression of proselytising; and emphasizing sharing, hospitality and reaching out to others through food. By approaching ordinary food consumption as “quasi-nonreligion”, the study shows how stepping back from the questions of the presence and/or absence of religion and focusing on other daily settings may help us to start seeing some of the nuances and complexities of nonreligion in everyday life that otherwise often remain obscure.