Food relief providers as care infrastructures: Sydney during the pandemic

Australia has a hidden but growing problem with household food insecurity, revealing the failure of conventional food infrastructures to support human flourishing. Disruptions to employment and livelihoods due to pandemic lockdowns have exacerbated household food insecurity, evincing the uneven geography of food access in countries globally, including Australia. Increasing demand for food relief had been observed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and has been met by food relief providers, which we consider as infrastructures of care addressing growing levels of hunger. This paper reveals COVID-19’s many impacts on the food relief sector across Metropolitan Sydney, New South Wales. It analyses both a questionnaire of food relief providers in 2022 and media articles, social media posts, reports, and websites. It provides much-needed insights into the impacts of pandemic lockdowns on the demand for food, interruptions to food provisioning, changes to food supply, and alterations made to suppliers’ ways of operating. Those insights show how infrastructures of care are place-based, responsive, dynamic, and constrained by caring capacities. Such insights are increasingly important for understanding infrastructural failures, documenting the real extent of household food insecurity, and challenging dominant discourses of Australia as a food-secure nation.