Using Tronto’s care ethics to transform debates about UK emergency food

The rapid growth of UK emergency food projects – predominantly food banks – over the past decade highlights concerns about the ongoing institutionalization of this form of charitable support. The current article analyses these debates through a lens of care ethics, drawing particularly on Tronto’s five phases of an ethic of care. Care ethics offers new and transformative ways of exploring longstanding debates about how care is conceptualized, organized, and delivered, and the societal benefits of redefining the scope of care. In parallel, emergency food offers the opportunity to interrogate how care ethics can be applied to a key, internationally significant policy question. Through these explorations, the article argues that the institutionalization of emergency food could be avoided by reframing the challenge of household food insecurity through rights to food that would be secured through a public ethic of care. Doing so would redraw current moral boundaries and thereby move care away from the political margins and onto the mainstream moral and political agenda. While this article focusses on emergency food, care ethics offers valuable insights into diverse policy areas characterized by the growing substitution of paid care work with voluntary activity, including education and social care.