Paper short abstract:

This research presents the first ever national-level quantification of the contribution of community kitchens at a national scale in any country, covering more than 2,000 cases during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Chile.

Paper long abstract:

Food insecurity was one of the multiple crises that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, and keeps re-emerging for years as a result of food price inflation. Community kitchens (CKs), food banks, and other similar initiatives, significantly contributed to tackle food insecurity in places as diverse as Colombia (Ortiz and Millan, 2022), Chile (Daniels et al., 2021), South Africa (Paganini et al., 2021), India (Rashmi and Lekshmi, 2021) and Australia (McShane and Coffey, 2022). Multiple studies were carried out to understand the processes and stories behind CKs, which are discussed as grassroots care devices: tools to sustain the basic reproductive conditions of existence. The association of CKs with care during the COVID-19 pandemic is reinforced by multiple accounts of women leading, operating and sustaining CKs. The spread of these sorts of efforts during the pandemic is an example of people as infrastructure (Simone, 2004), in this case care infrastructure (Van Houtven et al., 2010). Qualitative in-depth research and small surveys have explained the nutritional contribution of CKs and the kind of people behind them. However, given its logics outside the state and the market, it is extremely difficult to quantify the scope of CKs at a city, regional or national scale. Aiming to generate both empirical and theoretical contributions to the understanding of community-based care infrastructure in times of crisis, this research presents the first ever national-level dataset with more than 2,000 CKs that existed during 2020 in Chile.