Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how food preparation, donation and redistribution facilitate the creation of support networks between religious communities and marginalised and precarious individuals.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how food preparation, donation and redistribution facilitate the creation of support networks between religious communities and marginalised and precarious individuals. It will focus on a Buddhist organization established in 2009 and its social welfare activities focused on food preparation and distribution in Tokyo. These activities also facilitate connections between volunteers, who gather together to prepare the food to be distributed. Furthermore, the donation of food to the organization highlights the networks of connections with temple parishioners through food donated to the temple to be redistributed, other religious organizations, and individuals the organization had previously supported. This includes donations of rice sent from the Tohoku region, where the volunteers participated in emergency relief activities after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. In late 2020 the organization also took part in a countrywide project of emergency rice donation for Vietnamese immigrants stranded in Japan due to the pandemic in collaboration with the Vietnamese Buddhist Association. This paper argues that connections between organizations and individuals through food incentivise the creation of support networks that are not a temporary response to a crisis but could have a more long-term effect. If crisis could “eats away” individuals (Knight 2021), sharing of vulnerabilities and trans-regional networks created by food production and circulation could create belonging and impulse toward redirection and renewal of Buddhist and local communities.