Solidarity kitchens: how pandemic food assistance developed to offer much more

Abstract

A grassroots food assistance programme in Brazil that grew out of the pandemic is now trying to counter obesity and other diseases of poverty. Rodrigo de Oliveira Andrade reports “When the covid-19 pandemic began, I knew Brazil would face a battle against hunger,” says Adriana Salay Leme, a historian in the city of São Paulo. So when their restaurant was forced to shut during the pandemic, Leme and her husband, the chef Rodrigo Oliveira, started feeding people living in Vila Medeiros, a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city, helping to spawn a mass movement for distributing free meals to people affected by the pandemic. “We closed in March 2020 in compliance with the emergency measures, and the next day we started serving free lunch boxes from the front door,” Leme tells The BMJ . This is how the project “Quebrada Alimentada” (Feed the outskirts) was born. Today, in addition to daily lunch boxes, Quebrada Alimentada distributes monthly basic food hampers to around 260 families in Vila Medeiros, including in Jardim Julieta, an informal settlement that formed during the pandemic in mid-2020. Similar solidarity kitchens, as this sort of initiative has been dubbed, have proliferated across the country, providing not just food but education and health access to the most vulnerable people—and inspiring government funding for a scheme. Brazil was once a global leader in the fight against hunger. Between 2004 and 2013, government policies aimed at eradicating poverty reduced the …