Hunger Hurts: The Politicization of an Austerity Food Blog

Abstract

Austerity food blogs have become prominent as household food budgets have become tighter, government finances constrained, and an ideology of austerity has become dominant. The British version of austerity privileges reducing government spending by cutting welfare benefits, and legitimizes this through individual failure explanations of poverty and stereotypes of benefit claimants. Austerity food blogs, written by those forced to live hand to mouth, are a hybrid form of digital culture that merges narratives of lived experience, food practices and political commentary in ways that challenge the dominant views on poverty. The popular blog A Girl Called Jack disrupts the austerity hegemony by breaking the silence that the stigma of poverty imposes on the impoverished and by personalizing poverty through Jack Monroe's narratives of her lived experience of it, inviting the reader's pity and refuting reductionist explanations of the causes of poverty. Monroe also challenges austerity through practices derived through her personal knowledge gained during her struggle to survive and eat healthily on i¾£10-a-week food budget. This combination of narrative and survival practices written evocatively and eloquently resonate powerfully with readers; however the response to Monroe's blog highlights a deep uneasiness in British society over growing levels of poverty, and deep divisions over who is responsible for addressing it; and more fundamentally, over identifying and defining the modern poor and modern poverty.