Hunger, Disgust and Anger. a Study on Food Programs in Argentina.
The state intervention to respond to the food needs of the poor population implemented the following strategies: delivery of food boxes, ready-to-eat food in soup kitchens, monetary transfers of income or food education workshops.
The objective of this work is to identify the emotions that are configured around the food that is eaten with others in soup kitchens, cooked at home or purchased from food programs between 1983 and 2023 in General Pueyrredon, province of Buenos Aires.
The biographical method was implemented in its life stories modality with the in-depth interview technique. The sampling was theoretical and by snowball. The analysis was carried out based on grounded theory.
Among the results, emotions were identified that predominate in each generational group according to the types of food programs received. Flavors structure and reflect social inequality in bodies. Disgust is associated with food boxes with products to cook at home and the food provided in the community kitchen. Anger is linked to the low amounts of benefits for purchasing products in the market.
These emotions and food programs persist from one generation to the next. The disgusted body also feels anger; an anger that originates from the proximity of the object of disgust that the subject wants/must reject. Hunger is violence as external coercion. The condition of poverty is, in some cases, disgusting and sub-human and, as such, enables bonds of violence that reinforce – from the food perspective – the expulsion and rejection that the subjects experience and feel within the framework of a social system that has expelled them and keeps them trapped in its margins.