Addressing Food Insecurity of Homeless People in Times of Pandemic. Which Right to Food?
The strict lockdown decreed on March 17, 2020 in France to address and contain the COVID-19 epidemic led to a new problem for the homeless: food insecurity. To address this unprecedented situation of food emergency, plural actions and cooperations have emerged. In this context, feeding the homeless requires the reconfiguration of scopes for actions, that were sometimes pre-existing. Based on a collective sociological research related to the adjustments of public action towards the homeless during the health crisis, including the food aid, this paper aims to analyze how feeding the homeless became a public problem during the COVID-19 health crisis in France. We will see that the distribution of food aid, mainly by food package, was the main response to the food emergency that makes visible plural cooperations at the crossroads of activism, charity, social work and local public authorities. We will thus see that these food distributions to homeless people where they have been isolated underline the existence to a right to food mainly focused on the availability and accessibility of foodstuffs, partly neglecting choices and the respect of tastes, practices and sociabilities, which are also at the heart of the food of the poorest.