Food banks across the UK are offering basic food supplies and a range of support services to people who have been affected by years of welfare cuts and the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis. Despite a growing research interest in the drivers and experiences of food bank use, their own role in constructing and managing poverty as a social problem has been neglected. Adopting a Foucauldian approach, this study critically explored how power is exercised and subjects are formed inside three UK food banks. The localised care for the poor is shown to work through a pastoral power, which requires confessions of crises and obedience to an expert regime in the diagnosis and treatment of poverty as an individual condition. By making food aid conditional on active engagement with other support agencies, volunteers negotiate and translate neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility and active citizenship. Findings are linked to a wider critique of neoliberal government, which works through therapeutic discourses and retains disciplinary and paternalistic elements in managing poverty at a distance.

英国各地的食品银行正在为受多年福利削减和持续的COVID-19健康危机影响的人们提供基本食品供应和一系列支持服务。尽管人们对食品银行的驱动因素和使用经验有了越来越多的研究兴趣，但人们忽略了他们在建设和管理贫困这一社会问题中的作用。这项研究采用的是富柯式方法，批判性地探索了如何行使权力以及如何在三个英国食品银行内部形成主体。表现出对贫困人口的局部照料是通过牧民力量发挥作用的，这要求承认危机并服从专家制度，将贫困作为个体状况进行诊断和治疗。通过以与其他支持机构的积极参与为条件的粮食援助，志愿者们谈判并翻译有关个人责任和积极公民身份的新自由主义言论。调查结果与对新自由主义政府的广泛批评有关，后者通过治疗性话语发挥作用，并保留了远距离管理贫困的纪律和家长主义因素。