The Everyday Politics of Food Co-Ops: Care, Aid and Community in Austerity Britain

National politics has a significant impact on organizing and accessing community welfare. This book engages with notions of everyday politics within two London-based food co-ops emerging from different political environments and ideologies. It provides a careful and engaging examination of the experiences of political and economic change in Austerity Britain, revealing how national politics came to punctuate everyday lives within the co-ops. It highlights the political resonances that practices of care, aid and community organizing came to have within the food co-ops at a time of rapid welfare withdrawal, as well as the tensions between more radical and neoliberal imaginaries that played out within them.

Celia Plender is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Exeter. She is also the co-convenor of the Association of Social Anthropologists’ Anthropology of Britain Network. One of her recent research projects was An Oral History of Neal’s Yard which was contributed to the University of Sheffield’s European Research Council-funded project Food Futures.