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The names may vary from country to country — soup kitchens, community canteens, or solidarity kitchens. But these collective initiatives, deeply rooted in working-class communities, not only share solidarity in times of crisis, they also sow the seeds for food sovereignty projects and for integrating rural and urban struggles.
Patricia Lizarraga is a project coordinator at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Buenos Aires Office.
Jorge Pereira Filho is a project coordinator at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s São Paulo Office.
Both work on food sovereignty and edited the Atlas of Food Systems of the Southern Cone.
Originating from the daily experience of scarcity and structural inequalities in the region, these practices are sustained by a long history of neighbourhood, trade union, peasant, and community organization that goes beyond welfare assistance and challenges our understanding of the public sphere. From the collective kitchens in the conventillos (tenements) and workers’ settlements of the Southern Cone to the Chilean community kitchens during the dictatorship and the picket lines of the unemployed movement at the beginning of the twenty-first century to the kitchens set up as the first collective space in the land occupations in Brazil, these experiences have woven a vital fabric that resists persecution, economic crises, and authoritarian politics.
Their rationale is shared throughout the region: cooking and eating communally not only guarantees material survival but is also a political act. It is a way of providing collective care, sustaining life, exercising everyday self-governance, and building counterpower in the face of weakened states and exclusionary economic models.
Brazil: Solidarity Kitchens as Public Policy
During the pandemic and the recent food crisis, community food initiatives in different countries once again demonstrated that collective solutions are possible even under extreme conditions. Brazil provides a compelling case study. Three years ago, more than 33 million people in the country were experiencing hunger. In 2025, it was removed from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’s hunger map. One of the measures announced by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government to remedy the situation was support for community kitchens.
Faced with social fragmentation and state withdrawal, Latin American peoples once again organized themselves around the kitchen as a political space, a place of care, and a driving force for collective action. Along this Latin American trajectory, Paulo Freire’s notion of esperanzar — hope as an active and transformative practice — found a concrete expression in the community kitchens.
Hundreds of community kitchens, driven by rural and urban movements, developed solidarity-based supply networks, adapted logistics to health restrictions, and guaranteed healthy and fairly priced food for the population. Wherever peasant agriculture is dynamic and diversified, the responsiveness was swift and effective, demonstrating that solidarity can function as a material force in times of crisis. Food became a gateway to a broader struggle: filling the pots opened up the discussion about access to land, agricultural policies, decent work, and food sovereignty.
Community kitchens were vital during the worst moments of the pandemic in Brazil, when far-right military man Jair Bolsonaro was in power. The food crisis spread across the country while the president refused to follow World Health Organization recommendations and denied economic support to families even during lockdown.
In Brazil, more than half of greenhouse gases come from large-scale commodity production.
Widespread hunger led to various urban and rural grassroots movements like the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST), the Small Farmers' Movement (MPA), the Movement for the Struggle for Rights (MTD), and the Popular Brazil Movement (MBP) founding collective dining halls and solidarity kitchens. They empowered a social practice created by the popular sectors to combat hunger and challenge societal norms, defending solidarity and collective action as methods for confronting the severe crisis of the period.
President Lula’s electoral victory in 2022 led to recognition for these initiatives. In his first year in office, he approved a bill developed on the initiative of Deputy Guilherme Boulos (PSOL-SP) that created the National Solidarity Kitchens Programme (PNCS) as one of the initiatives of the Food Acquisition Programme (PAA). Today, around 2,000 kitchens receive food and financial support from the federal government to continue their work.
Both programmes, the PNCS and the PAA, constitute a form of social engineering that links the public purchase of food produced by indigenous communities, traditional peoples, quilombola communities, peasants, and agrarian-reform settlers with the free distribution of rations, meals, and unprocessed food to those who need them, especially in the urban periphery. The leading role is played by social and community organizations that carry out the socio-community work of food distribution.
Beyond combating hunger, the two linked public policies encourage families to remain in rural areas by generating income from the purchases guaranteed by the state. They also have a positive impact on global warming, since small-scale farming is less harmful to nature than agribusiness. In Brazil, more than half of greenhouse gases come from large-scale commodity production.
Milei’s Argentina: Destroying Spaces of Solidarity
Providing financial support for peasant agriculture and traditional communities is crucial for transforming the dominant agri-food model in the Southern Cone, which not only fails to feed the population but also harms the ecosystem.
The Red de Comedores por una Alimentación Soberana (Network of Community Kitchens for Food Sovereignty) was launched in Argentina in the midst of the pandemic as an initiative bringing together rural and urban organizations to guarantee healthy food for community kitchens and cafeterias in the shantytowns of Buenos Aires and its metro area. This cross-sector project coordinated more than 200 neighbourhood organizations, trade unions, parishes, schools, football clubs, community kitchens, organized neighbours, and peasant organizations, bringing healthy, safe produce and food sovereignty to each neighbourhood: agroecology in the slums.
However, this experience did not come out of nowhere. Argentina has a long history of community kitchens becoming symbols of struggle and communal canteens and snack stations becoming emblems of community organization.
In Argentina, according to the National Register of Community Canteens and Snack Stations (RENACOM), by 2023, more than 40,000 dining halls and snack stations were registered along with some 70,000 cooks who sustained these community spaces day after day. The cooks, together with grassroots organizations, politicized historically invisible tasks and were able to establish the notion of unrecognized community work. Between 2022 and 2023, organizations like the Unión de Trabajadores de la Economía Popular (Union of Workers of the Popular Economy, UTEP) and La Poderosa supported demands for recognition of care work, improvements to infrastructure, and access to fresh food.
This process helped consolidate the socio-community branch of the popular economy: a feminized and locally organized space that sustains neighbourhood life, challenges the logic of welfare assistance, and proposes another way of understanding the public sphere from the bottom up. In the midst of austerity, this network not only withstood the crisis, but also demonstrated that community solidarity is indispensable political infrastructure for any food sovereignty and social justice project.
These initiatives across the region not only guarantee food for entire communities, they also reactivate grassroots organizing, strengthen popular education, and reopen political debate in the realm of ideas.
Javier Milei’s arrival in government in December 2023 meant that social and food policies were dismantled at an accelerated pace. Utilizing a narrative of the “fiscal chainsaw” and accusing community organizations of being unnecessary “intermediaries” between the state and the population (not only inefficient but also driven by greed), the government suspended agreements with social movements, drastically cut the food budget, and advanced a campaign of stigmatization and judicialization. In its crusade to destroy social movements, the far-right administration sought to eliminate all grassroots public policies. More than a hundred food-related policies were dismantled in 2024 (see the “Rascar la Olla” report) in line with Milei’s belief that the free market should meet all human needs.
It is no coincidence that one of the government’s first measures was to boycott the solidarity kitchens and to drive forward a general weakening of grassroots social and economic policy — including cuts to state programmes for food security, the undermining of social protection systems, and the reduction of government support for community kitchens. In July, following denunciations by social movements, it became known that the state was letting food rot in public warehouses rather than distributing it to the community kitchens. Only after it was subjected to heavy social pressure did the government decide to hand over some of the food — not to the organizations that have historically sustained these practices, however, but to initiatives led by churches that are aligned with its political project.
There are currently no official records indicating how many community kitchens managed to survive; many are known to have disappeared, reduced their days of operation or their portions, or been overwhelmed by demand. Nonetheless, far from collapsing, community food spaces have functioned as one of the country’s most solid pillars of support. Where the state withdrew, the community network persists. The popular movements played a decisive role in making the work that sustains the everyday task of feeding the neighbourhood visible.
These initiatives across the region not only guarantee food for entire communities, they also reactivate grassroots organizing, strengthen popular education, and reopen political debate in the realm of ideas. For any food sovereignty project, solidarity is not charity or a mere supplement: it is a strategic principle that anticipates the more humane society that we strive to build and inspires new forms of collective organization.
Translated by Juan Diego Otero and Joe Keady for Gegensatz Translation Collective.
