The Politics of Hunger: Feminist Infrastructures of Care in Crisis

Across the globe, feminist movements face renewed backlash and shrinking resources. At this year’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), activists warned that the erosion of feminist funding undermines decades of struggle for gender justice. Funding is not about dependency; it is about sustaining the networks that hold communities together when institutions falter. Crises repeatedly show that grassroots movements generate extraordinary strength under pressure. Yet without material support, even the most resilient care infrastructures remain precarious.

Cape Town offers a stark example of how structural inequality, hunger, and care intersect in times of polycrises. The city’s reputation as Africa’s “culinary capital” conceals a post-apartheid reality shaped by deep spatial and economic divides. Colonial and apartheid legacies endure in the city’s geography: wealth and opportunity remain concentrated in well-serviced areas near table mountain and sea, while the majority live in the Cape Flats vast informal settlements and working-class neighbourhoods at the urban periphery. Here, poverty, unemployment, and violence are woven into everyday life, and chronic food insecurity has become a defining feature of urban existence.

Hunger in Cape Town is not coincidental; it is a manifestation of systemic oppression. South Africa’s social safety nets provide minimal relief, while local food systems remain fragmented and uneven. In this context, community kitchens emerged during the pandemic as a collective response to crisis. Run primarily by women, they were never part of formal policy frameworks. They began as emergency food relief, but over time evolved into enduring hubs of care, dialogue, and mutual support. These kitchens demonstrate that acts of care can also be acts of political significance.

The findings from the A Hungry City is a Violent City study reveal the gendered dimensions of this crisis. Women who have experienced gender-based violence (GBV) are three times more likely to be food insecure, showing how hunger functions as a gendered mechanism of control within unequal food systems. In the Cape Flats, hunger and violence are not separate problems; they reinforce one another. Women who run community kitchens are often first responders, supporting survivors of GBV while ensuring that families eat.

From a feminist perspective, these practices redefine what care means in the city. Cooking is not merely an act of charity or domestic obligation; it is a collective intervention that exposes the fragility of existing urban systems. By transforming unpaid reproductive labour, community kitchens reclaim care as both social right and political strategy. As feminist theorist Silvia Federici reminds us, the struggle to reclaim the commons of care is central to building societies that prioritise life over profit.

Cape Town’s community kitchens show us that care can be a quiet form of resistance. They reveal how collective nourishment can challenge systems of exclusion, and how women’s everyday labour carries transformative potential. Yet their existence also echoes a global truth: at a moment when feminist funding is under attack, sustaining these grassroots infrastructures is not optional. It is essential to keeping alive the possibility of more just and caring urban futures.