**Background:** Over the last four decades, foodbanks have become a widespread and permanent feature of high-income countries' responses to hunger. Research has commonly attributed this rise to neoliberal social welfare reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. However, the authors argue that critiques based solely on neoliberalism overlook deeper historical roots of food charity, including colonial and capitalist ideologies that have long shaped attitudes toward poverty, individual responsibility, and the role of the state. This paper aims to provide a genealogy of food charity in Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ) to demonstrate how foundational approaches to hunger predate neoliberalism and to explore alternative solutions beyond the neoliberal critique.
**Methods:** The authors conducted archival research into food charity in ANZ using digitised newspapers, hardcopies, and microfilm from the 1840s to 2020, primarily through the Hocken Library at the University of Otago and online databases. Keywords searched included "soup kitchen", "soup kitchens", "foodbank", "foodbanks", "hunger", and "poverty". Additional sources included reports from churches, NGOs, and the state. A critical qualitative inquiry approach was adopted, guided by interpretive phenomenology to break data into descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual components. In total, 217 articles and reports were included in the analysis.
**Key Results:** The genealogy revealed two main periods of prominent food charity: the soup kitchen period (1860s–1930s) and the foodbank period (1980s–present), with the latter divided into phase one (neoliberal initiation, 1980s–1990s) and phase two (corporate appropriation, 2000s–present). During the soup kitchen period, soup kitchens emerged in the mid-1860s as the primary channel of poor relief, but were met with widespread contempt and resistance from the unemployed, who saw them as degrading. Victim-blaming prevailed, with poverty attributed to individual moral failings. The first major economic depression of the 1880s was known as "the regime of the soup kitchen". Soup kitchens essentially disappeared from archival research after the 1930s, coinciding with ANZ's long boom characterised by full employment, economic expansion, and a well-developed social welfare state following the 1935 Labour Party reforms.
Foodbanks first appeared unintentionally in 1983 in Auckland. Between 1989 and 1992, the number of foodbanks rose rapidly. By 1991/2, foodbanks emerged as independent organisations. By 1994, over 300 organisations were involved in collecting and distributing food. Foodbank use continued to rise, with a noticeable peak during the 2008 Financial Crisis; the Salvation Army saw a 100% increase in need for its services from 2009 to 2012. The 2010s saw corporate appropriation intensify, with supermarkets playing a more prominent role through food donation bins and "food rescue" operations. The government's 2002 Foodbank Strategy had "no significant impact on reducing the need for foodbanks". The Welfare Expert Advisory Group's 2019 report, "Whakamana Tāngata—Restoring Dignity to Social Security in New Zealand", concluded that a complete overhaul of the welfare system was needed, but the government's response was described as disappointing.
Three main points of comparison across periods were identified: (1) individualistic narratives—poverty and hunger have been consistently justified by narratives of individualism and self-sufficiency since colonisation, with victim-blaming persisting across all periods; (2) points of resistance and political action—soup kitchen resistance came primarily from the unemployed demanding work, while foodbank resistance in phase one came primarily from those running foodbanks (especially churches), and in phase two resistance has been further removed to food rescue organisations; (3) individualisation of blame—shame has shifted from a collective societal shame about soup kitchens as symbols of social stratification to individualised shame directed at food parcel recipients, leading to social inertia rather than resistance.
**Clinical Implications:** While this paper does not directly address clinical practice, it has significant implications for public health and social policy. The authors argue that hunger needs to be reframed as an emergency caused by systemic issues, not hidden behind other social issues or individualised. They call for a paradigm shift in understanding charity as a short-term crisis response rather than a normal part of life. The paper emphasises that state inaction, not economic system rationale alone, is responsible for hunger, and that the voices of food-insecure people should be prioritised. The authors conclude that hunger has consistently been treated as an issue of charity rather than justice, and that addressing food insecurity requires assessing the social norms and laws that set the framework for philanthropy, with an aspiration to social conditions that render food charity redundant.