Between Gift and Entitlement: Experiencing Public Social Services and Charitable Food Aid in 2020s Finland

Abstract

In this chapter I analyze how the ideals of the Finnish welfare state are experienced in the 2020s by people who live in weak social and economic situations. Charitable food aid and public social services are often seen to epitomize the unreconciled ideals of the charitable ethos versus welfare universalism. This chapter voices grassroots experiences of people who use services from both charitable and public social service institutions. By exploring people’s everyday encounters with these services, the demonstrations of agency within these services, navigations of social hierarchy, and expressions of gratitude in the welfare state context, the chapter highlights both contrasts and connections between food aid and the welfare state institutions. It shows how experienced social rights of people in weak positions are entangled with their individual agency.

Introduction

In the late twentieth century, Finland was characterized as a Nordic welfare state that relied on the universal coverage of widespread public services, collective, solidarity-based support that helped people to lead an active and independent life, and the fostering of equality against class hierarchies and societal divides.¹ However, with the emergence and proliferation of charitable food aid since the 1990s, Finland’s status as a universalist welfare state has been questioned.² In this chapter, I ask how the ideals of the Finnish welfare state are experienced in 2020s Finland by people who live in weak social and economic situations, and who must rely extensively on social services and recourse to charitable assistance in order to make ends meet.

Although helping the poor by giving them food has a long history,³ the early twenty-first century’s food aid system is a relatively new invention. The first cross-national study of food aid in the 1990s identified the phenomenon as characteristic of residual welfare states. According to that study, Northern European welfare states had shown that hunger, and hence charity-based measures to combat it, need not exist. With appropriate social policy actions, people can be lifted from poverty so that they do not have to rely on charity.⁴ However, the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries witnessed a global expansion of food aid across the affluent world. Studies from various corners of the world show that food aid does not respect the theoretical boundaries of welfare state regimes.⁵ Rather, it epitomizes post-welfare state governance that promotes charity responses to poverty and food insecurity and undermines the public responsibility to secure the right to food for all.⁶

The emergence and proliferation of charitable food aid in Finland challenges the thought that such assistance is not a concern for Nordic welfare states.⁷ From the 1970s until the beginning of the 1990s, the construction of the universalist welfare state with an inclusive social security net had reduced the need for faith- and voluntary-based social protection and charity aid.⁸ Tiina Silvasti describes the welfare state ideals of that time:

Finland identifies itself as a Nordic welfare state. The ethos of Nordic welfare refers to a public responsibility for society and its citizens based on strong democracy, a determination to reduce poverty, inequality and vulnerability based on the principle of equality, as well as recognizing basic rights of all citizens and implementing them in the spirit of universalism […]. Accordingly, during the expansion of the welfare state in the 1970s and 1980s, people became accustomed to the idea that the basic needs of all citizens would thereby be satisfied. Food insecurity or hunger was unimaginable.⁹

This development took a drastic turn in the early 1990s. Charitable food aid arrived in Finland in the wake of the economic recession in the early 1990s. It was first meant as a provisional response to the immediate consequences of the economic downturn. However, over three decades food aid became a semi-permanent way of helping people who live in precarious positions in Finnish society.¹⁰ There are no comprehensive statistics on the prevalence of food aid in Finland. However, there are food aid outlets throughout the country, and they are estimated to provide food aid for tens of thousands of people (out of a population of 5.5 million) on a weekly basis.¹¹

Charitable food aid and public social services are often seen to represent opposites: they epitomize the unreconciled ideals of the charitable ethos versus welfare universalism, or gift versus entitlement.¹² Food aid has been criticized for compromising values such as food security, dignity, and equality, which are at the heart of rights-based social security.¹³ As a reactive aid that is targeted at a selected group of marginalized people, food aid does not address the root causes of food insecurity and poverty. However, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and other organizations providing food aid brought poverty onto the Finnish public agenda in a manner that fostered an ideological change in Finnish social policy from universalism to selectivism.¹⁴

Despite the critique, and with the rise of the anti-poverty approach in Finnish social policy in the early 2000s, food aid persists.¹⁵ It has become a new social fact in affluent societies that is unlikely to fade away anytime soon.¹⁶ Since the early 2000s, food aid has indeed become more and more socially acceptable,¹⁷ and, with the new emphasis on food waste reduction, even desired.¹⁸ This impacts how food aid organizers approach their own work. Simply put, whereas the introduction of the first food banks in the 1990s sparked critical debates among aid providers,¹⁹ today’s food aid organizers are seeking ever new ways to prove their usefulness and effectiveness to ensure the continuity of their operations.²⁰

The increasing cooperation between the public sector, food aid providers, and food markets reframes the roles and responsibilities of different actors.²¹ This new situation calls for research that moves beyond the stark opposition of public versus charitable services. Further, the situation calls for research that better takes the service users’ voices into account. Reaching for insights into the food aid recipients’ world provides a rich and nuanced perspective on the Finnish welfare society as it is experienced by people who live in weak social and economic situations. This chapter voices grassroots experiences of people who use services from both charitable and public social service institutions.

The Lived Experiences of Service Users

With the growth of food aid, a growing body of research is targeting food aid recipients in different parts of the affluent world and various welfare state contexts. These studies have so far mainly asked who the recipients are, how they are perceived by others, and to what extent they are reached by the aid organizations.²² Some studies have engaged in the experiences of food aid recipients in more detail by asking, for instance, how they feel about the aid and how they perceive their situation.²³

Previous research has well illustrated that food aid recipients are often trapped in difficult life situations and social positions. Food aid has been characterized as “the last hatch in the social security system” and as “the perdition zone” beyond the public social security net.²⁴ However, while in many ways useful, this doomsday imagery obscures the active voice of the food recipients. In addition to the obstacles that food aid recipients face, it is important to analyze the degree to which these constraints leave room for agency.²⁵ So far, little attention has been paid to how food aid recipients experience the society around them. However, my past research with food aid users has shown that these people merit more attention, not as objects of scrutiny, but also as important informants.²⁶

The study draws from qualitative interviews with eighteen people who have used both public social services and charitable food aid. I refer to these people as service users. The interviews were conducted in November and December 2020 in Espoo in the Helsinki metropolitan area. They took place amid the Covid-19 pandemic, which had both increased the need for social benefits and food aid and affected the modes of operation in social services and food aid venues.²⁷ Nevertheless, the interviews reflect service users’ experiences beyond this exceptional period. The questions in the qualitative interview guide were informed by a quantitative survey conducted with over 450 food aid recipients earlier in the same autumn in the same food aid venues.²⁸ In the analysis, I concentrated on finding out how the interviewees experienced public services and charitable aid provided in the city, how these services met the interviewees’ needs, and how these people envisioned the changes needed in these services. As the analysis below will show, the interviewees also engaged in wider discussions concerning their own life experiences, their ability to cope, and the role and place they envision for themselves in society.

The interviewees were aged from their late twenties to late sixties and split equally between the genders. The interviewees’ life histories and current situations varied widely. However, as people who receive food aid in general, they lived in, or had experienced, severely difficult life situations and cumulative deprivation.²⁹ In the following, I do not discuss individuals’ life situations in detail, but instead concentrate on how they experienced the welfare system and society that they navigate. Further, I do not aim to evaluate the service users’ experiences in relation to their legal rights or moral entitlement to certain services but focus on giving voice to their own interpretations of their situation.

Absurdity and the Loss of Humanity vs. Respect and Recognition

The service users interviewed for this study were experts in various public services: They had years of experience in dealing with the benefits system, social services, employment services, health care, addiction services, and so on. Indeed, many of them had experiences of being helped by these services—whether to resolve small, everyday needs, such as food or furniture, or more complex problems, such as combating addiction and severe health concerns. However, many of them also shared experiences of being left without help, neglected or overlooked in their difficult life situations.

A middle-aged woman went to a local office of Kela, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, with the intention to clarify some of her social benefit issues. She was unsure whether the problem she was trying to resolve fell under the purview of housing benefits or income support. Thus, she consulted a staff member, providing information in the lobby of the office, and asked for help. It turned out that the information officer was unable to help the woman with her troubles, but instead advised her to call the Kela service number and ask for instructions on how to proceed with the matter. There she was sitting in the waiting room of the Kela office and lining up for the phone of that very same office’s phone service.

After 45 minutes of waiting in line, the woman finally got an officer on the phone and, eventually, got her issue sorted out. Now she knew what to do and who to contact next. However, the incident left her perplexed: “I dealt with the matter, but it was nonsensical,” she explained, “so it felt really absurd.”³⁰

Like the woman above, other interviewees also recounted small incidents in their encounters with welfare state institutions that had an absurd overtone. An unemployed man with a physical disability recounted a nonsensical experience with the unemployment office. He was obliged to apply for a job as a truck driver, despite his disability and the fact that he could not even hold a driver’s license due to his health situation. Another man had his dentist appointment unexpectedly canceled. The dentist’s office did not send him a new appointment time to replace the canceled one. However, they did send him a bill concerning the appointment that never took place.

These experiences of small, absurd incidents, as well as being refused assistance when needed, resonate with previous research, which has shown that social service users face unfair situations. The conditions for such incidents arise, for example, when legislation does not fit the service user’s situation, when a service user is unable to request the benefits that they are entitled to, or when the principle of minimizing public expenditure is followed instead of seeking solutions that would benefit both the clients in their acute situation and society and the economy in the long run.³¹

The excerpt that started this section also refers to another issue that the service users often raised: faceless, random, and remote services, and a desire for face-to-face encounters. There was a nostalgic tone to many of the interviewees’ comments about the past and comparisons to the present: Previously, they had received personalized, face-to-face assistance, the system worked well, and they felt that they were cared for. Now, the social service people had been replaced by computers and forms. One must wait for weeks or even months to get access to services that involve a human encounter. A couple in their mid-thirties talked about this change. In their view, “Before, it used to be a more humane activity and you were listened to, and you sat there and talked, and you received the aid in a different manner than today.” In contrast, today, “all they have is computers and no people at all.” According to these service users, face-to-face interaction had been replaced by computers that cannot evaluate individual situations properly:

Now, when you hit ‘enter’ on the computer, it’s all about paperwork. Humanity has totally lost its value and there is a computer between humans. But I guess it is what it is today. I bet it is to save costs. But before, the help was near.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and concomitant social distancing measures enforced at the time of the interviews, the opportunities for face-to-face services were particularly restricted. However, the experiences of the service users did not only speak about the acute crisis period. They reflected wider patterns of change in the field of welfare provision, such as the centralization and digitalization of services and reductions in service points, which had been initiated already before the pandemic.

The call for face-to-face interaction is not only about demanding rights to a personalized service. The service users wanted to be encountered as persons, not as papers and numbers. They aspired to the ability to represent themselves in a respectful, humane light. One described this vividly: “I do not want to be a faceless voice over a phone, who is always, always, always demanding: ‘give, give.’ I want the person to encounter me as a person. And this has been important to me.”

The experiences of absurdity and facelessness are entwined in the fact that the service users lacked chances to explain their often complex life situation and need for services face to face, thus leading to experiences of misrecognition and rejection.

In Finland, the discussion concerning the welfare system mostly concentrates on its financial basis and stability. The service users, too, noted that the situation that they experience as unfair or absurd is most likely “to save costs.” However, the foundation of the welfare state relies not only on economic rationale, but also on social factors. Indeed, instead of the economy:

More essential for the future of the welfare state is its social foundation, meaning people’s experiences of fairness, equality and reliability of the society as well as the welfare state’s capability of taking care of the most vulnerable groups of people.³²

The experiences of service users speak about fractures in this social foundation. Based on experiences of being left without help or treated in an absurd manner, many service users expressed tiredness, pessimism, and anger toward the system. Some noted that it is not worth even trying to apply for public social benefits or seek services that they might be entitled to; based on their experience of being rejected in the past, they were convinced that they would not be helped in the future, either. A man noted cynically that he understands why there are so many guards in the social security offices, insinuating the possibility of a violent outbreak because of frustration.

In contrast to these experiences of facelessness, remoteness, and rejection, the service users often characterized their encounters with charitable food aid organizations and their personnel as warm, humane, respectful, and personal. One man described his experiences of food aid thus:

In my view, the food aid workers are wonderful people. They are always in a good mood. Always give me personal attention. And somehow, I feel that, even though they, too, are starting to get older, still somehow, I feel that they remember me. Perhaps they remember me because of my beanie, or something, if I have given ten cents to their fund-raising or something.

The recognition that the service user received from the food aid workers only required that he was seen as a person, not as a faceless, demanding voice.

Uncanny Demonstrations of Agency

This call for recognition is further illustrated in the constraints that people faced when navigating a complex service system. A man in his mid-sixties had experienced severe, cumulative deprivation in his life: he grew up in an orphanage, suffered from substance abuse since childhood, and lived all his life on a minimum income. He had experienced mental illness, injuries, and homelessness. He had been receiving food aid for two or three decades. This man suffered from anxieties that made it impossible for him to travel to the social office independently by public transport. A director of a food aid organization took him there when she could. She also took care of all his bills and applied for all benefits on his behalf. “She is my memory,” the man said of this person. “I give her all my bills. I do not have anything to do with the paperwork.” Thus, when it came to taking care of his welfare service matters, the man was heavily reliant on outside help.

Yet, the man’s dependence on the food aid organization did not mean that he remained passive in his efforts to seek solutions to the problems in his life, only that his means to act were rather unconventional. During his life, his range of activities to cope in problematic situations had included seeking a way into public institutions so that he would have a roof over his head while homeless. He first talked about seeking mental health care with this goal in mind:

The so-called loony bin, I just got my foot in the door, wittingly—just because I did not have an apartment. So, I pretended a little, like ‘where am I?’ […] So, I went there just because I didn’t have an apartment. Like that is why I went there. At least it’s warm there.

As another example, the interviewee talked about his dramatic effort to find a place to sleep by trying to get himself into an emergency room:

I pushed my left arm under a bus once. When it was sleeting and raining and all. So, I did not have an apartment or anything. […] It was dark, it was autumn or winter, I don’t know. So, I put my left arm under the front tire, and then rolled over, so that the rear wheel didn’t run over me.

This effort to injure himself purposefully to obtain a warm place to stay failed. The man was caught and ended up being fined for his action. Further, it turned out that the soft sleet had shielded his hand, so his injuries were not as severe as he had expected. Hence, the man could not get to stay the night in the emergency room. “I was back in the rain, walking,” he said, finishing the story.

Navigating a complex welfare system requires people to have many capacities: material resources such as a computer and mobile phone, enough money to call office numbers or pay for travel to offices and potential service costs, and the ability to use this equipment and these services. The interviewees in this study noted several challenges in these skills: some felt that they are not competent in filling in the right forms and finding out about potential services, some had difficulties in remembering appointment times and the names of the people and offices, and so forth. Some suffered from physical disabilities and visual impairment, and some from anxieties—for instance caused by the use of public transport—which might make it difficult to seek help. Physical and mental distress caused by poverty lessened their ability to seek help. For many service users, charitable food aid organizations were not only places where they went and sought assistance once the official, public welfare state institutions had failed them. They were also venues where people could get hands-on help in dealing with social services.³³

Facing challenges and having to rely on outside help when seeking services does not mean passivity or a lack of individual agency. When the man above was asked who or what had helped him the most in his life, he mentioned God and himself. At the request of the interviewer, he then clarified his own role:

So ultimately, I have been the one who solves [things], by pushing my hand under the bus, or by going to the loony bin intentionally. Even though I would not need it, mentally. So, I must go there purposely, so that I don’t bite the dust. And one must make those decisions, offenses, even be sent up the river, so that at least you get somewhere where it is warm. So, I am the one who makes those decisions. But they are, of course, wrong.

While acknowledging that the propriety of his actions can be questioned, the man nevertheless framed these choices as active efforts to solve the challenges he had faced in life. Like this man, other service users also demonstrated agency from a materially highly constrained social position, even though not always in a way that is expected from them by the welfare system. People used creativity to carve out space for agency within complex public social services.³⁴ What the welfare system considers as harmful and deviant behavior can, from the individual’s perspective, be viewed as a means to take initiative in one’s own life. The challenge is to recognize these forms of self-help that do not always fit neatly with the welfare state institutions’ logic.

Navigating Social Hierarchy

When talking about their experiences with public and charitable services, the service users also engaged in reflecting on society more broadly. Hierarchical descriptions were common in the interviews. The service users talked about societal layers and dividing lines, and described their position in, and sometimes movement between, these divisions. A woman said that she had “been in a good position” until suddenly her “whole life fell apart.” Some had “visited the bottom,” and some had risen up, at least “to the first floor.”

A man in his fifties reflected on his position in society vis-à-vis what he considers ordinary. In his words, he had “fallen below the ordinary person.” Rising through societal layers from that position is not easy. The man noted that “getting back to be an ordinary person is years and years of work.” He listed certain qualities that hampered his aspiration to rejoin the ranks of the ordinary people: “When you are unemployed, divorced, a man, over fifty years old, have a bad credit history, it affects everything you do,” he summarized.

The man compared his current societal position to his own past: “I do have a background as an ordinary person. Good life, two wonderful children, twenty years of marriage, and so forth. So, this gives me strength to think that I have led a good life. Compared to this, now.”

He then moved on to weigh up the positive outcomes of his current life phase: “I would not have met these wonderful people if I had led that middle-class life and so forth. In its own way, this is wealth, too.” The man counted all experiences in life—including the difficult ones that have made him fall “below the ordinary person”—as holding value.

The man stated that he was himself responsible for how his life had turned out. “I know that society has not ruined my life, but I have caused it, with my own actions, that a middle-class person has become less privileged,” he said. However, he recognized the positive influence that societal institutions can have in fostering an ordinary way of life:

It is like, when you are a small child, you are in nursery, you are at school, you are in middle school, high school, vocational college, get a job, all these. So, all the time, you have things to do. And perhaps, in the end, you still want to stay in work after three years or so.

One of the key ideas behind the welfare state is the power of institutions to support and level people’s opportunities to lead an ordinary life and pursue their goals. The interviewee readily acknowledged this. Yet, in his own life, these routines had gradually fallen apart. He developed a mindset that saw work as interfering with rather than supporting his life. He noted that such patterns of thinking are hard to turn around. However, recently, the man had gained positive experiences from occasional work opportunities, which had helped him to change his thinking again:

I could think like an ordinary person needs to think. So that I pay the rent myself, I do not get housing benefit. I pay for my living myself, my bills. And I no longer think that I will lose my unemployment benefit if I take a job. Or that I lose my housing benefit.

This positive experience had infused in him a hope for change. In his words, “the game is not up yet. And I have decided already in the beginning of this year that this year I will get a job, so that I do not have to fill in even one single fuckin’ Kela form.” Thus, even though the man still positioned himself outside middle-class ordinary life and noted the difficulties of getting back to that life, for him, the possibility of return to the ordinary, the way he sees it, was not totally out of the question. What he aspired to was freedom from those welfare institutions and their practices that signal his position “below” ordinary people.

This man did not blame society for his situation but emphasized his own actions. Yet, in interviews with some other service users, the description of one’s position in society grew into a societal critique. A couple in their mid-thirties talked about how they had to give up their entire life due to health- and income-related adversities. They had attempted to receive help from social services but were unsuccessful, and thus they felt that they had been forgotten by the social service system. Due to the way they had been dealt with, they concluded that “we belong to the group of people who the city does not apparently want in the future.” Further, they extended this sense of being forgotten to the societal level: “Some people have been forgotten. Some people retreat somewhere, and some end up at the end of their tether. Perhaps it is intended, to make a portion of people go away,” one of them said. The other continued: “It feels like we are just papers. Some get ahead, and some are put in the trash bin.” They contrasted this situation to the egalitarian ideals of the welfare state with a nostalgic undertone:

Before, people were taken care of. We talked about the welfare society, and how important it is that everyone is well. Today, there is this certain group who is doing well. They are riding high. They laugh and make fun of us. The main thing is that this place looks better. In my view, in five years, there will be only super flat broke and addicted people, and those who prosper. Inequality will become visible, and all people will be divided into their own groups. And I think that it’s sad, and it’s scary, too. What the future will bring is not perhaps what we have wanted. But this is what we have made from this. We should have thought about it twenty years ago, when we started to build this into a ‘Little America.’

Suddenly dropping out from ordinary life with a decent income and good health had let the couple realize the current state of the welfare society.

Alongside this societal division between those who have and those who have not, the service users described the communality between people who share the same fate. Even hardship can bring people together and foster a sense of community.³⁵ Many service users referred to the importance of meeting people who share the same life situation. One woman referred to food aid venues when she said:

So, the social environment is important, because there you don’t have to pretend anything. You can be pretty much yourself. Like, I could not be with such people, anymore, who think about nail polish, or the last time they traveled, and like, ‘don’t you ever travel (laughs) anywhere’, and that. Like, people who are in the same situation.

However, the sense of belonging to a group as other people who are socially “in the same boat” is not only positive in character. A man in his fifties, for example, subtly distinguished his own financial deprivation from the deprivation of some other people who he had met in the food aid venue:

Sometimes it might make me wonder a bit that, well, I don’t have a terribly low income, but I am in a rather difficult financial situation, nevertheless. So, when you see those other underprivileged people there, so sometimes you might experience like, kind of unpleasant feelings.

Encounters with other service users caused negative emotions in the man, but he abstained from stating his concerns in detail. When the interviewee tried to find out about the reason behind those unpleasant feelings, the man brusquely answered: “Well, because you note that there is like kind of different, very different kinds of people, too.”

The example highlights that the commonality experienced by people with social and economic difficulties can be negative and burdening. People relate to others with similar experiences, but also differentiate themselves from those who they consider as different, but who outsiders might count as the same social reference group.³⁶

This fear can be grounded in empirical evidence. A recent study analyzed how wealthy Finnish entrepreneurs draw moral boundaries to justify their privileged position. They emphasized their own ordinariness, while considering the lower classes as spoiled, possessing a false sense of entitlement, and having lost their ability to take initiative.³⁷ Other studies have found that the public often views food aid recipients from a distance, as humiliated, spoiled, or undeserving others.³⁸ Identifying as a social service or food aid user involves the risk of being identified as an inferior other.

Getting Along with the Welfare State: Gratitude and Survival Codes

A woman in her fifties listed the many troubles she had encountered in her life and the many ways in which she had been helped by the welfare state: “I’ve had that addiction problem, single parent, unemployment, long-term unemployment. So, I have received help for that life situation, so that I cope.” She then continued by expressing her gratitude to the welfare system: “I am genuinely thankful. Like, I have somehow understood it, that yeah, that it is not self-evident and that in Finland we have this system, and we really cope because of it.”

The woman expressed contentment with the system that had helped her to navigate a life filled with troubles and acknowledged her privileged position as a member of a society that provides a wide range of social support to people in need.

Further, the same woman describes how her own demeanor had prevented her from utilizing the available aid in the past. She talked about her efforts to “keep up appearances” amid severe drug addiction. Despite her adversity, she had been reluctant to acquiesce to the service system’s requirements. She could not stand “ranting,” as she at that time interpreted the well-intended advice that she received from social workers. The woman described her past attitude: “At least I have noticed that when I was using drugs, sometimes I might have been like, that I was angry and [makes a wailing sound]. And I bashed and I whined and [making a squealing sound] ‘I have been mistreated again,’ and that kind of thing.”

She then noted that a change in her own attitude had enabled her to get help:

But then, when I have been polite and like ‘thank you, thank you, best regards,’ [laughs] dealt with it like that, then I have been treated very well myself, too. And I have noted it. One thing is that when you notice that come on, this is not self-evident. That you just put in an application and write something, then somehow. So at least I have noticed that it is not self-evident that there is enough for everyone. So that you just go and get it. [laughs]

This example shows how the service users noted that their own efforts and attitudes affect their ability to succeed in receiving welfare services. In contrast to keeping up appearances, the trick was to be polite and open to the aid.

In contrast, some service users saw their restrained demeanor as a hindrance in receiving aid. A man said he knew that people sometimes receive certain benefits if they strongly insist on getting them. He then described his own approach:

My behavior is that, if they say that they won’t pay, then the arguing ends there. I do not start to bash them or raise my voice, because I hate it, if in this society you get something by yelling, more than you would by behaving properly. If so, then there is something rotten in this society.

In their efforts to seek help and cope in their life situations, the service users needed to balance reciprocating kindness with demanding rights for services. These dilemmas resonate with past research on food consumption and charitable food aid. Giving thanks for food can serve as a strong political act that communicates acknowledgment of the food’s value in a world where waste constantly undermines it.³⁹ However, as I have noted elsewhere, gratitude can be used as a repressive norm that undermines the leverage of choice that people with a limited income have regarding what they eat.⁴⁰ In the context of food aid, service users are often expected to show gratitude and satisfaction with the received benefit, even though their most prevalent emotion would be shame or anger.⁴¹

These arguments can be expanded to welfare services. Gratitude for received benefits and aid can serve as a politically transforming act that reinforces the legitimacy and the social basis of the welfare state. Room for genuine, spontaneous expressions of gratitude makes space for agency for people living in vulnerable societal positions. At the same time, if gratitude becomes a norm that is expected from service users, it can repress and undermine entitlement, and thus risk the foundation of the universalist welfare state.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have analyzed how the ideals of the Finnish welfare state are experienced in 2020s Finland by people who have used both public social services and charitable food aid. At the societal level, the prevalence of the need for charitable food aid symbolizes the failure of affluent societies to ensure food security and the right to food for all.⁴² It indicates that even in the wealthiest countries in the world, some people are unable to meet their food needs in ways that are customary in contemporary consumer culture. Charitable food aid is an illustration of a charity economy that relies on two-tiered food markets and the commodification of welfare. It is a signal of an ethical and societal dilemma where abundant wealth goes hand in hand with persistent food insecurity.⁴³

Individual experiences paint a more complex picture of the situation. The service users’ experiences show both continuities and contrasts between charitable aid and public social services. By showing those many sides, these experiences disrupt the dualism between rights-based welfare systems and gift-based charity, and instead provide a more nuanced view of how the welfare state is lived by people who are familiar with both public and charitable services. Recipients of charitable food aid have experiences ranging from gift to entitlement. Their experiences can illuminate the ideals of the Finnish welfare state and its fracture in the twenty-first century.

The service users’ experiences highlight both contrasts and connections between food aid and the welfare state institutions. On the one hand, faceless public services are contrasted with personal charitable aid; while gift-based aid undermines equal rights to social protection, it might involve the personal aspect that many service users crave. On the other hand, charitable food aid organizations do not only work in opposition to the public service system ethos; they are an integral, if not officially acknowledged, part of the service system. Beyond bread, they also provide advice, help, and support in navigating services, as well as a venue for peer support.

Further, the service users’ accounts highlight social rights as experienced by people living in weak social and economic positions, and the entanglements of these rights with individual agency. The call for respect and recognition is entangled with a call for the ability to voice one’s views in difficult situations. An opportunity to display agency in a personalized manner is entangled with the requirement to receive help in a complex social protection system. The recognition of societal hierarchies and their effect on people’s everyday lives is entangled with the opportunity to take a critical distance from narrow social and societal positions. The room to express gratitude and reciprocate should be safeguarded in a manner that does not undermine universal rights for social protection.

Food aid use reflects services users’ societal position on the low end of the societal hierarchy. Pictures of charitable food aid services and their users serve as symbols of poverty and food insecurity in an affluent society and epitomize the failure of the welfare state. When considering food aid use, service users need to reflect their stance vis-à-vis this wider societal, symbolic, and communal issue. Whether in public services or charity aid, people call for room for agency, including expressions of gratitude and recognition of their own efforts in shaping their own lives.