Dining in Bethlehem: Food, Charity, and Growing Old in Bogota

Abstract

This dissertation is about practices of giving and receiving of food assistance in a diverse range of contexts, including comedores (public dining facilities) for elderly residents of Bogotá. I focus on the ways religious charity organizations (with the assistance of multinational corporations) focus not only on nutritionally assisting elders by curbing hunger through gifts of food, but also endeavor to transform the lives, personhoods, and social relations of their recipients through practices of feeding. My ethnography is a “ground-up” analysis that moves beyond understandings of how social welfare and religious based charity affect people, and focuses on what the intended receivers do with the food and aid they receive, how they transform these material forms, and recirculate them in new communities with new registers of value. I argue that practices of rebusque, or the practice of finding one’s livelihood in the street, are not passive ones, but rather are forms of work that position the poor elderly of the Colombian capital as active agents in securing their own futures and well-being. In doing so, I complicate dyadic representations of the “givers” and “receivers” of charity, and position food practices as material and spiritual response to the deep social and economic inequalities that are connected to histories of violence, migration, and urbanization in Colombia. In doing so, I show how every food product that is given, transferred, and consumed is connected to sets of local and global relations and histories, and the ways elderly patrons of comedores embody and reproduce these relations with every bite.