Brazil has over 6.7 thousand grassroots initiatives feeding vulnerable communities, from peripheral favelas to downtown areas; since 2024, some receive government aid, but the daily operations still rely heavily on unpaid, predominantly female volunteer work

It’s 9 a.m., and the smell of beans drifts through the entrance of Nova Esperança Occupation, in southern São Paulo. It comes from Instituto Cuca, run by Zenilda Silva – known to everyone by her nickname, Cuca – and ripples through the narrow alleys until it reaches the steep slope leading into the community, an access road appropriately named Cuca Street. The steam billowing from the pots serves as a reminder to residents: lunchtime is approaching, and it will soon be time to join the line. Anyone waiting by noon will receive a free meal. 

By 10:30 a.m., the first people begin arriving carrying plastic containers, most of them women. Many come every day to pick up lunch. If there is enough food left over, they take an extra portion home. “There are many mothers here who go hungry and depend on this food to eat,” says Cuca. “Sometimes they come with three, four, five containers so they can have something for dinner too.” She distributes around 200 meals every day. 

At age 45, Cuca spends her days organizing donations, preparing meals, and listening to her neighbors’ concerns. Cooking and distributing food have been part of her routine for at least a decade. When she moved into the occupation during the pandemic, she was able to secure a shack with neither flooring nor a bathroom. “Then I started paying attention to what the community was going through,” she recalls. “There were people in even worse conditions than me. That’s when I thought: I have to do something.” 

She began by asking for donations and cooking meals in her own home. Later, she obtained permission to use the plot of land where Instituto Cuca now operates. “In the beginning, I cooked everything by myself. We were putting out a thousand meal boxes a day,” she says, referring to the first two years of the pandemic. Once the critical phase passed, donations plummeted and never recovered. “People think the need only existed back then,” Cuca says. 

When she founded the Institute in 2022, the space gradually gained structure through a parliamentary budget amendment and support from the British philanthropic organization The Caring Family Foundation. “Now we have freezers, and I buy the chicken pre-cleaned and pre-cut, so it saves a lot of time,” she says. 

Instituto Cuca is one of the 6,700 solidarity kitchens operating across Brazil. Most were created by women who decided to stretch the pot of beans when they noticed hunger spreading around them.

While severe food insecurity is a chronic problem in Brazil, the crisis reached a breaking point during the Covid-19 pandemic, under former president Jair Bolsonaro. It was then that many solidarity kitchens emerged.

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to office for his third term in 2023, 33.1 million Brazilians were experiencing some degree of food insecurity, mild, moderate, or severe. Brazil had returned to the United Nations Hunger Map after having left it in 2014 during the administration of former president Dilma Rousseff, who succeeded Lula after his first two terms in office. Combating hunger – a longstanding political banner of the re-elected president – became one of the new administration’s top priorities. The government reestablished institutions dedicated to addressing the problem. 

“Until the Bolsonaro administration, hunger was not a central issue for urban reform movements. But during the pandemic, the MTST [Homeless Workers’ Movement] began scaling this network of collective kitchens across the country because they realized that standard anti-hunger tactics centered around distributing basic dry-ration baskets (cestas básicas) simply wouldn’t cut it anymore,” explains Denise De Sordi, a PhD in Social History and researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation’s Sérgio Arouca National School of Public Health (ENSP-Fiocruz). De Sordi authored the landmark Fiocruz report that served as the policy foundation for the 2024 executive regulation implementing the federal Solidarity Kitchens Program.

The Solidarity Kitchens Platform, created by the Ministry of Social Development (MDS) to map initiatives nationwide, currently lists around 4,300 kitchens. Of those, nearly 1,400 have been officially certified and are therefore eligible to receive funding.

Government resources are transferred to intermediary organizations, known as managing entities, which serve as a bridge between public authorities and the kitchens themselves. Under the program’s first funding call, 35 million reais (approximately US$6 million) were distributed over an 18-month period to 21 managing entities, which in turn supported 324 kitchens across Brazil. The ministry estimates that these kitchens served 7.5 million meals in 2025 alone. A second funding round is expected to distribute another 30 million reais.

At a time when federal budgets are increasingly constrained by mandatory congressional spending amendments, the Solidarity Kitchens Program may be one of the most cost-effective tools available for expanding access to adequate food and strengthening food and nutrition security.

Certified kitchens also receive support through Brazil’s Food Acquisition Program (PAA), a federal initiative that purchases food directly from family farmers. In 2025, the Solidarity Kitchens Program received 100 million reais through the PAA. The system still faces logistical challenges involving transportation, delivery schedules, and product diversity. The final stage of distribution depends on state and municipal food supply networks, and fresh produce such as leafy greens, fruits, and vegetables remains difficult to obtain consistently in some locations.

Program guidelines require meals to follow the recommendations of Brazil’s Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian Population, prioritizing foods rooted in local food cultures and emphasizing fresh and minimally processed ingredients. In the pantries of the solidarity kitchens visited by O Joio e O Trigo in São Paulo, staples such as rice, beans, cassava flour, corn couscous, and pasta filled the shelves. Every kitchen shared the same foundation: rice, beans, and a protein source, whether meat or textured soy protein. Cooked vegetables and fresh salads appeared less frequently, largely because they are harder to store while maintaining freshness. Proteins are usually purchased with donated funds or through community fundraising campaigns and stored in refrigerators and freezers.

“Whenever possible, we prefer foods people are already familiar with – chicken gizzards, liver, chicken thighs – because we want the meal to feel welcoming rather than unfamiliar,” says Mila Maria, a nutritionist at Quebrada Alimentada, a solidarity kitchen in São Paulo’s northern outskirts that O Joio e O Trigo visited in April. Each meal box there weighs about 500 grams and is assembled according to nutritional guidelines. “People living in vulnerable conditions are usually very hungry,” she says. “If there’s food left over after they’ve eaten, that’s actually a good thing. What we cannot do is leave someone hungry.”

A School of Rights

The women who lead solidarity kitchens do far more than cook. They become community reference points. They connect residents to public services, monitor situations involving domestic violence, organize donation drives, and help neighbors navigate crises. “Cuca is always checking in on people, asking how they’re doing and whether anyone needs help,” says Márcia de Souza Reis, 54, a resident of Nova Esperança Occupation.

During our visit, Cuca kept her phone slung over her shoulder while tracking a delivery of powdered milk and sending voice messages to a WhatsApp group she maintains with residents.

“It’s not just Cuca,” says Juliana Bruno Favacho, who accompanied O Joio e O Trigo during the visit. Favacho coordinates MTST solidarity kitchens across São Paulo state. “In every community or MTST occupation, you’ll find someone like this – sometimes more than one person, which is actually ideal. Everyone helps one another.”

On the other side of the city, in São Paulo’s North Zone, Val Frazão plays this role for her neighbors. The 53-year-old community leader took part in the occupation of a plot of land owned by SP Urbanismo in Jardim Julieta six years ago. “This place had been completely abandoned,” she recalls. The economic crisis triggered by the pandemic led thousands of people to be evicted and seek refuge in that area. The Viva Jardim Julieta occupation began with 300 families. Val estimates that approximately 4,000 people currently live there.

Like Val and Cuca, residents of the urban periphery know they have a right to housing. It is the state’s delay in responding to these populations that leads them to take matters into their own hands. The fact that solidarity kitchens emerged from the initiative of women in vulnerable territories also shows that they will not wait for the government to provide solutions so they can eat well. 

Adriana Salay is a historian, professor at the University of São Paulo (USP), and manager of Quebrada Alimentada. In 2015, while studying hunger in Brazil, she encountered the work of geographer Josué de Castro and became interested in understanding how hunger is produced. “Hunger is an everyday phenomenon of capitalism because it is deeply tied to income. A person’s income determines whether they will eat and what they will eat. This modern process of producing hunger became consolidated between the 19th and 20th centuries, and Josué captured this brilliantly in his 1946 book The Geography of Hunger,” she explains. 

The migration from rural areas to cities has created new forms of social inequality. Unlike housing, the right to adequate food was only recently added to the list of rights guaranteed to Brazilians. Even so, it remains out of reach for more than 13% of the population, especially those living in urban areas.

Although hunger levels have declined since 2023, it still affects 28 million Brazilians. This underscores the importance of a national policy recognizing solidarity kitchens as components of the country’s food and nutrition security system. “Solidarity kitchens have shown us that there is a gap in the outskirts of large cities that had not been adequately addressed,” Rahal summarizes, referring to the location of popular restaurants and community kitchens, which are usually situated in high-traffic areas near public transportation hubs. Solidarity kitchens, by contrast, are embedded within neighborhoods and communities, serving people who cannot afford to travel elsewhere. 

This proximity is especially important for Black women, the group most affected by hunger in Brazil and one that often bears the greatest caregiving responsibilities within families. In addition to earning lower wages, they frequently shoulder exhausting workloads of reproductive labor – such as cleaning and maintaining the household – while caring for children and elderly relatives and, not infrequently, serving as the family’s primary breadwinners.

The convergence of the struggles for housing and adequate food has become an economic strategy within occupations: by reducing spending on rent, families are able to reorganize their budgets and improve their quality of life. Women are often at the forefront of this mobilization. 

“Women are at the center of these territories. Building community is tied to an expanded notion of family and to the private sphere, yet this work is not recognized as labor,” observes Salay, from Quebrada Alimentada. Favacho, from MTST, agrees: “The work of building citizenship in the peripheries happens almost entirely through social movements, and it is not paid work.” In solidarity kitchens, cooks are, in fact, nourishing community life itself.

Women’s work — and unpaid labor 

In the kitchens visited by O Joio, women could be seen humming while sautéing kilos of onions, joking with one another and with regular visitors, and remaining attentive to even the slightest changes in the behavior or attendance of familiar faces. 

It is no coincidence that they appear so comfortable in these caregiving roles. “This training begins when we are very young, through the construction of gender identity. Being attentive and available to care for others is an acquired skill; it is not part of women’s nature,” emphasizes Miriam Nobre, an agronomist, coordinator of Sempreviva Organização Feminista (SOF), and an advocate working alongside women farmers in the Ribeira Valley region of São Paulo. 

Patriarchal culture frames domestic work as an expression of women’s love while simultaneously devaluing it. It is expected to be performed free of charge, invisibly, and selflessly. As the pace of life and workplace productivity accelerate, the cost of maintaining this arrangement increases. “The adjustment mechanism between the pace of capital and the pace of life is the overburdening of women and reproductive labor,” Nobre observes. 

The existence of solidarity kitchens and other collective caregiving initiatives offers an alternative to the nuclear and patriarchal organization of society. But they also present a paradox: if this work is performed on a voluntary and full-time basis, these women effectively become a reserve of care labor for society. Instead of distributing responsibilities, they end up taking on even more – both those of their own households and those of the collective.

This arrangement provides greater flexibility – allowing women to care for elderly family members, take their children to medical appointments, and manage their own homes – but it also leaves them unprotected in terms of social security benefits. “How are you supposed to retire if you’ve spent all this time doing volunteer work? And should this volunteer work really be responsible for meeting all of society’s caregiving needs?” Nobre asks.

In this sense, another right has been added to Brazil’s list of rights. The National Care Policy, launched at the end of 2024, seeks to redistribute this individual responsibility. The initiative calls for the expansion and integration of public care services, as well as measures aimed at reducing the burden of unpaid labor on families, such as daycare centers, community laundries, social centers for older adults, and other public support facilities. This is where solidarity kitchens fit in: for many women, having access to a ready-made meal means one less task weighing on their daily routines. 

Although public funding to support these initiatives remains limited, it plays an important role in keeping the kitchens running. “The financial management of a solidarity kitchen is the management of scarcity. This is something people in the periphery learn through experience – making a little go a long way is nothing new to us. So when there is funding, we can do much more,” says Favacho, of MTST-SP. 

For the movement, paying the cooks is a non-negotiable issue. “Our struggle now is to demand social protection and guaranteed wages for the cooks working under the Solidarity Kitchen Program. This support has to come from the government,” Favacho emphasizes. 

In other Latin American countries, grassroots movements have been engaged in similar struggles for decades. In Argentina, cooks working in community dining halls – known locally as comedores – linked to organizations such as La Poderosa have demanded pension rights and state compensation for their community work. In Peru, community kitchens and the Vaso de Leche programs have been consolidated as women-led networks fighting hunger since the 1980s, while community initiatives in Bolivia and Chile have likewise pressured local governments for sustained funding and social protections for care workers. 

Imagined horizons 

Researchers and community leaders interviewed by O Joio argue that this public policy must become firmly established to the point of becoming permanent. Only then would it truly fulfill the constitutional right to adequate food. Salay, from Quebrada Alimentada, draws a parallel with Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS). “Does SUS function perfectly? No. But you have your local health clinic as a point of reference, you can get your medication, you can seek treatment. There are many challenges, but SUS materializes in people’s everyday lives,” she explains. 

“Food is a right, but today it only materializes through the market. My dream is for every neighborhood to have a solidarity kitchen,” says Salay. 

Such an approach would offer a structural solution by shifting food provision away from being an individual responsibility and toward a collective one. It echoes a longstanding debate within feminist economics: the need to de-privatize and de-feminize care work. At the same time, this transition would not erase women’s knowledge or their contributions to building these strategies. “It means placing what sustains life – such as food preparation – at the center of society and redistributing this work among everyone, without stripping women of the leadership role they have played in all of this,” explains Nobre, of SOF. 

“There is a moralistic and even elitist discourse suggesting that it is up to us, women, to cook fresh, organic, minimally processed foods. I agree with that. But what are the living conditions of these women? Do they actually have the means to maintain this type of diet?” Salay asks. According to her, solidarity kitchens also serve as a temporary reprieve from this burden: a place where women can obtain an adequate meal for themselves and their families when the demands of everyday life become overwhelming.