Organising a solidarity kitchen: reflections from Cooperation Birmingham

The global Covid
19 pandemic is being faced by governments and covered by the
media as a natural disaster And in a way they are right: a s scientists predicted,
the rapid change in climatic conditions has created a favourable environment
for the virus to spread. However, other factors have also contributed to the
transmission and mortality of the dise ase. Global capitalism and the frenetic
movement of people and goods that it entails; an endemic lack of funding (or
plain privatisation) of public healthcare systems all over; cultural inclination to
frequent socialising; and most importantly, widespread lack of access to basic
goods such as healthy food or clean water and air. Critical geographers already
discovered decades ago that natural disasters are not purely natural , but to a
great extent they are socially constructed. Or as Neil Smith, in his acco unt of
hurricane Katrina, puts it natural disasters don’t just create indiscriminate
destruction, “[r]ather they deepen and erode the ruts of social difference they
encounter”