Hungry for Food or Hungry for Love? Learning from a Belgian Soup Kitchen

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 2000 by Marie-Eve Mulquin, Corinne Siaens, Quentin T. Wodon

Thus while payment difficulties for food do exist in Wallony, they are not widespread even among the poor. This provides a justification for the existence of soup kitchen or social restaurants. Indeed, if only 23 percent of the households belonging to the CVSE sample have food difficulties, the fight against hunger doesn't seem to require a generalization of food-based assistance such as food stamps to all low income households. More targeted forms of assistance, such as the Namur soup kitchen, should be less costly in reducing deprivation--provided of course they can be shown to be efficient in reaching the households facing difficulties in paying for their food.

III

Who is Going to the Social Restaurant of Namur?

IT CAN BE SHOWN that the poorer a household, the higher the probability that it will have difficulties in paying for its food. Does the social restaurant of Namur reach the very poor? To analyze the characteristics of the restaurant's customers, we can compare a sample of them (31 individuals interviewed on site in the restaurant in April 1997 by Ao[hat{u}]t, Mar[acute{e}]chal, and Wigny) to control groups consisting of adults from three other samples. As already mentioned, the first sample, from the CVSE database (1992), is representative of the poor Walloon households. The second sample is a subgroup of this first sample, constituted of the households with difficulties in paying for their food expenditures. The third sample is the Walloon subgroup from the national Panel Study on Belgian Households (PSBH) (1994), representative of the Belgian population as a whole, poor and non-poor.

Statistical results are presented in Table 2. The characteristics of the restaurant's beneficiaries differ from those of the three other samples. Among the customers, loneliness is highly prevalent, since seven customers out of ten are living alone, as compared with one or two out of ten in the other samples. Among the customers, 71 percent are men, whereas gender is more balanced in the other samples. The restaurant's customers are less likely to own their homes, and they seldom own a car, a garage, a telephone, or a video recorder. They move from one house to another more often, which indicates a lack of stability. They are less educated and less likely to work.

Although we could not get a good measure of the income of the restaurant's customers in our site survey, income estimates can be obtained using the other information provided by the customers. The idea is to construct a simple prediction model for income based on variables common to our survey of the restaurant's customers, the CVSE, and the nationally representative PSBH. Using such a model (of the logarithm of income as depending on a wide range of variables), and standardizing the predicted household income to account for differences in family size between households, [4] we obtained the results provided in Figure 1. Figure 1 gives the equivalent income distribution for the four samples within the age limit of the restaurant's customers, that is, 23-74 years of age. The estimated income distribution of the customers after standardization is similar to the distribution obtained for the CVSE individuals having difficulties in paying for their food. In other words, the restaurant does seem to attract poor in dividuals who need help for their food needs. More precisely, the average monthly equivalent income is BF 40,516 for the PSBH, BF 24,916 for the CVSE, BF 23,334 for the CVSE households with payment difficulties for food, and BF 24,273 for the restaurant's customers (BF35 [approx] US $1).