From the infrastructure of food to food as infrastructure in Brazil’s urban peripheries

Introduction

Food and infrastructure are deeply intertwined in Brazil’s urban peripheries—hereafter periferias. ¹ In these spaces, infrastructural exclusion and routine breakdowns shape everyday food practices, placing a burden on women and grassroots initiatives—such as urban gardens and community kitchens—to ensure everyday needs. These efforts rely on and draw together social, economic and political connections within and beyond the neighbourhood, and become fundamental to community life.

In this article we draw inspiration from what has been called the ‘infrastructural turn’, largely prompted by Star’s (1999) invocation to study ‘boring things’ (p. 377). Subsequent discussions have offered a capacious multidisciplinary field with a particular prominence in urban studies. While this attention has influenced our thinking on food access, justice and practices, the literature on infrastructure has largely overlooked food. Our paper makes two principal contributions. First, we build on the food geographies literature to outline the local infrastructures of food—that is, the web of material and social infrastructures (Clark et al., 2021; Rut and Davies, 2024) that enable (and constrain) food access in the periferias. In so doing, we highlight the labour involved in making food available. Second, we develop the concept of food as infrastructure to demonstrate the potential of food in generating connections between people, places and materials that function as platforms to support everyday life in contexts of exclusion.

The remainder of the article is organised in five sections. The first section reviews recent scholarship on infrastructures, revealing the near absence of food from these debates. The second section introduces our theoretical rationale and conceptual contribution, while the third details the methods employed in our research. The fourth section examines the infrastructures of food. It demonstrates how everyday infrastructural breakdowns affect food practices and how grassroots initiatives contribute to food provision through social networks, both organised and ad hoc. The fifth section presents the notion of food as infrastructure. It draws on different initiatives, such as urban gardens and community kitchens, to reveal how food functions as a social connector, enabling relationships and partnerships within and beyond periferias. By bringing these two concepts together, we advance a novel claim that acknowledges both the infrastructural mediation of food provision and the infrastructural role of food in (re)shaping social and material arrangements.

The infrastructural turn and the food gap

Star (1999) inspired a renewed interest in infrastructures, inaugurating innovative ways of analysing the relations between people and socio-technical systems (Amin, 2014; Easterling, 2014; Jensen, 2017). Debates then shifted attention from infrastructure as merely a material grid to a lens for understanding uneven social and political processes (Amin, 2014; Chu, 2014; Larkin, 2013). Particularly influential in urban studies was Graham and Marvin’s (2001) critique of neoliberalism’s erosion of infrastructures as mostly public goods and connected systems. Scholars, however, questioned how far this perspective captured the reality of cities where infrastructural fragmentation, unequal citizenship and hybrid forms of provision had long shaped everyday life even as neoliberal governmentality and entrepreneurial models of the state increasingly took hold (Anand, 2017; Furlong, 2014; Lawhon et al., 2018).

As these contributions made clear, infrastructures are deeply embedded in everyday social, economic and political lives of cities. Yet, the accepted view was that infrastructures are so mundane that they largely go unnoticed until they fail (Star, 1999)—a contention that Larkin (2023) argued was ‘flatly untenable’ (p. 336). Especially in the Global South, tangled cables, periodic blackouts, leaking pipes and potholes are constant and visible reminders of disconnection, disrepair and breakdown (Anand, 2017; Chu, 2014; Gupta, 2015; Jensen, 2017). Infrastructures are persistent and contentious topics of public scrutiny, whether functioning or failing (McFarlane, 2008) and constitute a critical terrain of disputes over inclusion and belonging. Indeed, research attended to how people’s everyday access to essential infrastructures are mediated by social and political networks (Anand, 2017; Téllez Contreras, 2025; Truelove, 2011), that express differentiated experiences of citizenship and relations with state power (Chu, 2014; Lemanski, 2020). In this sense, access (or lack thereof) to material infrastructures is intimately tied to how rights are defined and enacted (Holston, 2008; Lemanski, 2020; Pilo’, 2020; Téllez Contreras, 2025). As Sultana noted, urban citizenship is thus ‘shaped by the embodied intersections of sociospatial differences’ and the materialities of both infrastructure and the resources they make accessible (Sultana, 2020: 1408).

The absence or breakdown of infrastructures have highlighted the important roles of people to act cooperatively and sometimes collectively through improvisation and repair (Lawhon et al., 2018; Silver, 2015). An influential perspective, Simone’s (2004) notion of ‘people as infrastructure’ emphasised the vitality of associational networks, social commitments, political affiliations, ethnic links and economic opportunities that emerge to address systematic exclusions. To Simone, these (re)combinations of energies in social and technical relations are contextual and contingent; the precise arrangement is formed, curated, and dismantled by individuals or collective efforts to sustain urban life. In short, ‘people should be considered forms of infrastructure themselves’ (Simone, 2004: 408). Much less recognised is that the ‘people’ undertaking these improvised, experiments to make-do are often women socialised to meet responsibilities as care providers and just as likely to be indicative of social inequalities as assertions of agency (Moragues-Faus and Marsden, 2017; Truelove, 2011).

In response to this absence, there has been a growing theorisation of infrastructures from the perspective of social reproduction and care (Alam and Houston, 2020; Binet et al., 2023). This approach often adopts Berlant’s (2016: 393) definition of infrastructures as ‘the living mediation of what organizes life’. This notion is encapsulated by Alam and Houston’s (2020: 4) perspective of ‘care itself as inhabited by infrastructure, where equality, recognition and participation…can be expanded’ to consider ‘caring with’ as a life sustaining activity. Specifically, this literature has focused on how care infrastructures have responded to a ‘crisis of care’ propelled by neoliberal dismantlement of welfare provision and socio-economic life (Power and Mee, 2020). Moreover, it has emphasised the material and affective ‘socio-technical systems…(re)produced through place-based actions and relations’ (Alam and Houston, 2020: 4) that organise how life is lived, especially in marginalised contexts (Traill et al., 2024). This literature is mindful of political and social potentials of resilience and resistance, but also of repression and invisibility of the labour that goes into sustaining lives where other systems have faltered (Berlant, 2016: 393–394). While offering insights that emphasise the role of women—and of feminised social roles—in closing infrastructural gaps in the Global South (Sultana, 2020; Truelove and Ruszczyk, 2022), research on care infrastructures have generally bypassed contexts—such as Brazilian periferias—where care is not in crisis but in a chronic state of neglect. In these contexts, organisations (wo)manned by local residents have historically been responsible for providing life-sustaining activities that keep both community and its members afloat. A case in point are food systems as a form of (care) infrastructure (Williams and Tait, 2023).

The centrality of associational life is also emphasised by the interest in social infrastructures, understood as the physical spaces and organisational forms that allow people to gather, interact and care for one another (Latham and Layton, 2019). Typically, social infrastructures have been associated with explicitly public interventions such as libraries, playgrounds, and community centres, but may extend to private spaces such as bars and clubs. The social connection built in these spaces brings people together, deliberately or incidentally, to respond to failings in supposedly reliable, functioning infrastructures but also to demonstrate due regard for each other’s well-being (Latham and Layton, 2019). Importantly, social infrastructures can be insurgent spaces, formed through combinations of collective and individual efforts. Too little attention has been given to how these emerge around deficiencies in formal interventions—gatherings to turn vacant lots into leisure and cultural spaces, or setting up food banks, gardens and community restaurants (Basile, 2023; Moya-Latorre, 2022). Central to this is the ability of infrastructures to foster trust, conviviality and shared purpose, producing a kind of social surplus that sustains and binds the social fabric together (Amin, 2008; Rut and Davies, 2024). Sourcing, preparing and eating food seems fundamental to these encounters and yet is barely mentioned.

Food geographies, however, have increasingly attended to the webs of ‘resources, activities and actors’ (Clark et al., 2021: 1) linking ‘food provisioning, consumption, and food waste management’ (Rut and Davies, 2024: 3). This networked perspective includes social infrastructures, commercial or non-commercial, where food is produced and shared, enabling conviviality, solidarity and political activism (Davies, 2019; Farrer, 2024; Reese, 2019; Williams and Tait, 2023). Yet, these infrastructures are often invisible to authorities, despite their fundamental role for sustaining and connecting communities—especially poor, racialised and otherwise marginalised groups—not least during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic (see Rut and Davies, 2024). This literature brings important elements to our discussion, emphasising how food operates in and through infrastructures to sustain community life beyond a focus on nourishment. In particular, the work of Rut and Davies (2024) points to food sharing as a form of infrastructural practice that fosters networks of care, makes visible infrastructural labour and generates affective connections and political awareness. Building on these insights, we move beyond an understanding of bottom-up food practices as relevant formations in moments of breakdown or invisibility. Switching the focus to Brazilian periferias, we reconceptualise food not only as embedded in infrastructural arrangements but as actively constitutive of them, thereby foregrounding its generative role.

The centrality of food to the periferias

The infrastructural turn has contributed an understanding of how things, people and places interact in multiple ways to (re)produce uneven experiences of urban life and thereby generate the need for constant improvised interventions. In the remainder of this article we think with the infrastructural turn to understand everyday life in Brazilian periferias. These neighbourhoods are constructed incrementally through processes that connect families with social and political agents, and with housing built before the arrival of public infrastructures or legal recognition (Caldeira, 2017; Holston, 2008). Commonly, access to water, electricity, and garbage collection is provided by private operators as well as through collective action, often informally. Efforts to instal, appropriate or improvise infrastructures is a terrain of political negotiation and mobilisation, through direct action, clientelism and legal dispute involving combinations of social movements, churches, criminal factions and politicians (Holston, 2008; Ikemura Amaral et al., 2025). In short, marginalised citizens secure livelihoods by making the city work for them while also forming relations that stabilise over time, becoming dense social networks that people mobilise to access crucial resources.

And yet we are struck by two observations. First, is the inattention to food in studies of everyday life in the periferia, which has been mostly understood through a focus on labour, religion and popular culture, social activism, and violence. Food enters the discussion through its absence or inadequacy, often through attention to hunger and suffering (Goldstein, 2003; Scheper-Hughes, 1992) or as a matter for social policy, including state programmes such as Fome Zero (Zero Hunger; da Silva Cruz and de Medeiros Hespanhol, 2025). Noting the uneven retail environments that characterise the periferia has prompted some observers to adopt the notion of food deserts, drawn from North-American food and retail geographies (Rocha et al., 2024). But, while useful in foregrounding how urban processes mediate food accessibility, the food desert concept fails to capture the distinct challenges shaped by autoconstruction and actions to tackle infrastructural exclusion prevalent in the Global South (see Battersby, 2012). We note, moreover, that these approaches have little to say about food practices or how these intersect with material infrastructures or the necessity of intense social and political arrangements.

Second, despite the rise of the ‘new urban food agenda’ (Morgan, 2015; Sonnino and Coulson, 2021), little attention has been paid to the intersection of infrastructure and food systems. While the food geographies literature has considered food infrastructures, this is done mostly from Global North perspectives that are largely disconnected from processes of urbanisation and incremental autoconstruction that characterises many Global South contexts. Simultaneously, while infrastructural debates have addressed gender (Sultana, 2020; Truelove, 2011), and the food insecurity literature has highlighted the burden on women to provide food (Madhavan et al., 2021), few studies have explored how infrastructural exclusion and everyday breakdowns intensify the challenges of food-related tasks. An exception is Battersby et al. (2024), who, as we also emphasise, highlights the mutual dependence of infrastructure and food provision in historically marginalised urban spaces. Here, communities are situated along a ‘gridded continuum’ of ‘shifting and fluid arrangements’ that underscore the ‘agency of and relationships […] that animate infrastructure in cities’ (Battersby et al., 2024: 442). At the same time, these assemblages disproportionately women, who must compensate for infrastructural absences amid unequal care responsibilities (also Truelove and Cornea, 2021). While this incipient framework highlights the ‘multifunctionality’ of food—combining nature, health, culture and politics (Morgan, 2015)—it falls short of conceptualising food itself as infrastructure. These are precisely the contributions we seek to make in this article.

Research methods

Material for this article was produced through a combination of remote and in-person research between 2020 and 2023 in five communities—Ocupação Anchieta, União de Vila Nova and Paraisópolis, in São Paulo and Ocupação Vitória and Taquaril, in Belo Horizonte. Starting in the pandemic, remote research was conducted alongside a team of five Brazil-based research assistants (RAs) between November 2020 and July 2021. In-person field visits and interviews took place throughout 2020 and 2023, and involved visits by at least one of the authors to the communities including to co-produce a film. ²

Remote research began in each community with conversations held with leaders who provided initial contacts for potential interlocutors. Given the pandemic context, these interactions took place mostly via WhatsApp—which had over 110 million users in Brazil in 2021, making it an ubiquitous and familiar tool. Through WhatsApp, in-depth interviews, focus groups and what we referred to as ‘food diaries’ were conducted. The latter took place over a period of three weeks, during which interlocutors responded to questions sent daily by the RAs. These covered topics ranging from budgets to food procurement, preparation and consumption; to the spaces where food is purchased, prepared and shared; to the more symbolic and affective dimensions of food. The research project covered the costs for participants’ mobile data services.

The diaries compiled more than 8000 short audio files, over 1000 photographs and 108 videos, as well as a large number of written messages describing food-related processes, practices and preferences. Of the 68 interlocutors, 64 were women, 46 living with children, 19 of whom were single parents, including one man. The majority, 37, were unemployed. In-depth individual interviews bookended the diaries while 27 focus groups were conducted to discuss emerging topics and to gain perspective of shared experiences of community and the city. Additional interviews were conducted with over 30 community leaders and key actors.

The combination of remote and in-person methods provided rich material into people’s everyday life from their own perspective. Weekly team meetings were held to discuss the visual, textual, and audio data, refine questions and interpret emerging findings, allowing for ongoing triangulation. NVivo supported the identification of themes and comparisons across data types, participant profiles and communities. Overall, the approach enabled a degree of participatory data production with more conventional, yet collaborative, analysis of the narratives, practices and meanings related to food, infrastructures and community life. As interlocutors shared intimate aspects of their lives, we have used pseudonyms but took the decision to retain the names of the communities and their leaders. We have done so partly because the leaders allowed or insisted and because the research aims to acknowledge and make visible their struggle to improve and sustain their communities.

The infrastructures of food

In this section, we employ an infrastructural framework to analyse the individual and collective practices shared by our interlocutors as they navigate everyday food-related activities in the periferias. We contribute to infrastructural debates by revealing how infrastructural gaps and everyday breakdowns (Anand, 2017; McFarlane, 2008) create additional hurdles that residents must navigate to accomplish seemingly mundane activities such as purchasing, storing and cooking food. Our discussion shows how creating and maintaining improvised infrastructural solutions often depends on trusted social networks reproduced through caring practices (Williams, 2022), in which food-sharing plays a central role. In parallel, we draw attention to how social infrastructures, built incrementally by residents, enable food provision. In mapping these infrastructures of food, we argue that insights from infrastructural debates can foreground the stressful, physically demanding and largely feminised labour of meeting households’ food needs, aspirations and expectations in the context of infrastructural exclusion. At the same time, we show that the collective labour involved in building and repairing infrastructures also generates forms of social connection and mutual support (Amin, 2014; Rut and Davies, 2024) that create alternative pathways for food provision (Davies, 2019; Moragues-Faus and Marsden, 2017), particularly in times of crisis.

Food as infrastructure

Discussions on periferias emphasise portrayals of deprivation, violence and death. If food is mentioned it is primarily in terms of absence or nutritional insufficiency (Manfrinato et al., 2021). By shifting the focus to food-related practices, we reveal the life-making strategies and practices of communities navigating precarity and infrastructural exclusion. We move beyond understanding food as merely circulating through infrastructural arrangements to argue that food itself can be understood as infrastructure. Building on insights from food studies, we emphasise the cultural, affective and relational qualities of food that differentiate it from other resources mediated by infrastructure. Despite the expansion of global commodity chains (Cook, 2004), food remains embedded in cultural practices (Murdoch and Miele, 2004). ‘Food is loaded with meaning’ (Harbers et al., 2002: 207) and infused in social practices (Castelo et al., 2021). It produces subjectivities, communicates belongings and affection and plays a key role in rituals and celebrations (Lupton, 1996). Food enables more than sustenance: it shapes relationships between people and connects different spaces (Cook et al., 2006; Farrer, 2024).

Here, we examine how initiatives in periferias mobilise food to operate as a ‘connective tissue’, reconfiguring relationships between spaces, people, and materials thereby functioning as infrastructure. First, food products circulate beyond the periferias linking these areas to other parts of the city, carrying alternative imaginaries that contest marginalisation. Second, through fostering conviviality and practices of mutual care, food enables the formation of dense social relations. These relations crystallise into platforms that sustain everyday life, while also enabling cultural and political practices capable of challenging marginalisation and reimagining urban futures.

The Horta Familiar do Vitória (Vitória Community Garden) offers an example of food’s infrastructural role. In Ocupação Vitória, it was common for people to have their own vegetable gardens and, for Adão—who tends the Horta with his wife, Ana—these serve purposes beyond food production. Before moving to Vitória, Adão was only able to tend to a small herb bed, reflecting the insecurity of rented housing. His decision to grow vegetables in his backyard (quintal) in the Ocupação was a gesture to put down roots, claiming his right to a contested space. ³ Later Adão helped create the Horta, supported by activists who trained him in agroecology. The collaboration proved strategic in allowing produce from the garden to reach a weekly farmers’ market in a middle-class neighbourhood, providing additional income for Ana and Adão and visibility for Vitória beyond the periferia. But it also made urban agriculture visible to the community, for whom the garden became a vital infrastructure. The Horta serves today as a base for the neighbourhood association. It is a conspicuously open space where leaders can host meetings with members of civil society organisations while illustrating the collective efforts for sustainability that attracts donors and supporters. As such, the Horta connected Vitória to wealthier areas of the city and to economic circuits that usually bypass the periferia, while also, as we will discuss, enabling further connections within Vitória itself. Urban agriculture and the space of the garden were critical for inclusion, sociability and advocacy.

A similar process occurred in food-related initiatives in other neighbourhoods: in Mulheres do GAU (Women’s Urban Agriculture Group), an urban garden and catering service in União; Bistrô Mãos de Maria, a restaurant and cookery school in Paraisópolis; and Temperando Vidas, a collective producing food seasoning and condiments in Taquaril. All are led by women. And in each case, the initiatives produce food for local and external consumption, attracting visitors and partners to the neighbourhoods and enabling encounters between residents and outsiders. As food geographers have already argued, food carries hidden histories and social relations (Cook et al., 2006). In our research, we found that food produced and prepared in the periferias and distributed to wealthier parts of the city conveyed narratives of entrepreneurship, ingenuity, struggle, work and dignity that challenged stigmatising representations of periferias as places of death and criminality (see also Ikemura Amaral et al., 2025). Food hence creates ‘new affective connections, cultural practices and political imaginaries’ that ‘prefigure novel infrastructural arrangements through new aspirations and ethical concerns’, thereby performing an ‘act of repair’ (Rut and Davies, 2024: 2).

Food also fosters conviviality and serves as an essential conduit of everyday social life. This is illustrated by Mulheres do GAU, described by its members as an oasis in what was once considered to be one of São Paulo’s most precarious neighbourhoods. As we argue elsewhere, the trajectory of Mulheres do GAU is embedded in the history of the neighbourhood and the migratory journeys of its residents, their self-organising efforts and their shifting relationships with the state (Nogueira et al., 2024). The garden is located in a former dumping ground, recovered by its members who are mostly migrant women from Brazil’s poorest areas, with ages ranging from 20s to 60s. Mulheres do GAU is a space for sustainable food production and promotion of healthy eating, yet also creates and strengthens relationships between vulnerable women as illustrated by Cleide:

Today my lunch was very special. Our colleague Joelma […] from Mulheres do GAU, made lunch at home and brought it here for us. She’s a very skilled cook. She brought beans—which are a must—brown beans, fluffy rice, and pumpkin purée. Delicious! And fish fillet in sauce. To complement it, I picked some curly lettuce from our organic garden and added cherry tomatoes and ora-pro-nóbis to the meal. ⁴ Everything was delicious. (Cleide, União de Vila Nova, São Paulo. Food Diaries, 30 November 2020)

Sharing a meal is a form of mutual care that reinforces and sustains social connections. Beyond sustenance, cultivating, cooking and sharing food functions as a catalyst for building relationships, partnerships and new forms of collective life. As Vilma, a founder of Mulheres do GAU, told us, the garden is a space of empowerment, where women reconnected with their roots and regained autonomy: ‘I was one Vilma before that gate and another Vilma after the gate’. As noted by Lewis (2016: 7), attention to food beyond nutrition reveals ‘the liberating ways of knowing and senses of self that certain practices and relationships around food yield’. Similarly, the garden foregrounds how women’s relationship with food can be creative and empowering, rather than reflecting a socially prescribed gendered task.

Other examples, the Bistrô Mãos de Maria and Horta na Lage in Paraisópolis and Horta Familiar do Vitória, foster conviviality and strengthen social ties among residents. Bistrô Mãos de Maria was initially conceived as a response to domestic violence in Paraisópolis. It aims to restore women’s self-esteem by providing income-generating opportunities that build on cooking as an existing yet undervalued skill. The restaurant serves meals to local residents and shares its space with Horta na Lage, an urban garden where herbs and vegetables grown in raised beds are used in the kitchen. This location fosters collaboration and everyday interactions among participants and between these and other initiatives housed at the Pavilhão. As with the Horta Familiar do Vitória, this site has become a key community hub, hosting workshops and classes. In all cases, the relationships built through engagement in these projects crystallise over time, enabling further collaborations that help sustain life in the periferias.

Our findings resonate with recent contributions in the field of food geographies and urban studies. Farrer’s research on the role of neighbourhood restaurants in Japan, for example, highlights how they provide economic opportunities, foster social organisation and enable political mobilisation (Farrer, 2024). Rut and Davies (2024), in turn, show how non-commercial food sharing initiatives in Dublin operate as infrastructures of care, mobility and access, particularly in moments of crisis. Our cases similarly foreground solidarity and the capacity of food practices to generate alternative social relations. But, our analysis departs from these accounts in two key ways. First, we examine contexts where infrastructural exclusion and breakdown are constitutive of everyday life, rather than exceptional or crisis-induced. Second, we shift the analytical focus from alternative spaces of food provision to the relational capacities of food itself. Food exercises a ‘convening power’ (Morgan, 2015: 1385, emphasis in the original) that brings people together, generating forms of conviviality and ‘caring with’ (Williams, 2022). Through everyday practices of cooking, sharing and cultivating, food not only circulates through infrastructural arrangements it actively produces the relational conditions through which collective life is sustained and enables the emergence of further initiatives and networks. These relations allow enduring forms of collective engagement, including political organisation and become a means through which the stigma attached to periferias and their residents is contested, foregrounding their capacity for creativity, solidarity and collective life. As infrastructure, food is a connector that weaves together materials, people and space promoting the possibility of fuller, more dignified lives in environments often framed by scarcity. It is this generative potential, emerging from ongoing exchanges and connections, that we foreground as the infrastructural role of food.

Conclusion

Procuring, cooking and sharing food are everyday practices essential for the reproduction of life in periferias. Yet in these spaces, access to vital infrastructures relies on improvisation and often a propensity for political dispute. So, it is curious that while food and infrastructural provision are intimately tied, the literature on periferias has evolved largely without reference to food practices or the relations to infrastructure. In this article, we mobilise these debates to reveal how food practices intersect with urban infrastructural exclusion, thereby making two key contributions.

Firstly, looking at food through the notion of infrastructures reveals how absent or unreliable infrastructures contribute to shape but not ultimately determine access to food in periferias. By emphasising how individual and community-led initiatives fill the gaps left by inadequate or inexistent state or private provision, we argue that food provides a unique vantage point from where to visualise the mutually-dependent character of social, material and people as infrastructures in the reproduction of life and community in the periferias. Food provision, as other forms of infrastructure—housing, water, electricity—is made available incrementally through grassroots efforts rooted in practices of autoconstruction and political struggle. These material and social infrastructures evolve alongside community efforts to secure basic services and improve urban conditions. Here, the boring, invisible infrastructures that drew in Star (1999) are in fact the sweaty, dirty, risky, and time-consuming routines of many—mostly women—who provide the essential labour required to close the ‘last mile’ between the systems, grids, and networks and their homes and communities.

Secondly, looking at infrastructures from the perspective of food allows us to see how food in itself works as an infrastructure. Unlike other resources (e.g. water, electricity) the provision of which is mediated by infrastructure, food possesses specific qualities that open up novel ways of thinking through and about infrastructure. Food practices are deeply cultural and affective, and food preparation and consumption are infused with care, pleasure and meaning that cannot be reduced to its nutritional functions. We demonstrate how in serving as a social connector and a form of care, food is crucial to the formation and nurturing of relationships that crystallise into platforms for sustaining community life. While we are not the first to underscore the affective, cultural and social character of food, we make a case for how these features are essential for the reproduction of the urban fabric, particularly in contexts of exclusion where collaboration based on reciprocity are essential. The urban gardens, community kitchens and donation projects serve as crucial locations for community building, where experiences, grievances, aspirations and strategies are recognised and shared. Through these spaces and practices, food works to connect people within the periferia and to other spaces and organisations in the city. As such, food serves as a ‘connective tissue’, through which it is possible to think about flows and disruptions, reciprocity and support, as well as failure and exclusion that operate along these networks. Our approach builds on and extends debates on social, people and care infrastructures. We demonstrate how food provision is often mediated through them while pushing further to reveal the active role of food. It does not merely circulate through infrastructure but helps produce infrastructural relations themselves.

While our argument is empirically situated in Brazilian periferias, we expect that the proposed framework can be extended to other configurations between food and infrastructure in other geographies and scales. Particularly, there is scope for thinking about how contemporary issues such as the cost-of-living crisis, austerity, and hostility toward migrants compound problems of food access in various cities across the North/South divide. Infrastructural failure and exclusion are also associated with different factors than those analysed in this paper such as citizenship status, governance approaches and climate change. The influence of these factors will, nonetheless, always be mediated by local contexts, as we show for the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil and vary depending on urbanisation processes. By framing food as infrastructure, we also open new analytic possibilities to trace how food connects people and communities with distant spaces and cultures, and how gendered, racialised, and classed practices around food may carry meanings that impact relationships in multiple ways. The emphasis on food as a connective tissue, we suggest, creates opportunities to review infrastructures not only as grids and networks but relations sustained through culture, care and everyday practices.