| Summary: | This essay aims to tie food practices to refugees and asylum seekers who live in temporary or emergency settings, focusing on two specific ethnographic cases located in the city of Rome. The first case refers to a bottom up hospitality experience named Baobab; the second case refers to a more structured experience, a soup-kitchen devoted to asylum seekers run by the Jesuit International Service for Refugees. Two main questions will lead our work: what is the sense of food for activists and volunteers in the two case-studies under consideration? And, how are food practices capable of creating spaces of communication and reflexivity among refugees and sectors of the host society? The general approach adopted in the essay is not so much on difficulties experienced by volunteers and refugees alike, which are present in everyday interaction, but rather on creative ways to cope with them. In this perspective, we suggest that both case-studies might find in the concept of agency a tool capable of making visible dynamics that would otherwise remain unspoken.
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