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A soup kitchen, meal center or food kitchen is a place where food is offered to the hungry for free or at a below market price. Frequently located in lower-income neighborhoods, they are often staffed by volunteer organizations, such as church or community groups. Soup kitchens sometimes obtain food from a food bank for free or at a low price, because they are considered a charity, which makes it easier for them to feed the many people who require their services. Many historical and some modern soup kitchens serve only soup with perhaps some bread. But several establishments which title themselves as a "soup kitchen" also serve other types of food, so social scientists sometimes discuss them together with similar hunger relief agencies that provide more varied hot meals, like food kitchens and meal centres. While societies have been using various methods to share food with the hungry for millennia, the first soup kitchens in the modern sense may have emerged in the late 18th century. By the late 19th century they were to be found in several American and European cities. In the United States and elsewhere, they became more prominent in the 20th century during the Great Depression. With the improved economic conditions that followed World War II, soup kitchens became less widely used, at least in the advanced economies. In the United States there was a resurgence in the use of soup kitchens following the cutbacks in welfare that were implemented in the early 1980s. In the 21st century, the use of soup kitchens expanded in both the United States and Europe, following the lasting global inflation in the price of food which began in late 2006. Demand for their services grew as the Great Recession began to worsen economic conditions for those on low income. In much of Europe, demand further increased after the introduction of austerity-based economic policies from 2010. ==History== The earliest occurrences of soup kitchens are difficult to identify. Throughout history, societies have invariably recognised a moral obligation to feed the hungry. The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that feeding the hungry when one has resources to do so is the most obvious obligation of all, and that as far back as Ancient Egypt, it was believed that people needed to show they had helped the hungry in order to justify themselves in the afterlife. Soup has long been one of the most economical and simple ways to supply nutritious food to large numbers of people.〔 〕 Social historian Karl Polanyi wrote that before markets became the world's dominant form of economic organisation in the 19th century, most human societies would generally either starve all together or not at all, because communities would naturally share their food. As markets began to replace the older forms of resource allocation such as Redistribution, Reciprocity and Autarky, society's overall level of food security would typically rise. But food insecurity could become worse for the poorest section of society, and the need arose for more formal methods for providing them with food. Christian churches traditionally provided food for the hungry since Late antiquity, with the nourishment mainly provided in the form of soup. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Soup kitchen」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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