Drawing a line: commenting culture, food povertyism and neoliberal responsibilisation

We analyse media and public responses to DISHED (co-Designing Innovative Infrastructure for Sustainable Healthy & Equitable Diets), a UKRI-funded initiative researching and piloting subsidised public restaurants offering affordable, nutritious meals. Following the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) announcement of 7 July 2025, coverage in the Daily Telegraph , BBC Scotland, and other online newspapers and portals drew on the press release but framed the project as a ‘taxpayer-subsidised’ welfare measure. Our analysis of ‘below-the-line’ comments reveals entrenched neoliberal logics of responsibilisation and povertyism, which moralise poverty as individual failure rather than structural inequality. Online news readers’ comments emphasised domestic incompetence, financial irresponsibility and maternal failure, often invoking classed, gendered and racialised stereotypes and hate. We term this focus on household food practices ‘culinary responsibilisation’, after Marsha Smith and colleagues, to demonstrate how journalists and readers deploy individualised unpaid domestic cooking skills and meal provision as moral markers. Culinary responsibilisation obscures systemic constraints including low income, time poverty, housing insecurity and social isolation, while erasing the unpaid, tiring and complex labour required for everyday family food provisioning. Our findings show that media framing and commenting culture actively co-construct hostile discourses that stigmatise collective welfare interventions, limit policy imagination and reinforce hierarchies of deservingness. By situating DISHED within debates on food poverty, public infrastructure and commenting culture, we highlight the discursive barriers faced by initiatives seeking to universalise access to nutritious meals in socially desirable, non-stigmatising ways, and underscore the importance of strategic communication to defend equitable food systems.