Hunger Basics

The charitable food system in the United States is made up of thousands of organizations and programs approaching the work in different ways, but the heart of it can be described in five parts:

1. Food Pantries – Food pantries, sometimes also called food shelves, food closets, or food banks, are the most common type of hunger relief program, being a place that someone in need can go to get food to take home with them and prepare there. The most effective food pantries are choice pantries, which let guests pick out what food they receive, instead of giving them a premade package. You can learn more about choice pantries here.
2. Meal Sites – Meal sites are places where someone in need can go to get a prepared meal that is eaten right there. The classic example of this is a soup kitchen, but there are many other kinds of meal site, such as some senior centers, and breakfast/lunch programs designed to replace school meals for children during summer break. You can learn more about how meal sites work here.
3. Mobile Food Pantries – Mobile food pantries are “pop-up” food pantries that operate a bit like a free farmer’s market – food comes on a truck, is unloaded onto tables in a parking lot, and then people in need go down the line of tables, picking out which of the available food items will help them. Compered to conventional food pantries, they tend to offer a narrower selection of product, but are exceptionally good at distributing large volumes of perishable and refrigerated goods. You can learn more about mobile food pantries here.
4. Food Banks – Food banks are not the same as food pantries, even though sometimes food pantries call themselves food banks! A food bank is a larger nonprofit organization that secures donated food from producers, distributors, and retailers in bulk quantities that would overwhelm most organizations, and spreads it out across a network of partner food pantries, meal sites and other hunger relief organizations in their service area. Food banks are also typically the providers of the “food on a truck” component of mobile food pantries. You can learn more about food banks here.
5. Feeding America – Feeding America is the national association of food banks. Not every single food bank is a member, but most are. Its work ranges from research and advocacy, to disaster relief, to standard setting, to helping to distribute across the country the largest donations that would even overwhelm a single food bank. You can learn more about Feeding America here.

For an example of how all this fits together, imagine sixteen tractor trailer loads of cereal – a massive quantity – perhaps available to be donated to the charitable food system because the boxes feature characters from a movie that flopped.

Such a large donation would likely start by passing through Feeding America on paper, perhaps resulting in sixteen different food banks receiving one truckload each.

The food banks, in turn, would spread the cereal among the food pantries, meal sites, mobile pantries, and other programs they serve, which would typically want an amount between a case and a pallet.

Finally the food pantries and other programs would spread out the cereal among the people they serve, with each family perhaps being offered a few boxes.

Trying to end the need for food assistance is a trendy position to take these days (“we want to get at the root causes, not just put a bandaid on the problem”), but unlike cases such as persistent homelessness where housing everyone in an area might be possible for the nonprofit sector to achieve, the scope of hunger and food insecurity as problems is so broad that eliminating them boils down to eliminating poverty. Even assuming for the sake of argument that it is possible for hunger relief groups to achieve this at all, there are still two major problems with giving it too much focus:

1. Transforming our society to such a great extent will be an extremely long-term project. To neglect actually existing hunger while that is being worked on is to ignore a huge opportunity for immediate impact while allowing an obscene amount of preventable human suffering to occur.
2. Hunger is a foundational problem – it is not only a symptom of poverty and crisis situations, but as a source of stress, distraction, and desperation, it also helps to produce and perpetuate them. It will be massively harder to move the needle on a lot of the things that need to be done to address poverty without taking adequate action against hunger first.

The majority of people seeking food assistance do so for only a short time, because some situation or crisis has arisen in their lives (car trouble, job loss, a divorce, an accident, etc.) and thrown them for a loop. Food assistance has a critical role to play in helping to contain the situation, keeping families from having to choose between rent and food, food and medicine, food and credit card payments, and so on and so forth – choices that can easily transform a transient crisis into a financial death-spiral.

In other words, by providing food assistance at the right time, we enable many people to “bounce-back” to self sufficiency much faster than they might otherwise.

There are some cases – for example, seniors on fixed incomes – where peoples’ life circumstances will lead them to seek food assistance on a long-term basis, but in that case we are simply meeting a need that will exist whether we serve them or not.

Even in the case of people who could theoretically be self-sufficient but wind up seeking food assistance on a long-term basis, food assistance is often vital to their ability to potentially do the things that might ultimately get them back on their feet. As a wise man once said, “If you know where your family’s next meal is coming from, you can have many problems. If not, you only have one.”

Federal and state governments play a critical role in the fight against hunger via SNAP (food stamps), WIC, school meals, and other programs – what we are discussing here is filling the gap between what the government is doing and the total need for assistance.

While the government could in theory expand its programs to go most of the rest of the way (take for example the 2021 temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit, which was estimated to reduce child poverty by roughly 50%), there are no indications that such a thing is actually going to happen in the near term, nor is there remotely a consensus among the American people that it should.

If we want this problem to be solved anytime soon, we are going to have to do it ourselves – and the good news is that we can! The average community in the USA is probably spending close to enough resources on the problem of hunger to meet the need – if only those resources were to be used as effectively as possible.

Getting to that point, where communities across the nation can and do adequately address their hunger problems, is what this website is all about. (That said, if you want to work on getting your elected officials more involved in hunger issues, we have some ideas on how to get started.)