By conventional measures, the meteoric growth of the nation’s food banks is one of the most remarkable success stories in American history. In the past 30 years, tens of thousands of volunteers and paid staff members have created soup kitchens and food pantries in cities and towns across the United States. Together, they have worked to create one of the biggest charitable organizations in the country, America’s Second Harvest, which represents more than 200 food banks and raised more in private donations last year than all but 15 charities.
But in reality, the growth of food banks represents a failure by nonprofit organizations and the nation’s leaders to understand what it really means to fight poverty.
The seeds of the problem could be seen in the earliest days of the growth spurt for food banks.
In 1981, the newly elected Reagan administration moved swiftly to carry out its domestic agenda by cutting the programs that low-income people depended on for survival. The food safety net that had been diligently woven since the early days of the Kennedy administration was being snipped one strand at a time.
But rather than rise up in rebellion, communities tapped new wells of charity to stem the growing demand for emergency food that resulted from those mean-spirited policies. Believing that the flow of hungry people could be stanched by distributing donated and surplus food, the emergency-food movement was born. And from that point it never looked back.
In Hartford, Conn., where I spent 25 years working to fight hunger, as many as a dozen new food pantries began springing up monthly.
Before 1981, the city had only five sites, most dating back to the city’s early mission societies in the 19th century.
Mark Patton, the founder of Connecticut’s first food bank, summed up the zeitgeist of those early days when he said, “We are playing into Reagan’s hands by increasing private feeding activity while the federal government is doing all it can to shirk its responsibility. This patchwork system [of emergency food programs] is an inadequate and terribly inefficient way to try to keep people from starving. But at the moment we have no choice.”
Little did he or anyone else in the ragtag emergency-food movement know that this was just the beginning of a sprawling, multibillion-dollar network. Today, the Hartford region alone has 375 emergency-food sites.
Hunger and severe malnutrition have long given Americans the greatest pause, far more than crime, health problems, drug and alcohol addictions, and the myriad other problems caused by poverty.
Whether as a result of fundamental religious teachings or innate human compassion, most of us are simply not wired to stand by and ignore hunger.
It is for this reason that the United States has created a vast and complicated system of private and public antihunger programs — consisting of 15 separate nutrition programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (food stamps being by far the largest) and 50,000 private emergency-food sites — that do not have an equal or obvious parallel anywhere else in the developed world.
The federal expenditure on these programs, while not considered adequate by most advocates to ensure that needy people have access to proper nutrition, was $53-billion in 2006 and constitutes one of America’s biggest commitments to social welfare.
Although Americans grudgingly use government dollars to mitigate hunger, we cannot muster the political will or moral conviction to forcefully challenge its cause, poverty.
It is my fear that food banking has become a complicit player, whether intentionally or not, in America’s schizophrenic response to social welfare.
Let me cite one anecdotal reason. A former colleague of mine, who now directs Hartford’s food bank, determined that 94 percent of the food distributed in her region is financed with government funds, like food stamps, and that 6 percent comes from food banks.
When she speaks to civic groups like the Rotary Club, she always asks audience members to guess what the relative percentages are. On most occasions, she told me, they estimate that 80 percent of the food comes through the private emergency-food system, and the balance from government sources. When you believe that private sources are so disproportionately large, then you believe they are the solution.
As the recent news-media attention to emergency-food shortages attests, Americans have come to believe that hunger will be stopped if they increase the number of canned goods they donate to food drives.
The fact of the matter is that if the nation increased food-stamp spending by 50 percent, from the $31-billion provided in the past year, nobody in the United States would have to go hungry.
But rather than fight hard for increases in government food programs — the short-term solution — or even more boldly, commit their resources to advocating for the eradication of poverty, food banks are caught on a treadmill of soliciting more food, buying more trucks, and building bigger warehouses.
Like transportation planners who believe that traffic congestion will be relieved by building more highway lanes, food banks believe that they will reduce the demand with more supply and infrastructure. And for Americans who are morally ambivalent about the poor in the first place, giving to a food bank is a more congenial act than demanding real political change.
But as the nation drifts ever further into a low-wage economy, the business world must be held accountable as well. One New Mexico county food-stamp director told me that he was seeing a sharp increase in food-stamp applications, even though his county had ample employment opportunities due to two newly opened Wal-Marts.
The reason for the surge in applicants, he surmised, was that Wal-Mart’s wages and benefits were so low that their employees were eligible for food stamps. The taxpayer, therefore, was subsidizing America’s largest retailer.
Similarly, back in Connecticut, one of the food bank’s largest donors, the Stop & Shop supermarket chain, closed down a warehouse in North Haven. This was a corporate cost-cutting move designed to eliminate a unionized operation. The retailer was able to move its food distribution needs to C&S Wholesale Grocers, a non-unionized, lower-wage company in New Hampshire. The result: The food bank lost a big donor, and the former employees of the Connecticut warehouse started showing up at Connecticut food banks.
How can food banks, as well as the caring volunteers and donors who support them, escape this vicious cycle?
To begin with, they must forge a meaningful connection to public policy, an effort that is often thwarted by well-heeled community figures, philanthropists, and business executives who control (and support) many food banks. Challenging city hall, the state legislature, or Congress is difficult when you have such a personal stake in preserving the status quo.
A notable exception (and model for other food banks) is the Oregon Food Bank.
Looking for systemic ways to attack hunger and its causes, the organization’s chief executive, Rachel Bristol, prodded the organization to take steps to influence public policy. It took 10 years, but the food bank’s board now has both an advocacy committee and a budget for three full-time people to work on advocacy.
The Oregon Food Bank began work to increase the state’s minimum wage and encouraged low-income food-bank recipients to use the earned income tax credit, a federal tax credit available to low-paid workers. The food bank took a strong position in support of expanding the Food Stamp Program and, closer to home, spoke out on Oregon ballot measures that affect the state budget and taxes.
While some food banks have hired lobbyists to secure state money to simply purchase more food, the Oregon Food Bank has used a lobbyist to help shape state welfare legislation that would directly benefit low-income families. According to the food bank’s director of advocacy, Kim Thomas, “We’d like to see more focus nationally on income support programs and some national statements about growing income inequality, which really is the root cause of hunger.”
Food-industry donors that supported the Oregon Food Bank found the idea of a higher minimum wage hard to swallow. The food bank listened to what they had to say but held firmly to its position. And at least one donor even said, “We’re so glad to be giving money to an organization that isn’t just moving food.”
The strategy seems to be paying off. Oregon went from being the state with the highest share of people in need of emergency food aid in the country to No. 21 in only three years.
On these pages almost 10 years ago, the sociologist Janet Poppendieck wrote, “Two-thirds of a century of public food assistance programs and two decades of expansion of private charitable projects haven’t solved the problem, because hunger cannot be eliminated unless we address the broader problems of poverty.”
Ten more years of emergency food-program expansion have not changed a thing. Federal data show that the same percentage — 11.3 percent — of Americans who were unable to get adequate nutrition in 1996, are hungry today. A rational people cannot travel forever down a road to nowhere. It is time for nonprofit leaders to press for a new social-welfare compact — and to take a more muscular approach to public policy.
Mark Winne is the former director of the Hartford Food System in Connecticut. He is the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (Beacon Press).