Most of us grumbled via the most recent federal authorities shutdown, vexed by airport delays, minimally staffed nationwide parks, and shuttered native places of work. However the forty-three-day disruption in federal service hit laborious for lots of of 1000’s of furloughed federal workers going with out pay and for the roughly 42 million Individuals served by the Supplemental Vitamin Help Program (SNAP), previously often called meals stamps, which at round $100 billion in annual spending is each the nation’s largest meals help program and one among its largest anti-poverty packages for the non-elderly. A month into the shutdown, regardless of getting access to almost $6 billion in contingency funds, the Trump administration selected to cease issuing SNAP advantages—the primary time in this system’s sixty-one-year historical past that it did not ship help to which enrollees had been entitled.1 States sued, and federal courts dominated that the administration acted illegally, however the White Home continued to withhold full SNAP funding because it appealed to the Supreme Court docket. The authorized tussle was mooted with the tip of the shutdown on November 12, and the US Division of Agriculture, which administers this system, moved to switch SNAP funds to the states for eventual transmission to enrollees.
Within the meantime, just a few states had tapped their very own budgets to maintain SNAP advantages flowing within the expectation—or the hope—that the federal authorities would reimburse them after the shutdown ended. However most states might or wouldn’t plug the hole, inflicting thousands and thousands of Individuals to go weeks with out allotted funds. The results had been direst for households that usually have entry to program advantages at the beginning of every month.2 Many shortly ran out of cash and located themselves compelled to fall again on the nation’s charitable meals sector, which began issuing pressing appeals for public donations.
Your native meals pantry is the face of that sector. With an estimated 60,000 meals pantries throughout the nation, likelihood is good that you’ve got one close by. Possibly it’s run out your church basement, an area hospital or well being middle, or your city’s emergency companies division. It doubtless operates one or two days every week, presumably by appointment solely, is staffed nearly fully by volunteers, and distributes meals largely obtained via donation. It’s the security internet of final resort for these unable to purchase meals at a retail market. Throughout the shutdown calls to the nationwide 211 helpline looking for info on meals pantries spiked, surpassing earlier peaks introduced on by pure disasters. Meals pantries throughout the nation reported dramatic upticks in demand.
The meals pantry is simply probably the most seen a part of an unlimited and principally submerged charitable meals sector. What retains all of it working are meals banks—industrial-scale, warehouse-like distribution amenities that look and performance very like their business counterparts, with the identical chilly storage areas, palletizers, and truck bays. Such distribution facilities vary in dimension from the brand new 300,000-square-foot facility being constructed by the Houston Meals Financial institution—all the pieces is larger in Texas—to the comparatively modest 20,000-square-foot facility operated by the Hoosier Hills Meals Financial institution in south-central Indiana. For comparability’s sake, your typical Costco runs about 146,000 sq. toes. You doubtless go your regional meals financial institution on the freeway with out realizing it.
The shutdown made seen what usually goes unnoticed. However it also needs to carry us to ask: How did the charitable system anchored by the meals financial institution develop into such a fixture of our social welfare panorama? And the way a lot of the load of offering for these in want can this method bear?
Donations to meals banks are typically in sort—meals, not money. Most come from meals producers and retailers offloading extra or undesirable product for one purpose or one other, at a quantity far surpassing the cans and packing containers collected in all these church and faculty meals drives. Every day workers unload semitrucks laden with product within the financial institution’s truck bay (or bays), whereas different, smaller vans and vans arrive at assigned instances to choose up shipments designated for taking part meals pantries, meal packages, and social service businesses. Inside, volunteers kind via donations and assemble bespoke allotments for the meals financial institution’s numerous clientele. Anybody who has labored in a business meals distribution facility would acknowledge the day by day rhythms: large shipments of meals in, smaller shipments of meals out.
Even because the Trump administration compelled extra folks to depend on the meals financial institution system by withholding SNAP funds, it was additionally placing these distribution facilities beneath extra direct strain. A non-trivial quantity donated to meals banks traditionally comes from the federal authorities within the type of “surplus” agricultural commodities, a lot of it through The Emergency Meals Help Program (TEFAP), which since 1983 has additionally offered money to meals banks to assist them course of and distribute bulk federal meals. However in early 2025 the Trump administration abruptly slashed some $500 million beforehand allotted to TEFAP for such commodities—cancelling deliveries of some 94 million kilos of recent produce, fruit, meat, poultry, milk, and eggs—and made comparable drastic cuts to different packages that aided the charitable meals sector.
The cuts underscored the extent to which the meals financial institution has come to characterize a peculiar function of American political financial system: what Walter Lippman, writing in 1932, referred to as the “paradox of want in the midst of abundance.”3 For not less than a century the US, with its favorable pure assets and insurance policies of largely unrestricted agricultural manufacturing, has struggled with the issue that it produces an excessive amount of meals. Trump’s TEFAP cuts weren’t attributable to scarcity. There was (and is) a lot to go round, and his commerce wars didn’t do a lot to assist export markets or commodity costs or anything that may shrink crop surpluses. The issue, fairly merely, was that the administration didn’t need to spend supplemental cash allotted by the Biden administration to buy commodities for meals banks. As if to emphasise the political nature of that call, in November the USDA abruptly introduced, to the reduction of citrus growers in Texas and Florida (if not low-income Individuals quick on eggs), that it could buy $30 million in oranges, grapefruit, and mandarins to prop up commodity costs sapped by crop surpluses, with plans to donate the fruit to the nation’s meals banks.
On the identical time, too many Individuals wrestle with the issue of too little meals on account of inadequate incomes and a paltry authorities security internet. In 2023, the most recent 12 months for which official information have been launched, the USDA estimated that some 13.5 p.c of American households, roughly 18 million, had been “food insecure,” a situation, per the USDA’s definition, the place a family at a while within the 12 months confronted challenges in placing meals on the desk, principally on account of restricted monetary means. A lot of these households took benefit of SNAP, however others—for causes of immigration standing or different elements—couldn’t. Folks on this scenario usually find yourself at meals pantries.
So do many whose SNAP advantages show inadequate to final the month. Regardless of the $100 billion spent on SNAP in fiscal 2024, by some counts 50 million folks in America nonetheless discovered themselves at an area meals pantry at a while that 12 months. A lot of these households trusted the charitable meals sector to plug the “SNAP gap” in regular instances, however the shutdown drove them to meals pantries earlier and at volumes not seen because the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the financial system. There was no assure that the charitable meals sector would maintain on till federal funds resumed.
“Soup kitchens” and meal packages for the destitute have dotted the nation’s cities and cities because the nineteenth century, and native charities collected canned items for emergency or vacation meals pantries as early because the Nineteen Fifties, however the thought of a warehouse to retailer donated or “rescued” meals is a product of the Sixties. Generations of activists within the sector have handed down the story of the meals financial institution’s origins in the course of that decade: an ex-sporting-goods distributor named John van Hengel was volunteering on the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen in Phoenix, Arizona, the place he took to gleaning undesirable citrus from space properties and delivering the fruit to missions serving the homeless. Van Hengel quickly bored with driving all around the quickly rising metropolis. It was then that he had an epiphany: “I envisioned a warehouse where I could store salvaged and agricultural surplus food, with an orderly and fair distribution to the poor,” he later advised an area newspaper.4 He broached the concept with the pastor of his church, St. Mary’s Basilica, who quickly supplied a former bakery constructing donated to the church, together with a mortgage from the parish council to help operations. Van Hengel and three different volunteers moved in, cleaned up the constructing, and opened doorways in December 1967.
Round this time, the story goes, van Hengel chatted with a lady whose husband was on demise row for homicide. She talked about that she was in a position to feed her ten youngsters with meals scavenged out of grocery retailer dumpsters, a shocking quantity of which was completely good. What was wanted, the lady advised van Hengel, was a spot to deposit the “surplus” meals for later withdrawal—like a financial institution. Van Hengel checked for himself and found that, for one purpose or one other, space markets, farms, and companies had been discarding lots of edible meals. He got down to persuade their operators to donate their “surplus” to his middle, now named the St. Mary’s Meals Financial institution, after the church that supported him. The brand new “food bank” was a direct success: it gave space companies someplace to dump their surplus and space charities someplace to acquire free or closely discounted meals for his or her purchasers.
The idea of the meals financial institution as warehouse and distribution middle unfold steadily within the following decade as spiritual clergy and secular social justice activists realized that it met two wants without delay: addressing the issue of an excessive amount of—a nation awash in surplus or in any other case undesirable meals—and too little, getting meals to those that couldn’t afford it. By the late Seventies a dozen regional meals banks dotted the nationwide panorama, most introduced collectively by van Hengel beneath the newly fashioned America’s Second Harvest (now Feeding America) community, whose goal was to develop nationwide requirements for meals banks and act as a single level of contact for donations from the nation’s main meals corporations.5
Denver Submit/Getty Pictures
A volunteer inspecting the canned good shelf at a meals financial institution run by the Central Denver Neighborhood Providers, a company based the earlier 12 months by a gaggle of 5 native church buildings, Denver, Colorado, December 15, 1975
The meals financial institution sector exploded within the Nineteen Eighties as Ronald Reagan made deep cuts within the federal social welfare security internet, together with meals stamps, even whereas the worst recession because the Thirties ripped via the Midwest farm belt and the commercial cities of the Rust Belt. Dozens of latest meals banks and lots of of native meals pantries popped up briefly order, aided in no small half by the federal authorities—if accidentally. Confronted with public opprobrium for his seeming cold-heartedness within the face of widespread deprivation amongst laid-off industrial staff and newly bankrupt farmers, in late 1981 Reagan approved the discharge of thousands and thousands of kilos of presidency surplus cheese and butter, all beforehand bought to prop up dairy costs and saved in caves awaiting some use. The sudden flood of “government cheese” swamped states and localities unprepared to deal with volumes of bulk meals, prompting bipartisan criticism of the hassle. With Reagan’s acquiescence Congress enacted TEFAP—initially the Momentary Emergency Meals Help Program—to help efficient distribution, together with funds to nonprofits in a position to deal with surplus commodities. These federal {dollars} gave meals banks essential organizational capability, and by the tip of the last decade their quantity had grown to just about 200. In 1990, apparently admitting the regrettable permanence of the emergency, Congress took the “temporary” out of TEFAP.
By then the meals financial institution had gone worldwide. Within the Nineteen Eighties the concept unfold to Canada, after which to France, promoted by clergy who noticed it as a extra organized and environment friendly means to feed the hungry. Later the mannequin expanded throughout Europe and finally globally, as environmentalists leveraged it to divert undesirable or “wasted” meals from landfills, thereby decreasing greenhouse gasoline emissions. Nonetheless others, corresponding to a sequence of Tory governments in the UK over the previous twenty years, have a much less lofty objective: discovering a method to handle meals insecurity with out spending a lot public cash.
In the present day the American charitable meals sector is larger than ever—and far larger than most Individuals comprehend. Almost 4 hundred meals banks, meals rescue organizations, and associated packages gather donated and different “surplus” meals for distribution to those that want it. Over 200 of those operations are a part of the Feeding America community, which coordinates donations by main producers corresponding to Normal Mills and retailers like Walmart. Feeding America by itself is the nation’s largest charity by complete revenues in keeping with the Forbes rankings for 2024, taking in $287 million in money contributions and $4.7 billion in donated meals and companies within the 2024 fiscal 12 months, sufficient to offer 5.9 billion meals. The nation’s two largest meals banks, the Midwest Meals Financial institution ($558 million in revenues in fiscal 12 months 2024) and Feed the Kids ($415 million), are the nation’s thirty-sixth and thirty-eighth largest charities, every with their very own company companions and distribution methods.
The meals financial institution sector as an entire took in almost $18 billion in complete income in fiscal 12 months 2024, up nearly $2 billion from the earlier 12 months. Roughly $480 million was money—a testomony to Individuals’ charitable impulses—a few of which meals banks used to buy recent produce and proteins. However the bulk was within the type of “surplus” meals donated by firms or the federal authorities, or “rescued” meals that in any other case may need been discarded by retailers, the worth of which is calculated primarily based on estimated wholesale costs. Almost half of that $2 billion in elevated help got here within the type of federal commodities offered by the Biden administration.
These numbers mirror a seemingly limitless development in each provide and demand. Whereas exact historic information are troublesome to return by, the Feeding America (then America’s Second Harvest) community took in roughly 2.5 million kilos of meals in 1979. By the early 2000s it was accepting over one billion kilos a 12 months. Since then it has routinely accepted between two and three billion kilos a 12 months, with highest totals through the Nice Recession and the pandemic, when extra folks couldn’t afford to purchase meals, and meals banks without delay obtained extra unsold merchandise and fielded extra want. Roughly 23 million folks obtained meals from the Feeding America community within the Nineties, a complete that greater than doubled to 50 million by 2024—a consequence, students argue, of a long time of stagnant wages, ever-higher prices of dwelling, and (save for a momentary wave of federal stimulus advantages through the pandemic) paltry authorities help for the non-elderly.
The Higher Boston Meals Financial institution, situated not removed from my place of employment, displays these traits. What began within the early Seventies with the homeless advocate Kip Tiernan distributing surplus meals from the again of her station wagon right now operates out of a 117,000-square-foot warehouse and distribution facility. In fiscal 12 months 2024 it took in round $175 million in meals and money donations, employed round 160 workers, and distributed round 107 million kilos of meals—sufficient for 90 million meals—to 600,000 space residents through its 600 affiliated meals pantries and different companions in jap Massachusetts. Three different regional meals banks cowl the remainder of the Commonwealth, by which one in three households are stated to wrestle with meals safety.
Even because the meals financial institution turned a part of the American panorama, it remained largely neglected, besides throughout moments of disaster just like the early days of the pandemic. However these crises had been momentary, ebbing as soon as federal funds flowed to affected households. What occurs if “crisis” turns into the conventional state?
We might quickly discover out, if modifications in SNAP promulgated by Republicans within the not too long ago enacted “One Big Beautiful Bill” finances play out as critics worry. The prospect that lots of of 1000’s—maybe thousands and thousands—of individuals will get kicked off SNAP within the subsequent couple years as Republicans search to chop program spending by 20 p.c provides charitable meals sector executives nightmares. They know that SNAP helps much more meals than meals banks might ever present—as much as 9 instances extra, to quote one extensively distributed statistic. Regardless of the ratio, you can not take away billions of {dollars} in annual federal help with out doing harm, and meals financial institution leaders doubt that non-public philanthropy can compensate for a hollowed-out state.
On the identical time, the for-profit meals system is altering in ways in which might undermine the muse on which the charitable meals system is predicated. To place it plainly, what occurs when “surplus” will get rarer and dearer? Meals producers and retailers, aided by federal and state tax credit on donations, for a very long time have been joyful to ship undesirable product to meals banks pretty much as good enterprise and good citizenship. Higher to donate and get a tax credit score than throw it away. However the economics of meals manufacturing and retail are all the time a problem, and as revenue margins slim many meals corporations now discover it extra interesting to dump extra product to salvage shops or low cost chains just like the Greenback Retailer.
With corporations streamlining provide chains and utilizing higher monitoring know-how, there merely could also be much less “waste” within the meals system. This in flip would pressure meals banks to make use of extra of their very own money to bolster their inventories, with the assistance of episodic and unpredictable USDA purchases designed at the start to prop up commodity markets (and farmers). Whereas meals banks are attempting to maneuver away from overreliance on the extremely processed meals that make up a lot of company donations, recent produce and high quality proteins are costly, extra so with latest inflation, and few meals banks have the monetary wherewithal to offset important drops in company meals donations.
There are many criticisms of the charitable meals system. Many come from disillusioned former insiders who argue, amongst different issues, that it too typically treats purchasers paternalistically, making them accept restricted hours, restricted alternatives, and meals no one else wished—all of which finally dehumanizes these meals banks are meant to serve.6 SNAP, for all its administrative hurdles, not less than permits its customers to purchase the meals they need at their native grocery store, like every other shopper. However absent any growth within the nation’s social welfare packages, the charitable system anchored by the meals financial institution stays America’s security internet of final resort. It was by no means meant to be greater than that, not to mention the answer to the paradox of need amidst a lot.
