Everyone has heard of food banks as a concept. If you find yourself in a situation where you can’t provide for yourself or your family and are hungry, you simply head to your nearest food bank and pick up some food. However, while the concept may seem simple on the surface level, most people haven’t ever had to consider or face the realities of food banks as they operate today. When asked, most people don’t know where their nearest food bank is, or what kind of aid is available. The reality is, most food banks are still slowly recovering from the pandemic, and that effort isn’t helped by the fact that SNAP benefits (formerly food stamps) have dropped back down in recent years, as extra pandemic aid has expired. Meanwhile, the number of people needing help at food banks has skyrocketed, with organizations seeing a huge increase in people who are actually employed. As food banks continue to rebuild from the aftermath of the pandemic, we need help from both the individual and government level wherever possible, as food is truly a human right.
The pandemic highlighted just how vital food banks are to the community - without them, people wouldn’t have access to food. Kate Maehr, the director at the Greater Chicago Food Depository explains how the virus was what really sent a lot of people over the edge of food insecurity - people who were “one paycheck away [...] lost that paycheck. And then, more people lost paychecks” (Parlapiano). As the cycle continued, the number of people being served at Chicago area food banks skyrocketed from 300,000 to 700,000 people per month, a level of demand they could barely keep up with (Parlapiano). And this kind of pattern was observed across the entire country, from large cities to rural areas alike. In Oregon, the amount of people served within the organizations in the Oregon Food Bank increased from 860,000 to 1.7 million people served per month (OCPP). So where was the government involved in all of this mess? For a bit of time in 2021, the government actually provided meaningful relief through SNAP. The benefits were increased by several hundred dollars each month as a result of the pandemic, which was enough to allow a lot of people’s food needs to be fully covered by SNAP, which had never happened before. However, when those emergency funds expired, a lot of people missed those paychecks, and they fell back into the cycle of food insecurity. To make matters worse, inflation is at an all time high, with the last report on consumer prices [finding] the cost of food increased 10.4 percent from a year earlier, the largest 12-month increase since 1981 (Kelley). Since SNAP can’t keep up, yet people need relief, we need to rely on our food banks more than ever before - and that requires the help from our government, as well as you.
We need to identify where the government falls short in providing support to people who need it, so that we can help in any way that we can as citizens. For example, a government program that a lot of people don’t take into consideration that has a huge impact on food is the Child Tax Credit. In fact, “it was the single biggest impact on hunger of any federal program that [they’ve] ever seen. (...) We saw the amount of child poverty drop by staggering double digit numbers during the Child Tax Credit expansion” (OCPP). What we can do as citizens is advocate for the reinstatement of the program, for example. We need to show that food is a basic human right that should be provided to everyone, especially children, no matter what. Food banks have also been innovating from day one in order to serve as many people as efficiently as possible. For example, in Boston, “staff identified internal pain points that could be ameliorated through adoption of digital to create more efficient processes that ultimately could advance the Project Everest mission of delivering more food aid to people who need it” (Baer). Not only has there been a huge increase in the use of technology in the industry, general innovation to save food and not let anything go to waste is a huge aspect. To name one example, food upcycling, where new food products are created out of scraps of food that would otherwise be thrown out is a new concept gaining popularity - it’s estimated that the food upcycling industry will reach a market value of $97 billion by 2031 (Namkung). If we are able to cut down on the about 40% of food that is wasted in the United States, and produce more nutritious food while we’re at it, that could be a major assist to food banks around the country. This is where everyday citizens like you and me come in - we need to ensure that we’re wasting as little food as possible, and that we can help out where we can. While there may be this illusion that everything is fine since most of us are removed from this issue, “what people don’t realize is that these men and women, who are either staff or the limited volunteer corps that we have, are really first responders, and they’re exhausted (Parlapiano)”. We need to petition the government to ensure the right to eat is met across the country, and help out in the meantime with serving our own communities.
Hunger is not inevitable - it truly does not have to be like this. The United States has the resources needed to provide benefits to those in need. Food insecurity is serious, especially for young, developing kids. We need to pay close attention to this issue, rather than just ignoring the topic.
Works Cited
Baer, Tamara, et al. "Digital transformation comes to food banks." McKinsey & Company, 26 Oct. 2021, www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/food-security/digital-transformation-comes-to-food-banks. Accessed 9 May 2024.
"Food Insecurity." Directed by Lysandra Petersson, produced by Zan Gillies and Zach Laliberte. Life In The Heart Land, episode 101, PBS, 1 Sept. 2023. PBS, www.pbs.org/video/food-insecurity-d7pcv0/. Accessed 9 May 2024.
Kelley, Lora, and Nicholas Kulish. "More Americans Are Going Hungry, and It Costs More to Feed Them." The New York Times, 4 Aug. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/08/04/business/food-banks-inflation.html. Accessed 9 May 2024.
Namkung, Victoria. "From trash to table: will upcycled food save the planet?" The Guardian, 22 Feb. 2024, www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/22/us-food-waste-upcycling-snacks. Accessed 9 May 2024.
Ordonez, Juan Carlos, host. "Food Bank sees worst levels of hunger in decades." Policy for the People, Oregon Center for Public Policy, 7 Dec. 2023. Oregon Center for Public Policy, www.ocpp.org/2023/12/07/worst-hunger-decades-oregon/. Accessed 9 May 2024. Transcript.
Parlapiano, Alicia, and Quoctrung Bui. "How Food Banks Succeeded and What They Need Now." The New York Times, 31 Mar. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/upshot/how-food-banks-succeeded-and-what-they-need-now.html. Accessed 9 May 2024.