How we came to rely on emergency food

Despite being one of the world’s richest countries, the United States is far from immune to hunger. According to Feeding America, 49 million people, or one in six Americans, depended on charitable food assistance programs, including food banks, food pantries and soup kitchens, in 2022 to feed themselves and their families. And while more recent data isn’t as detailed, it’s clear that inflation and wage stagnation have taken a toll, with food insecurity numbers looking worse in 2023 than they did in 2022.

These programs are, in many ways and for many people, essential for meeting the country’s nutritional needs. But could their presence actually reinforce — not mitigate — the root causes of food insecurity? Answering that question requires a closer look at the history of the charitable food system in the United States, how and why it was put in place, and how it’s altered the landscape of food insecurity ever since.

It wasn’t always like this

Mark Winne, author of “Closing the Food Gap,” has witnessed this change over the course of his career as a community food activist. “There was virtually no ‘charitable food system’ when I started my career in the early 1970s,’ he explains. “The… growth of the charitable food system [was] due to a national economic downturn and the conservative, anti-welfare mentality of the Reagan Administration from 1981 to 1989.”

These changes were partially fueled by a “bootstraps” mentality that ignored the sociopolitical contexts of poverty and, by extension, food insecurity. But the fact that the United States has come to rely so heavily on charitable ’emergency’ food instead of providing comprehensive entitlements that help poor people achieve self-sufficiency is, says Winne, largely a result of racist mentalities.

“We’re the only country in the developed world that relies so heavily and exclusively on food assistance as a core part of its anti-poverty, social welfare strategy,” explains Winne. “Rather than simply increase cash assistance without a lot of restrictions on how the recipient can spend the money,” Winne says, “racist assumptions coming from [1980s era] Southern Democrats whose support was critical — Black people can’t be trusted to spend public funds responsibly — the assistance was limited to food purchases only… The racist roots of those attitudes are uniquely American.”

The cultural appeal of charity and its consequences

It turns out that Reagan’s push for greater reliance on the charitable food system was an easy sell, especially for his culturally conservative, religious-leaning base. According to Andy Fisher, author of “Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups,” “People see the immorality of hunger as it [is] codified in the Bible and other religious teachings.”

In the wake of the drastic cuts to the social safety net deployed during the Reagan administration, people needed food, and food banks and pantries were largely able to meet that need. But in the immediate push to provide people with sustenance, organizers in many ways ignored the policies that had manufactured that food insecurity in the first place. Charitable food organizers, says Winne, “became entrenched and disinclined to engage in serious public policy work that might address the underlying causes of food insecurity.” Pushing for too much policy change could alienate donors and threaten charitable organization CEO salaries, so calls for a disruption of the status quo were often muffled.

According to Katie Martin, author of “Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries,” many charitable food organizations have specifically declined to advocate for better policies regarding poverty and food insecurity, like addressing overlapping and compounding economic barriers to food security, cutting back on strict eligibility requirements for programs like SNAP and unemployment assistance, and reducing food waste and better distributing wasted food. “Historically, food banks in particular have been very nonpartisan because hunger has been seen as a bipartisan issue,” she explains. “No one likes to see or think about people in their community going hungry and recognize the systems in place, systemic injustices…. Changing those systems, it requires sticking our neck out politically.”

Of course, some food banks and pantries have pushed for greater change while others have opted out. “I think that there are some food banks that have been more comfortable advocating for those bigger issues,” says Martin. 

Building a brighter future for charitable food recipients

Experts like Martin, Fisher and Winne say that an understanding of the underlying causes of food insecurity is essential to creating a more just future for charitable food recipients. First, there’s challenging the idea of charity itself. People facing food insecurity are symptoms of a failed system, so facilitating their access to nutrition is simply an attempt to right society’s wrong. Charitable food should serve to benefit the recipient — not to bolster the egos of the donors.

Secondly, there should be a recognition that food insecurity does not occur in a vacuum. At its core, food insecurity is inextricably linked to poverty. “A lack of income drives food insecurity,” says Fisher.

Martin says that it’s important for charitable food leaders and volunteers to view food insecurity within its proper context. “When you have food pantry directors or volunteers who see their services as providing food and food alone and not necessarily recognizing the interconnectedness of food insecurity and other social determinants of health or other root causes of poverty… it’s very easy to see food as the solution as opposed to seeing hunger as just one symptom of a larger problem.”

Building collaboration between food banks and pantries and other types of nonprofits may be the key to better meeting all of the needs of people who are struggling — not just putting tonight’s dinner on the table. The Cleveland Food Bank, the Food Bank of Central and Northeast Missouri, and the Tampa Food Bank are just a few examples of organizations that are already moving in this direction, says Martin. These organizations, among others, are working to connect food bank and pantry patrons with other community services, like job training, affordable childcare, and disability benefits. By co-locating other types of community services, food banks and pantries can become hubs for people who are struggling financially in multiple areas of their lives, as is common amongst the food-insecure.

And thirdly, organizers should recognize that food insecurity, like so many other poverty-adjacent struggles, targets marginalized groups at higher rates. Therefore, people from these marginalized groups should be at the helm of charitable organizations whenever possible. “Women and BIPOC groups have much higher rates of food insecurity than men or whites,” says Fisher. “They have lived experience and unique perspectives that can and should drive the policy agenda, as they represent their own interests.”

Fixing the landscape of the post-Reagan charitable food system in the United States would require work at both the personal and policy levels. But the widespread dissemination of government funds during the height of the COVID pandemic illustrated that policy intervention can make a striking difference in peoples’ lives. “I think a huge lesson from COVID that I don’t want to be overlooked is how the rates of food insecurity actually were stable or in some cases declined during COVID because of the incredible outpouring of federal, state, and local government support,” explains Martin.

And people weren’t able to better access food just because of nutrition-specific policies. Martin says that government intervention in “not just food distributions but also the child tax credit and moratoriums on eviction notices and student loan repayments and reducing red tape for services and programs… [helped] folks to be able to afford enough food” during that time.