There are hungry people out there, actually; they're just largely invisible to the rest of us, or they look so much like us that it's hard to tell. The Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program, better known as SNAP and even better known as food stamps, currently has around 46 million participants, a record high. That's one in eight Americans — 10 people in your subway car, one or two on every line at Walmart.
We wouldn't wish that on anyone, but as it stands, the number should be higher[1]: many people are unaware that they're eligible for SNAP, and thus the participation rate is probably around three-quarters of what it should be.
Food stamps allow you to shop more or less normally, but on an extremely tight budget, around $130 a month. It's tough to feed a family on food stamps (and even tougher without them), and that's where food banks — a network of nonprofit, nongovernment agencies, centrally located clearing houses for donated or purchased food that is sent to local affiliated agencies or "pantries" — come in. Food banks may cover an entire state or part of one: the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, for example, serves 53 counties and provides enough food to feed 48,000 square miles and feeds 90,000 people a week — in a state with fewer than four million people.
Like many other food banks, Oklahoma's, says executive director Rodney Bivens, has made a commitment to serve every single person in need in its area; put that together with that state's geography, and it might give you pause. Similarly, God's Love We Deliver (not technically a food bank), which provides over a million cooked meals a year to sick people in the five boroughs and the Newark area, has seen its numbers nearly double in the last six years because, as Karen Pearl, the president and C.E.O. told me, "We are never going to have a waiting list and are never going to turn people away."
And because poverty is growing.
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs brought the poverty level down to 11 percent from 20 percent in less than 10 years. Ronald Reagan began the process of dismantling that minimal safety net, and as a result the current poverty level is close to 16 percent, and food stamps are not fully doing their job. "There was a time in this country," says Maryland Food Bank president and C.E.O. Deborah Flateman, "when food stamps had practically eliminated hunger; then the big cuts happened, and we've been trying to recover ever since."
Food banks are changing. I visited the Rhode Island Community Food Bank last year and was surprised to see not rows and rows of mac 'n' cheese and Frosted Flakes but fresh produce, rice and beans, even meat. That's because until recently, manufacturers' mistakes — the misprinted label, the too-soon sell-by date — went to food banks; now there are fewer mistakes, and "seconds" are usually sold to "dollar" stores rather than donated.
In addition, the cutbacks to The Emergency Food Assistance Program (Tefap), a Department of Agriculture program that delivers purchased food to states for free distribution — usually through food banks — have been hit hard; in Oklahoma, for example, the food bank lost around six million pounds of donated food from Tefap this year, representing something like 70 percent. (At the same time, Bivens notes, apples went from $14 to $24 a case.)
These developments cause hardships, but opportunities too: every food bank I spoke with is providing its clients with more fresh produce and real food than before. (And less junk: Andrew Schiff, who runs the Rhode Island Community Food Bank, convinced his board years ago that they did not need to give people free soda. "We provide meals," he told me, and "soda and chips does not constitute a meal.")
Food banks closest to where food is grown in quantity are in the best shape to obtain produce. The San Francisco and Marin Food Banks, according to executive director Paul Ash, get "10 or 15 truckloads of produce a week out of growing areas like California's Central Valley," some of which it shares with food banks as far away as upstate New York. Nor is this solely a West Coast phenomenon: the Maryland Food Bank, says Flateman, went from working with two farms two years ago to 51 this year.
This all sounds great: providing people in need with real food is clearly preferable to providing them with junk. But, as Ash says, only one out of two people who are eligible for SNAP in his state are on the program, and "the only thing that can really touch that problem would be improving SNAP, because there aren't enough warehouses in San Francisco for organizations like ours to take up that slack." Ideally, SNAP would work so well that food banks became superfluous.
Furthermore, as great as fresh produce is, the reality is that most people need more than onions, carrots, apples and oranges. And so it's dried goods like rice and beans and concentrated protein like animal products that cost food banks real money. And there are other issues: you don't have to know how to cook to "prepare" cold cereal, or even boxed mac 'n' cheese. But "people don't know how to prepare rice and beans anymore," says Bivens, who along with others I spoke to is doing two things: increasingly preparing cooked, shelf-stable food to give to people and offering cooking lessons.
SNAP participants and food bank visitors are sometimes homeless people but they're also our neighbors, our employees, our co-workers, our fellow bus riders, the family in the car next to ours, the cashier at the supermarket; more and more, they're our parents, because Social Security is another program that isn't cutting it.
The need is everywhere. Whether you look at this from a moral perspective (love thy neighbor, remember?) or a practical one, it's clear that SNAP and food banks deserve better funding, not worse.
It seems absurd to have to say it, but no one in this country should go hungry.
1. Of course as everyone following this knows, it's cuts that are on the agenda, not expansion. Cuts, which could mean that 500,000 households could lose $90 a month and nearly 2 million people could lose food stamps altogether, are not only cruel but counterproductive.
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