Food banks in the U.S.

have become institutions and the people that work at them have
become institutionalized.

Since at least 1980, as our social services and public institutions have been inexorably
whittled away, privatized for profit, and defunded; as workers’ wages and labor protections
have been systematically gutted; and as entire communities have been blighted by
deindustrialization with no social safety net to fall back on, food banks have continued to
expand their operations and funding to meet the needs of an increasingly precarious populace.
This massive shift in resources – away from the control of the public and our laws and instead
towards the non-profit industry – is undemocratic, untenable, bad policy, and damaging to
society.

It is tempting to view food banks as some of the most laudable and altruistic non-profit
organizations, if not at least the most benign and unoffending. Who could take issue with
giving free food to people who need it? But this simple mission, free food with no questions
asked, when unattended by a broader critique of the ills that necessitate a food bank’s
existence in the first place, comes with a steep price.

It comes at the price of our vision, the ability to see and recognize the realities of food
insecurity and how it is connected with our entire food system. It comes at the price of our
bravery, the courage it takes to recognize our standing in the community as a respected anti-
hunger organization and to use that immense clout to change the status quo and to take on
the difficult task of refusing to play into the systems that shuttle people to our doors in the
first place. And it comes, finally, at the price of our souls, as we show up for work in our
community, day in and day out, passing out food to a never ending, and in fact growing line of
people, as we continue to fill our investment account and garner raises and bonuses, all the
while never questioning why it is we are doing what we are doing, but with the gnawing feeling
that there must be a better way.

There are millions of impoverished people in this country and each one of them exposes
the malignant lie of our morally bankrupt economic and governmental systems. The crime of
poverty is a communal crime for which we all bear responsibility. Every day, hour after hour,
we bear the colossal failure of being the richest nation in the world which yet refuses to
provide for its people, as we languish under the grip of a deeply inequitable system that
identifies what ought to be public goods – healthcare, education, housing, employment in
meaningful work, food, mailing, and banking services – as mere glittering potentials for
privatization and profit at the expense of our collective health, well-being, and human
solidarity.

Amongst these injustices, we put our faith in the misguided belief in charity and
philanthropy – which are at best benign ways for disempowered individuals to feel good about
themselves, and at worse are ways for the rich and powerful to launder their dirty money –
rather than putting our faith in a system of real collective justice.

If we as food bank workers are beholden to private donations, grants, and scant
government funding for our non-profits, then we are utterly reliant on the whims of a donor
base that is not guaranteed to be there for us nor is mandated by any democratic body of law.
And if our very same non-profit organizations that are reliant upon this private funding
remain completely devoid of explicit language that identifies the underlying systems that
cause food insecurity in the first place, out of fear of alienating our donor base, then we have
a system that is completely beyond democratic control due to its private structure, is utterly
reliant upon the status quo out of fear of losing revenue streams, and is therefore unable to
affect any meaningful change in the community that could actually reduce food insecurity.
And the more I work in this field, the more that outcome seems to be exactly the point of the
entire endeavor.

I hope that food banks would have the wherewithal to understand that their success must
not be measured by how many people they serve or how much money they can raise. If your
primary concern is to continue finding revenue streams for your organization, and finding
more abject people to place in fundraising campaigns to appeal to the pathos of your donors,
then the cycle will never end, indeed, your organization will depend on it. It will depend on
everlasting hunger to perpetuate its business model. It then begs the question, if hunger
actually did reduce or disappear from our community – and therefore also our reason for
fundraising – would our food banks rejoice in having found themselves to be put out of
business just like we always say we are trying to do? Or would we find that that maxim was a
shallow platitude that merely kept us from asking ourselves: “What would it really mean to
work to put ourselves out of business?”

For a start, it would mean adopting a stance that says we will not accept any money from
a corporation that is known to engage in anti-labor or anti-consumer practices such as union
busting, price-fixing, monopolization, labor trafficking, or lobbying for criminalization of
protests against their business practices, all of which contribute to wage depression, industry
consolidation, and food insecurity.

Most important for this stance of not accepting money from corporate bad actors to
succeed, it must be done in accordance with other anti-hunger organizations. One single food
bank adopting an internal donation policy of this sort will accomplish nothing except to cut
off revenue streams to that one organization. In order to have maximum impact, these policies
must be organized across the entire food bank industry, and they must be adopted in tandem
with robust public relations campaigns that speak directly to our communities, the people
that we serve, and to the corporations that we put on our hit list, in order to clearly express
the reasons for such a donation policy and how it would directly affect the systems that
exacerbate food insecurity. To adopt such a policy at only one organization without an
accompanying PR campaign would be masturbatory.

There is a line of thinking that says that food banks should remain politically neutral in
order to maintain their donor base and to avoid “mission creep”. This argument has many
problems. Firstly, it presumes that the narrow focus of handing out food to people is itself
politically neutral. This is false. The narrow circumscribing of a food bank’s mission in this
way is in fact a political stance which says that engaging our community on a grassroots level
and using explicit language to explain the root causes of food insecurity are either not
worthwhile endeavors or are beyond the prim and proper functions of a respectable
organization. It identifies hunger as a temporary problem that can be alleviated by throwing
food at people, instead of as a cancerous social, economic, and political failure where
powerless people are subjugated by the powerful. It says that the solutions will come from
private donations to the non-profit sector, instead of from changes in government policy and
from mass, sustained organizing that opens up democracy and places localized control in the
hands of the people. What one person may describe pejoratively as “political” language, I
would simply describe as clear and explicit language which serves to enlighten us to the
realities of food insecurity, not to obfuscate those realities. One person’s politically neutral
stance is another person’s poverty.

Secondly, this argument presumes that engaging your community and donor base with
more explicit language – language designed to spur them to action, not simply to tug on their
heartstrings and make them open their wallets – will necessarily cause you to lose money
precipitously. What evidence is there for this? Engaging your donor base politically can drive
them to feel far more connected and invested in a project. This is already being done
successfully at Oregon Food Bank, where, since the onset of the pandemic, they have mailed
fliers to their donors detailing the root causes of hunger and have reoriented their entire
development team to measure their success not by money earned but by their levels of
engagement with the community and with each other. And any development team worth their
salt would be able to effectively craft and message out a PR campaign that speaks to the root
causes of hunger and then use that campaign to increase donations, not cause them to dry up.
Imagine if our relationship with donors was not one of simply begging them for money, but
of engaging them on a deeper political level in order to encourage action beyond simple
monetary support.

Thirdly, this argument puts fundraising first, and the anti-hunger cause second. It places
maintaining fundraising over and above other programmatic considerations that ought to
have equal footing if not take precedent to donation collections. It gives undue influence to
donors over the structure and programming of the organization. It makes us try to divine what
our donors’ political stances may be when we should instead be focusing on solidifying what
our own stances are as an organization. If food bank leaders are always acting out of fear for
the bottom line, then we have ceased to be an anti-hunger organization, if we ever were one
in anything but name only. This persistent fear keeps us from instituting changes that would
transform the ways we combat food insecurity. Fundraising efforts must not be at odds with
the mission of anti-hunger, and to ensure this, we must not be afraid of being explicit about
what our community faces.

Food banks must organize themselves, their supporters, and the people they serve into a
collective group to advocate for policies that will address the root causes of hunger. Calling
for more government funding for food stamps and school meals is not enough. We must
organize for taxation of the wealthy, universal social services, enforcement of antitrust
legislation to break up our monopolized food system, free higher education, and raising of the
minimum wage. So long as food banks view their role as a narrow mission of simply passing
boxes of food to people, over and over again, nothing will ever change, in fact it will only get
worse, because our nonprofits will be built around a steady stream of “clients,” and those
clients better keep coming or else we won’t be getting our paychecks anymore.

Imagine if every food bank refused to be complicit in the corporatized food system and
engaged in an aggressive campaign that specifically called out the corporations and the
government policies that contribute to food insecurity. Food banks would be a national force
to reckon with, instead of what they currently are by and large – milquetoast non-profits that
keep their blinders on and keep the gears of the system running as smoothly as possible.

Shortly after the onset of the pandemic, Feeding America, the largest and most
prominent organization dedicated to hunger relief, accepted $100 million from Jeff Bezos, one
of the richest men in the world, and prostrated themselves before his magnanimity and
thanked him effusively for being so kind and generous. This is despite the fact that that money
mostly belongs to the Amazon workers who create that wealth and are prevented from
unionizing and are fired if they even think about uttering the words “living wage.” This is
despite the fact that vendors who sell on Amazon have upwards of 30% of their sales stolen
from them and are forced to not sell on any other platform. This is despite the fact that
Amazon avoids billions of dollars in taxes and instead gets subsidized by the US government.
Bezos stole that $100 million from the American people and we say thank you when he gives
it to food banks when it should have been put directly into our bank accounts and our
collective public services in the first place. It is embarrassingly irresponsible for any anti-
hunger organization to accept that money, let alone accept it without a mumbling word in
opposition to the structures that brought it forth.

Going beyond the issue of funding, food banks must recognize that they have become an
integral part of the broader food system. We fill in the gaps where capitalism has left us to
perish. We work closely with vendors across the state and with gleaners within the county. We
foster relationships with fellow, local non-profits. We strive to offer healthful foods that are
culturally appropriate and locally sourced when available. Doors open for people when they
say they are with the food bank. Given our important standing in the community, we have a
responsibility to use our voice to call attention to the injustices of our local food economy, not
only in our poorly attended and tepid online monthly committee meetings, but in person to
the broadest audience possible. To not use our standing to ensure that those who come to us
in need won’t be coming to us every month and every week and every day would be an act of
feckless complicity to the very forces that trap people in food insecurity.

Food banks have extensive community ties through their broad base of volunteers,
clients, vendors, partner non-profits, and government connections. There is tremendous
opportunity in that network of people. We ought to be using our position in the community
to foster deeper connections between these entities and to organize people to advocate for
government policies and engage in grassroots actions that will reduce food insecurity. These
things are already being done by smaller, scrappier mutual aid projects in our own community,
why should every food bank not be doing so as well? We are being put to shame.

We must invite the community and those who are suffering from food insecurity to have
a say in determining the policies that affect them the most. This is an essential way to remain
accountable to those we serve. The current relationship of the food bank to those we serve is
inherently unequal. We must remain honest and deeply connected to our community by
constantly interfacing with those who experience food insecurity and by inviting them to
express both their needs and their proposed solutions in the capacity of a consultant, and then
we must compensate them accordingly for contributing to the food bank’s operations and
mission.

But even if wages increased in our community, housing prices improved, and our social
safety net was expanded, we would still be presented with the problem of a highly
consolidated, monopolized, globalized, corporatized food system that disempowers farmers,
subjects farmworkers to wage theft and pesticide exposure, forces food service workers into
precarious gig jobs, and narrowly limits the choices of anyone who purchases food. We must
emphasize the importance of local sustainability and local control of our food system.

Within our food system, it is worth pointing out why “locally sourced” and “sustainable”
and “organic” food is more expensive. It is often because the labor that is put into the food,
the people behind it, are being paid a living wage, or at least better than what is found at larger
operations. It is because the food is not coming from a large monopolistic agribusiness that
drives wages down, inordinately determines prices across the market, buys protection from
lawmakers, and values profit above safe and nutritional food. Food banks should do all they
can to support small local agriculture through their food sourcing and by being explicit about
why large agribusinesses are harmful to our local economy and our health.

Food banks must support the farmworkers and food industry workers who are
responsible for bringing our food to our plates. This must involve amplifying farmworker
voices as well as calling attention to local businesses that treat their workers poorly. What
kind of an organization are we if we give food to farmworkers that was sourced from a farm
that drives down those same workers’ wages and prevents them from unionizing? We should
not source food or funding from bad actors and we must call out their anti-labor practices,
especially if they are local.

And it is important to remove the “ethical consumer” talking point from discussions of
supporting local sustainability. A single consumer, making an ethical purchase choice that is
not attended by an explicit reason for doing so, and which is not communicated to the entities
that need to hear it, is utterly ineffectual. And what’s more, it is a tactic that is inaccessible to
the poor and working-class. If housing prices are high, wages are low, and people have limited
or no access to healthcare, child care, and other basic services, then people will be shuttled
into the very limited choices of mostly cheap, unhealthy, unsustainable food products. If
purchasing power and personal choices are our main avenue for supporting local, sustainable
food systems, then poor and working-class people are going to be consistently locked out of
that process. Instead, we must encourage political action. We must build well-organized
grassroots movements that democratically incorporate the voices of impoverished and
marginalized people so that everyone has a say in creating solutions and so that we can create
a broad-based, mass movement that can push back against the globalized and corporatized
food system.

Our current food system also contributes to the destruction of our environment through
the cultivation of monocrops and through the expansive, immoral livestock industry that
emits immense amounts of greenhouse gasses, poisons groundwater supplies, tortures
animals by treating them as unfeeling objects for profit, and breeds new viruses and antibiotic
resistant bacteria. Not only must we support hyper-localized food systems, we must also
engage in explicit direct action against agribusinesses and the companies that purchase from
them, such as Wal-Mart, in order to shut down their operations from functioning.

Given the legalized bribery of our legislators and regulators with Big Ag lobbying money,
seeking meaningful change through electoral politics, or through personal spending habits,
or through simply giving food to people standing in line, is a dead-end game. People in power
will only listen when they are made to fear for themselves in the same way that poor and
working-class people fear for themselves every day, which requires mass, sustained acts
of civil disobedience against the instruments of corporate control and predation.

Some would argue that these actions are well beyond the scope of a food bank. But this
again fails to recognize the immense opportunities we have with our relationships in the
community and the immense obstacles we face in combating hunger. Hunger is not simply a
lack of food. It is every aspect of the systems that force people to choose between food and
shelter. We must recognize the responsibility we have to the people we serve to not bury our
heads in the sand and thus perpetuate the problems. We get to choose our own priorities.

Another argument that keeps our anti-hunger organizations bogged down in distraction
is one that says we need to conduct “needs assessments” and studies and reports and surveys
of the local food system in order to determine how to best tailor our services. While there is
nothing wrong with analyzing our food system in a systematic way in order to produce data
and to more clearly understand our local problems, these efforts must not get in the way of
immediate action and they cannot simply be producing data for data’s sake. What is the impact
of yet another study if we just use the data to determine how much more food to throw at the
problem? What is the impact of yet another study when every assessment identifies the same
problems over and over again going back decades? There have been plenty of previous studies
and reports done on our local food system, and those reports sit on shelves or are buried in
digital file folders to be forgotten, and all the while our problems keep getting worse.

The SLO County Food System Coalition produced the Paradox of Plenty Report in 2012.
Here’s some highlights: “With an economy driven by agriculture and tourism, many of the
jobs in the county pay low wages. Furthermore, San Luis Obispo County has one of the most
unaffordable housing markets in the nation.” Here, the report specifically links low wage jobs
and the high cost of housing with food insecurity. The numbers in the report are grim, and
mind you this is from pre-pandemic times. “The Census reports that 36% of renters in the
County have severe housing cost burden (U.S. Census, 2010). This is a higher percentage than
Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco and New York City. According to a 2010 survey, almost
one quarter of SLO County residents are paying more than half of their income on housing.”

The report goes on to emphasize the importance of coordinating community

organizations to educate the public on the root causes of food insecurity to illustrate “the
interconnectedness of jobs, housing, health care, and hunger.” Some of the explicit goals
identified in the report include: “Educate the community about the state of hunger and
malnutrition in SLO County through a multi-agency PR Campaign to explain interconnectedness
of poverty, hunger and jobs” [emphasis mine.] Another goal is to “[c]ollaborate with other
organizations combating poverty, homelessness, hunger, and lack of health care to advocate
for economic and social justice.” Be careful, these goals sound quite too political and difficult
for our respectable food banks to wade in to. Maybe we should just keep our heads down and
keep begging people for money. (The SLO Food Bank’s coffers have never been doing better,
by the way. Thank god for the pandemic, it’s been great for business.)

The Paradox of Plenty report used survey data compiled by Cal Poly professor Aydin
Nazmi and his research team which was published in the Hunger Free Communities report in
2011. Most of the people surveyed were living at or below the poverty level. 52% of respondents
said they had to choose between paying rent and paying for food. The study also found that
significantly more people utilized the food bank than they did SNAP benefits, an underfunded
government program that gives people money for food so that they can make their own buying
choices. This is yet another example of how non-profits are taking over providing essential
services from the more proper entity, the public state. Here’s a revealing quote from one of
the survey respondents: "Healthy foods are too expensive. With the little money I have to
spend on groceries I have to buy whatever is cheapest." Another response: "If people in the
community could get better paying jobs then they would be able to buy better food for their
family.” When respondents were asked what would help alleviate hunger, top responses
included “more jobs,” “higher wages,” and “community gardens.” Here we have people
experiencing hunger who are clear about hunger’s economic connection, know that better
wages would alleviate the issue, and who understand the importance of local food sovereignty.
What is another study going to recommend to us about alleviating hunger that our community
doesn’t already know?
 A 2016 report called Vital Signs: Understanding San Luis Obispo County, compiled by
ACTION for Healthy Communities noted that food service workers and “those in the farming,
fishing, and forestry fields […] have some of the lowest median hourly wages of all jobs in the
[San Luis Obispo County] labor market.” The workers who are most responsible for feeding
all of us are also some of the most likely to experience food insecurity. And food insecurity
often goes hand-in-hand with obesity, since cheaper foods are often the most unhealthy,
processed, and calorie-packed. The report noted that in 2015, 60% of San Luis Obispo County
adults were overweight or obese. In that same year, over half of San Luis Obispo County
residents whose income was less than double the Federal Poverty Level stated that they were
not able to afford enough food.

Additionally, SLO County has some of the worst enrollment for SNAP benefits among
residents who would otherwise qualify for the food assistance program. “The county ranks at
the bottom of all California counties,” the report notes, sitting at 39th place out of 40, with
60% of eligible residents not enrolled. And California as a whole ranked second to last in the
nation for SNAP enrollment. This means that federal money that could otherwise be injected
into the community through these benefits is being left on the table. This is yet another sign
that underfunded, bureaucratic, labyrinthine public services need to be made universal and
simplified. Enrollment in the SNAP program should be automatic. When a family files their
taxes and they are found to be eligible for the program based on their income, they should
automatically get access to the funds, no application required. And the SNAP benefits should
be expanded to increase the benefit itself and to increase the income threshold so more people
can be eligible. Food banks should be organizing to press lawmakers to make social services
such as SNAP universal.

In regards to farming in San Luis Obispo County, the Vital Signs report found that in
2012, 2.8 million pounds of pesticides were used on crops in the county. A survey conducted
of Santa Barbara County farmworkers in 2015 reported that workers were pressured to pick
faster with a pesticide sprayer coming up behind them. And because many farmworkers only
speak indigenous languages, warning workers about the dangers of pesticides only in Spanish
has limited efficacy. Our farmworkers bear the brunt of these poisons, we ingest them with
our produce, and our local environment suffers continued pollution.

A more recent report from 2019 called the Food Systems Atlas, done by Cal Poly
professor Ellen Burke and her team, found that local awareness and understanding of the food
system was low and it therefore recommended increasing “awareness of local food systems
through magazines, publications, events, education campaigns and other marketing
methods.” It also highlighted the problem of potential agricultural land being developed
instead of preserved, thus limiting the space for small local farmers to have access to
affordable land. The report also looks at the negative environmental impact our food system
has on the community. Because so much produce that is grown locally is shipped beyond
county lines and just as much outside produce is trucked into the county, the shipping vehicles
and refrigeration required contribute to increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Shifting to looking specifically at farmworkers, The Central Coast Alliance United for a
Sustainable Economy (CAUSE) produced the Raising Up Farmworkers report in 2015.
“Throughout California’s history,” they write, “the agricultural industry relied on a cheap
labor force that feared asking for their basic rights which greatly impacted their ability to
integrate into society. Seen as outsiders and non-citizens, each wave of workers were tossed
aside once they sought basic rights and replaced by a new group of exploitable workers.” This
history has not changed. The Supreme Court recently clawed back the right for unionizers to
enter onto farm property in order to organize workers, a key protection that had been fought
hard for and won by Cesar Chavez and the UFW.

The CAUSE report notes that 73% of farmworkers surveyed in Santa Barbara County
were noncitizens, most had not progressed past the eighth grade, and 52% had children at
home, thus putting them in very precarious economic positions. Wage theft and overwork are
rampant on farms. The report notes that growers in California are not required to pay overtime
until after 60 hours per week or 10 hours a day. “Yes I have felt that some of my paychecks
have been short,” the report quotes one worker as saying, “but then I am told by co-workers
that it’s only a few cents difference and that I shouldn’t make a big deal out of it because I can
get fired over a few cents, better not risk losing the job.” When asked what changes could be
made to improve the conditions for their work, respondents identified “better pay, sick time,
vacation time, overtime pay, breaks, and benefits as areas that they would prioritize.”

The next time someone says we need to conduct another involved study about the food
system before we make any confident statements or changes to our programming, I’d be happy
to point them in the direction of the wealth of knowledge on these subjects that already exists,
or advise them to simply talk to one of the people standing in their growing lines for food. We
cannot claim ignorance anymore, only sheepishness.

This is but a cursory glance at the many problems we face. And any proposed solution is
but a stepping stone towards the broader goal of developing a society where we do not rely
upon the non-profit industrial complex for what ought to be our collective public services and
our human rights. Food banks increasing their numbers, locations, funding, and scope are all
indicators of failures by our government and society to properly place the locus of control of
public services in the hands of the people, namely through socialism. For any food bank not
to acknowledge this fact and not actively work to shorten their lines for food is a failure to be
a true anti-hunger organization.

Our commodified capitalist society is in terminal decline and it has failed the least of us
most of all. And I have come to the conclusion that food banks share the responsibility for
these failures. We have a collective responsibility to ensure that we are doing right by the
people we serve by having the courage to name and be explicit about the forces that drive
people to desperation in the first place. We have a responsibility to ensure that our anti-
hunger organizations are doing everything they can to keep people from relying on our
services. Anything less than that is a dereliction of our duty, a capitulation to the powers that
be and the status quo, thus ensuring the perpetuation of the iniquities that bring people to
our doors, ensuring the continued and endless expansion of food banks as an integral column
propping up the bloated, shambling corpse of corporate capitalism and all of its attendant
radical evils as we all stumble blindly towards our collective immiseration.

If we do not array ourselves against the institutions that force people into poverty and
food insecurity, then what are we as organizations but a lame excuse for the worst offenders
in our society to continue their depredations upon us? Let the people have their food banks,
we say. We need not pay our workers a living wage, let them have food banks. We need not get
out of the way of labor organizing, let them have food banks. We need not build social, not-
for-profit, public housing, let them have food banks. We need not prioritize education - an
inherent good for society that is worth far more than what a student’s potential wage earnings
will be – over the funding of militarism and Wall Street greed, let the people have food banks.
We need not cancel student debt, enforce antitrust laws to break up monopolistic
agribusinesses, fund universal healthcare, tax corporations and the rich, punish white-collar
crime, fund mental health and homeless services, and treat drug addiction as a public health
issue rather than a criminal issue, let all the people everywhere have their food banks.
Preferably food banks that don’t ask questions.

Drip feeding the masses a bare minimum of resources so that they can continue to
function as little more than commodities to be mined for profit as we all slowly starve or burn
to death – whichever comes first – is the logical conclusion of unrestricted, avaricious
capitalism. The situation we find ourselves in is not the result of simple neglect. It is not
incompetence. It is not even policy failure. It is murder. It is murder because it is designed. It
is murder by degrees, because a choice was made by the ruling class to extinguish life rather
than sanctify it. It is murder, finally, because profit is considered more important than our
lives and our survival. Until this reality is reckoned with by the organizations that should
ostensibly concern themselves with food insecurity and its root causes, until these odious
forces are named for what they are – forces of control and social death – and until anti-hunger
organizations grow a backbone and stand up against this gargantuan and reckless madness
that is pushing each and every one of us to the brink, our food banks will continue to be a part
of the problem, not the solution.

Kody Cava

Community Programs Coordinator

SLO Food Bank

“You Christians have a vested interest in unjust structures which produce victims to whom
you then can pour out your hearts in charity,” - Karl Marx