The Food Banking Crisis

Last Wednesday, I volunteered with a group of Harvard students at the Greater Boston Food Bank, the clearinghouse for over 500 food pantries and soup kitchens in Eastern Massachusetts and the largest food bank in New England. In service to this superlative, the warehouse we entered almost comically evinced the industrial aesthetic. Shrilling beeps announced forklifts moving backwards. Mountainous stacks of cans reflected the fluorescents overhead. “I read somewhere that this is one of the country’s biggest food banks,” I heard someone behind me say. “I’d buy that,” I responded—the proof was in the pudding cups, stacked ceiling-high in one corner.

I was pumped.

This was my chance to address issues in the food system in ways that writing an article every couple weeks couldn’t. The energy of the other volunteer groups—a corporate team from Oracle generous with their time but not with their pizza, a veteran delegation from Datazoom, and the legendary Jimmy whose artistry in packing bread boxes will be celebrated in lore for years to come—showed that my feelings were well-reciprocated. We fed off of each other’s good vibes as we started our first task of packing boxes of bread, further convinced of the difference we were making the higher the pile of boxes grew. Charity makes us uncritical, and we spent the following hours boozed on her effects.

It wasn’t until we moved onto packing boxes of snacks that I sobered up to the real impact of our labor. “Don’t pack any candy,” the woman to my left forewarned me in all seriousness, lest I compromise the dietary value of the sugar cookies, potato chips, and Ritz crackers already in my box. I started feeling like shit—because that’s what we’re feeding our nation’s poor. By failing to meet the basic nutritional needs of a population already paradoxically burned by both hunger and obesity, food banks perpetuate the very issues they aim to solve.

Food banks provide a simple solution for a complex problem, bred from a simple conception of hunger taken out of the complex issue of food security. Hunger is merely a matter of caloric intake, which can be as effectively alleviated by KitKats as it can by kale. Food security, alternatively, characterizes the sufficient and reliable availability of nutritionally adequate food without having to sacrifice other basic needs. It means a mother doesn’t have to feed her kids hot dogs and Sour Patches for a week because that’s all that the food bank has. One in six Americans is food insecure, a statistic that has only worsened throughout and covertly because of our 50-year experiment in food banking.

Logic dictates a pretty intuitive solution, one that modifies but ultimately salvages food banking: People should donate healthier food. What the monopoly of store-brand white hamburger buns and ethnic Christmas cookies in last Wednesday’s box packaging operation illustrates, however, is the unhealthy dependency of our nation’s hunger relief system on large-scale corporate donations. Supermarkets and manufacturers donate to food banks the items they can’t sell—often unhealthy junk that customers know better than to buy. Corporations get tax breaks and good PR, and food banks get a critically larger and more warehouse-friendly inventory. Both get illusory visions of progress in the misguided fight against “hunger.”

The problem may very well be in the demand as much as the supply. There’s a solid case to be made that despite Farm Bill subsidies and industrial cost reduction, it’s feasible to eat a nutritious meal on a budget. However, these arguments don’t account for other costs that make food banks and drive-thrus cheaper and more convenient: the opportunity cost of preparing fresh food for parents juggling multiple jobs, transportation costs and the general inaccessibility of healthy food in food deserts, and the costs and unaffordable hassle of preserving fresh food, just to name a few. Food banks accommodate the food insecure with a counterproductive coping strategy—79 percent of food bank patrons purchase the unhealthy but cheap and convenient food that’s available at their fingertips.

The illogical, counterintuitive solution to food insecurity, then, is ingenuity in the face of habitual mediocrity. In the Greater Boston area, the organization Food for Free rescues prepared fare from restaurants or campuses like ours that otherwise goes to waste, and delivers it to homes and local food pantries. Gleaners harvest unmarketable or surplus produce from farms to supply soup kitchens. And while only members currently enjoy the products of Boston’s League of Urban Canners, the idea of sourcing fruits and vegetables growing in public areas or private homes has unorthodox ramifications on tackling food insecurity. At their core, all these solutions replace food banking with hyperlocal, hyper-convenient programs that disavow the industrial food banking framework that values volume over quality, bogus nutritional standards over an acceptance of what constitutes real food, temporary aid over long-term impact.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” the saying goes, a crucial reminder that only pragmatism breeds productivity. It will always be a privilege to be picky about your diet. But this shouldn’t eliminate the element of choice altogether.

Those who do have the privilege of access to good nutrition must exercise it for those who don’t. At the very least, we can wake up from the chimera of food banking and feel no better about ourselves when we a see a poster ironically shaped like a nutrition label, proudly advertising the 500,000 people the Greater Boston Food Bank has “served” this year.

Shubhankar Chhokra ’18, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Apley Court. His column appears on alternate Fridays.