Unpeeling the Layers: How Do Food Banks Actually Work?

Organizations like Feeding America support the nation’s food-insecure communities. But it’s not enough. 

The Friday before Thanksgiving, at a high school in northern Westchester County, New York, I sat at my desk and called the last person listed on my Excel spreadsheet, “Families in Need 2024.” As one of the social workers at the school, I’ve called this woman before — the custodial grandmother of a student — but only because of her grandson’s attendance issues. When I told her I had a turkey for her, she said, “Huh? Are you serious? Hold on a minute.” A few seconds later, she returned to the phone and repeated, “Are you serious?,” her voice trembling. “Yes,” I responded. “Would you like it delivered?” She said, “Oh my God,” and began crying. She told me she had been trying to figure out how to get a turkey from a food pantry; she had fallen on her hip recently, complicating existing mobility issues.

About an hour later, I visited the walk-in freezer behind the school, grabbed one cold, unnaturally large turkey from a stack of boxes containing about a hundred, and delivered it to her fourth-floor apartment along with boxed cake mix, boxed cornbread mix, Stove Top stuffing, and a bag of potatoes. She invited me inside and showed me the ledge she tripped on and the rolling grocery cart she had been using as a walker (she finds it easier to use than her actual walker). I made a note to check into regular food deliveries from a local service. We said goodbye, and I heard her saying “thank you” and “God bless you” through the closed door until I reached the elevator down the hall.

Over 20 years working in the human services field, I’ve delivered countless frozen turkeys, scooped mounds of mashed potatoes onto disposable trays, and assembled hundreds of meal kits. Providing food has become routine, so the woman’s emotional reaction caught me off guard. It was a reminder that, despite broad access to charitable food, needs remain vast and personal.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 13.5 percent of U.S. households are food insecure. That’s 47.4 million people, the highest rate since 2014. To fill the hunger gap, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service operates 16 food and nutrition programs, costing, in 2023, $166.4 billion. The biggest line item is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), serving over 40 million people a month, amounting to $112 billion per year.

Still, despite extensive programming, the federal government can’t fill the gap alone. Like most of the food I’ve distributed over the years, the turkeys at my school came from local affiliates of Feeding America, the country’s largest private charitable organization. The government has depended on their services since the late seventies when a few grassroots food banks rapidly transformed into our industrial charity system.

Courtesy of Toups Meatery

It began with a confluence of a few key sociopolitical factors. The 1976 Tax Reform Act enabled companies to make charitable donations in exchange for write-offs. Then, in 1979, a federally-funded development effort consolidated the food bank recipients into an association called America’s Second Harvest (which changed its name to Feeding America in 2008). Private donations to America’s Second Harvest, now Feeding America, began to flow.

Between 1979 and 1980, the poverty rate jumped from 26 million to 29.3 million people. Just as the country grew poorer, then-President Ronald Reagan slashed food stamps from the federal budget, leading to a national rise in hunger. At the same time, American farmers faced the worst industry downturn since the Great Depression. Owners had vast surpluses of unsalable commodities. To solve that problem, Reagan drew on a depression-era mechanism, the Commodities Credit Corporation, through which the USDA can purchase surplus commodities directly. According to this report, the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) was authorized by the Emergency Food Assistance Act of 1983. The new legislation directed the USDA to buy surplus commodities like fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, and grains and distribute them to food-insecure communities through food banks. The Second Harvest network received the bulk, adding to growing inflows from large private donors.

The food bank network, helmed by what is now Feeding America, ballooned. Today, it comprises 198 food banks and 60,000 food pantries operating in every county and state, including Puerto Rico. (Think of the food bank as a regional wholesaler or hub and the food pantries as the retailers or distributors.) Last year’s total support and revenue was $5.15 billion; 20 percent of its food still comes through TEFAP.

While each food bank and food pantry operates semi-independently, Feeding America network membership grants access to all the food and money through contacts with TEFAP, the USDA, Kroger, Walmart, Conagra, and other firms. Food banks use financial donations, large and small, to purchase items their communities need that haven’t been donated.

“We bought the turkeys this year — they didn’t come from the USDA — but we sell them to the pantries for about 40 cents a pound,” says Brad Kerner, Feeding Westchester’s vice president of community engagement and impact. “The pantries order what they need from us through an online system, and we deliver.” According to Kerner, Feeding Westchester distributes roughly 20 to 25 million pounds of food to 200 local pantries, schools, and churches each year. Like other regional banks, they tailor their operations to local needs; its staff includes caseworkers who connect people to SNAP and other services, three dieticians who design food packages for people with specific health conditions, and a mobile food truck that makes 60 monthly stops in neighborhoods in food deserts.

Operations escalate at Feeding Westchester and food banks nationwide around the holidays. Truckloads of frozen turkeys are delivered, stored in industrial freezers, and distributed to neighborhood-level providers. “It’s an extraordinary volume,” says Linda Nageotte, president and chief operating officer of Feeding America, “but food banks may need multiple truckloads to meet their needs.”

That volume is not just because people need to furnish a feast. According to Nageotte, “The fastest-growing population standing in that line is a working person whose earnings are too much to qualify for food assistance but not enough to cover necessities,” she says. “The weather’s getting cold; folks start seeing their heat and electricity bills go up, but their paychecks don’t change... We hear from folks facing hunger that inflation, rising rents, and housing costs, and the increased cost of accessing healthcare and medicines all put pressure on their budgets.”

Feeding America is still the only coalition poised to procure and deliver food at scale, and, as Amy McCarthy reported for Eater, a financial contribution to them is still an easy way to help put food on sparse tables. But even with a several billion dollars in support, the organization has never eradicated the root cause of hunger — poverty.

In his 2017 book Big Hunger, author Andrew Fisher argued that the current charitable food system fills the hunger gap while preserving it. Indeed, more people live in poverty today than when TEFAP started (though as a portion of the U.S. population, it’s down two percentage points since then, from 13 to 11 percent). Feeding America’s sizable lobbying budget — $1,348,193 in 2024 — focuses on efforts like the Food and Farm Bill, which bolsters SNAP and TEFAP. Some of Feeding America’s biggest donors, like Walmart and Amazon, also spend millions lobbying for the Farm Bill because they benefit directly from Feeding America (through tax write-offs) and SNAP (because recipients shop with them). For example, over 96 percent of SNAP recipients use their EBT cards at Walmart, many right after punching out of their work shift; their paychecks don’t cover their basic needs. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, “commodity crop traders, meat and poultry processors, fertilizer and pesticide makers ... and all of their related trade associations” also support the bill because of their enormous subsidies.

Provisions for the next bill (it needs to be renewed every five years) include more support for marginalized farmers and environmental conservation efforts. The bill was extended on Friday evening after long negotiations. Paradoxically, the Farm Bill — like Feeding America — provides vital support during desperate times, not just to people, but to a consolidated food system that keeps people desperate. Some are searching for another way.

“The system is based on two false premises,” says Megan Larmer, senior director of programs at Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming in New York’s Hudson Valley. “One is that the consolidated food system is a good one. And the other is that hunger is a temporary problem in our society. Those two things are not true. So it’s a Band-Aid system that isn’t addressing the systemic causes of hunger and food insecurity.”

The limits of the consolidated food system were suddenly on full display during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Agencies didn’t have any food because they relied on the food bank,” says Larmer, “which relied on the global infrastructure of the global consolidated food system, which ground entirely to a halt.”

In the Hudson Valley, small-scale farmers reached out to Maggie Cheney at Rock Steady Farm, who is known for their food security work. Cheney set up a Zoom call to share and distribute resources. Glynwood offered to host. The Food Sovereignty Fund was born, and delivered 170,000 pounds of food grown on local regenerative farms in 2022 and 2023. Today, Larmer oversees the coalition. They directly pay 27 regenerative small farms run by historically marginalized (BIPOC, LGBTQ, and women) farmers to grow food for 25 regional pantries and access partners. Every part of what they do is healthier and more humane, from labor practices to land stewardship to food quality.

They can’t match the scale of Feeding America, but there are similar efforts around the country. The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance maintains a directory of similar organizations, all needing financial support. Glynwood accepts donations and distributes food year-round. (Disclosure: my wife, Zoraida Lopez-Diago, works there.)

This past October, there was some good news. The USDA announced that $1.13 billion would be released for states, territories, and federally recognized Indigenous tribes to purchase foods produced within the state or within 400 miles of the delivery destination to help support local, regional, and underserved producers. “The purpose of this program is to maintain and improve food and agricultural supply chain resiliency,” according to the USDA. The money will come through the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program.

We can only speculate what this might mean for someone who needs money on their EBT card or a holiday turkey today or tomorrow. To be clear, Feeding America is, at the moment, essential. When I asked my wife if Glynwood could supply turkeys for my school, they had all been earmarked for families. That was my fault; it didn’t occur to me to ask until too late, and the woman I delivered the turkey to was more than happy that there was a bigger safety net in place.

However, the incoming administration’s policies threaten to slash SNAP and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and drive the prices of imported groceries higher. Perhaps that will create an opportunity for a more localized food system. It’s also possible that our current charitable food system will be devastated. Unless there’s a surge of well-paying jobs and labor regulations, which seems unlikely, we’ll have to build something new. We should look to groups like Glynwood’s Food Sovereignty Fund and their national allies, who have been envisioning and planning for a better future for decades.

“If we accept that we must work within the current system, it’s only ever going to replicate inequity,” Larmer says. “But if we shoot for something grander, then even little steps are important progress.”

Mike Diago is a writer and social worker based in New York’s Hudson Valley.