Boy do I have feelings about this issue, as a grocery worker. Bart writing on a chalkboard forever "I will not allocate scarce resources by price"...and of course, yet another second-order reason to take the Jones Act behind the warehouse. You know what's a lot more efficient than shipping food overland via reefers*...?
The company I work for has a bit of an infamous reputation among food banks. We donate gobsmacking amounts of product each year - my store has cracked $seven digits' worth for years now - but a great deal is in those low-to-negative-shares categories, or otherwise takes additional work to make useful. As workers, we're simultaneously encouraged to salvage anything we can, but also maintain a threshold of "if you wouldn't buy it, throw it away". Which is clearly PR-first, actually-feeding-people second! Even though the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act and related provide a legal shield for charity, there's a certain level of corporate CYA about potentially having An Incident where harm is traced back to our donations. This gets especially tragic when there's some sort of quality assurance issue that doesn't actually affect the integrity, but is annoying to deal with...for example, poor seals on packaging leading to open units. I personally make extra effort to reseal such goods (hey, we get paid by the hour), but most employees...frankly can't be assed. So stuff gets binned. *Lots* of stuff. Sometimes there's at least a fig leaf of "well maybe it got contaminated, better safe than sorry"...but still, come on. Someone starving on the streets is not gonna care if a bag of cereal got nicked by a boxcutter.
Moral impulses really are important though. There's only so far you can go with workplace norms and vague threats of "the company gets fined if we throw away too much food". Employees have to actually care enough to do the donation. Whole system runs on trust, too - no one supervises the donation process to check it's being done correctly (or honestly even that people aren't just recording stuff as "spillage" and effectively stealing it, which is a nonzero occurrence sadly). If you don't earn any extra money for donating stuff, if no one's checking to make sure you do it, if there's no real consequence to doing it wrong or not at all, if you just don't care...then edible stuff gets thrown away. As someone who's been through lean times before, like literally negative bank account and subsisting on plain rice and instant noodles while unemployed, it breaks my heart a little every time someone chooses not to Do The Right But Trivially Inconvenient Thing in this area. I've seen the system from the other end too: used to pick up food bank groceries for a disabled client. The number of times I had to lug home 30 pounds of carrots or whatever...it's insane how much surplus this country produces, and a tragedy that we allow anyone to go hungry.
That footnote really should give people pause, too. It's literally small potatoes to efficiency-maxx the food donation ecosystem. Charity begins at Home Depot...but actually spending real money on the problem, like via SNAP? ~OOM improvement. Many such cases where it's possible to spend a dollar and get more than a dollar back, but we simply choose not to, because Dukes of Moral Hazard. Or something. Cf. "lawyer volunteers at soup kitchen instead of donating dollars" thought experiment. Time is money, friend...
*refrigerated trucks; we may or may not refer to delivery truck-induced stress as "reefer madness"
I really appreciate your insights from this world. So many of the policies you have to deal with seem like stupid bs. I briefly worked in food safety regulation and the whole “expiration date” thing drives me insane. I routinely eat yogurt a month or two past its “expiration” and I keep buttermilk on hand for months and months. I know it’s “best by” not expiration per se, but a couple of days ago I used a can of pumpkin “best by” the early 2020s and it was totally fine, including the taste and texture. I also live in a two-person household so our leftovers can get pretty old by conventional risk-averse standards.
Of course people who are immunocompromised have to take precautions. But so many of these regulations, especially truly bogus standards like “expired” food in undamaged cans, generate a lot of waste. My brother lives in a group home for developmentally disabled men, and they routinely throw away cans barely past their “best by” date. I don’t interfere with people doing their incredibly difficult and poorly paid jobs, but it’s frustrating that some of these labels even exist.
Some of the numbers are arbitrary bullshit- but many of them are based on studies passing a percent threshold. Such as after x time 95% is still good, 5% spoiled. So the question is one of risk- inherently MOST the food will still be good.
What would help are, better, cheaper indicators to distinguish good from bad. For example ph strips built into packaging. The percent spoiled with good indicators would be much further out.
"if you wouldn't buy it, throw it away" is neither a real nor wise policy.
There's a crazy produce store in my city called Freestone, whose parking lot is always full (businesses around it have special "no Freestone customers" signs). Prices are low, quality is inconsistent. The first time I went in there, a guy was handing out free boxes of cucumbers. Each box contained at least a couple of moldy cucumbers on top, and I left with a great big smile on my face because I got a box of free cucumbers and a bunch of other low-priced produce.
Would I *buy* that box? Maybe for $5, probably not $10. I guess a lot of people wouldn't want it for $0, and that's why this is not a real policy. Nobody would pay full price, and the price people would pay varies. And I don't think the policy is wise, as the huge popularity of Freestone's low-quality produce points to the huge importance of price on perceived value. If you're giving it away, no, it doesn't need to be in top condition.
(OTOH I once fed a homeless person by taking him to Subway, except I was only willing to buy him the basic meals that I myself would be willing to buy for myself, and he was unhappy about that. No doubt other charity recipients have a picky mindset too, which makes me think, geez isn't there some way to get this food to someone, anyone, who isn't so picky?)
We did, in fact, once upon a time have the "discount bin" type thing that you can still find at fine retailers like Safeway...lower prices for dented cans, ugly produce, crushed chips. But that program was discontinued long ago, because of the...I guess the polite way to put it is "misaligned incentives"? We still get total cheapskapes these days who peel the stickers off bananas and avocados so they're paying regular instead of organic price, which boggles my mind - you're doing all that work to save a few cents, why? Just to stick it to The Man? It's exactly that sort of disreputable asshole customer that we don't particularly want to invite into the store, and there's a lot of Venn diagram overlap between such nonsense and the sort of person who frequented the "discount bin". This is why we can't have nice things.
And, yeah, part of why I don't work in the produce departments anymore is because I'd spend all my time retrieving the 1-2 moldy [items] from bagged produce so the rest could be donated, which meant not getting any actual stocking done. Sometimes there's a legit food safety reason for this - berries really are extremely perishable, it takes a few days from donation to table, so you often gotta dump the whole thing - but it still makes me rather sad. I've heard that some other grocers used to have waste-minimizing policies along the lines of "any unsaleables can be consumed by employees", but once again, a lack of integrity ruined this for everyone.
Great article, Caroline! It’s not entirely clear to me, though, why the organization is considering changing the model now. If it has held up this well over the last ~ five years, that’s pretty impressive.
Great to see you on the writing side, Caroline! Hope there's more from you in the future.
This was a clever story to improve output, and to me, actions like this is what it means for charity to get more effective: take a cause that's already established, then find ways to improve what the cause is doing.
The other broad thing I'll add is that while charities want to avoid turning down in kind donations if they can find any use for them, the most flexible donation that best adheres to market principles is straight cash, homey--something that regular Slow Borers are also well aware of.
While cash is certainly the best thing for individuals to donate*, this system seems to exist downstream of some places getting large homogenous in-kind donations, which probably means producers or grocers who have business reasons to be donating something like five tons of rice at once.
(*Actually, the best things to donate are highly appreciated equities, in order to maximize your tax leverage. But you can donate the equities to your DAF, which can then sell them and pass the proceeds on to the food bank.)
Yes, to be clear I would not advocate blowing up this particular system in favor of cash donations without some very good reasons to deviate from the status quo.
(And yes, an endowment would be the most ideal, but is also not as opportune.)
The best donation is straight cash and the best currency is… straight cash. Why go to the lengths of inventing “shares” when food banks could just bid real money? I think the article suggests this would lead to “the biggest” food banks hoarding the resources. Isn’t that a good thing? Presumably they serve the most people.
“Shares” ensure that the biggest food banks get the most goods. Using money means that the food banks with the richest donors get the most goods, which is very much not the same thing. If the Northwest Arkansas food bank gets a big cash donation from the Walton family, it can outbid the food banks of St. Louis and Cleveland that may be serving a lot more people.
To me it seems similar to why games like World of Warcraft don’t operate their virtual currencies in cash. It’s a lot easier to design a system to achieve your desired goals when it’s a closed system. If you use cash then you have to worry about people taking cash out of the system (ie corruption) or about extracting value from the system in ways that you don’t intend to be supporting.
I might prefer an actual market with dollars, but keeping 1 level of indirection buy calling them shares a cheap shield against the moral busybodies who insist that late-stage capitalism not starve the people or something.
This is a great piece and belongs in the SSIR. I'd add a personal and selfish analogue to this to draw Slow Boringers attention to an under discussed issue: this is exactly why it's in the national interest to have a vibrant Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that, among other things, funnels grads from top MBA programs into social service and education. This program has been in shambles for the past two years (in ways that have meaningfully upended my life and sent me on a detour into for profit employment), and OBBBA effectively closed off this pathway for young professionals in the future. It's one of the many crimes I'd lay at the feet of bad intentions on the right and poor governance on the left, and the downstream impacts are bad and getting worse.
The attempt to gut PSLF is evil, and my org is also in shambles over it. There’s no reason the current admin should be targeting people who’s given up nearly a decade of corporate earnings to help the poor, elderly and disabled, and yet lots of people are getting stuck unable to satisfy their payments because of forced forbearance or having to consider leaving the public service field because their org might get de-certified this July. And that’s just the EO attack on PSLF; the lawsuits around SAVE et al have been pretty horrible for people who just want to satisfy the forgiveness requirements they agreed to 9-10 years ago.
That is a horrid idea. MBAs do more good for the world than you even have the capacity to conceive of. Taking them away from actual productive enterprises would be like arson. Variation in management quality explains wholly a fifth of the dispersion in productivity in America [1]. It’s a really big deal!!
I didn't take his comment as a direct attack on me but rather on the stupidity of destroying this pipeline of management training for the sector (not to mention the many other impacts of PSLF being diminished).
Unfortunately, based on what regular readers of this comment section know about Mr. Decker (i.e. that he is an extremely dogmatic libertarian), I doubt he sees any value in either the PSLF program or the public sector in general. I would be happy to be proven wrong though...
I admit my feathers also get a little rustled when someone talks about things like, say, optimizing food bank deliveries so 50 million more pounds of food get into the hands of hungry people as not “actually productive.”
Genuinely astonishing you would say that, given that the ideas for improving food allocation came from the UChicago School of Business. Surely you can find an example of people in the program doing good in a way that is better than if they worked on actually productive things?
I am not a libertarian, and that should be reasonably obvious from my work. I am an economist. I have a contempt for sentimentalism. This need not lead you to a blanket endorsement of markets everywhere.
Well, this is entirely anecdotal so take it with all the requisite grains of salt, but I personally was an undergraduate history major, went to work in schools and got teaching experience, lucked into a desk job at a big ed nonprofit, and THEN went to a top MBA program and emerged as a much stronger contributor and eventually leader within the sector. So from my admittedly biased lens, MBAs aren't inherently stronger managers, but an MBA education can absolutely make folks without a business background much stronger operational managers and strategists.
Did you read the article? I think the value of having folks trained in finance, operations, marketing, and basic economics in the public sector would be obvious (tech companies and retailers hire from the same programs for a reason), but if it's not this entire article just laid out a pretty ironclad example of the benefit.
*Larry H. Parker client voice* "PSLF saved me $93,000."
My road to PSLF was a bit weird because my loans came before the program existed and my interest rates were low. But a lot of medical residents with high-interest loans are specifically looking at public-sector and academic jobs because they hear of stories like mine. As SBers now, altruism can only go so far toward meeting needs.
I'm a mediocre poster child for the direct effects of PSLF (since I probably didn't NEED it) but a better one for the indirect effects.
This is one of the most rewarding articles I have read in recent memory. I fits into that area of knowledge of being a good news story with tangible innovative solutions to a seemingly unsolvable problem wrapped for me in the old adage “You don’t know what you don’t know”. Thanks Caroline well done and Thanksgiving timely!
"In-kind donations still help, of course, and nobody’s turning away boxes of food. But a fundamental issue is that many organizations feel that asking for money—like requesting cash as a gift—seems somewhat gauche. So, let me be rude on their behalf: Find well-managed charities in your community and trust them to know how to do their job. They have access to food at a fraction of the price. They know their clients, and they have better things to do than to sort through your canned goods."
How so? We already know that there is an abundance of produce in the US. That people are willing to give away produce that is near to unsellable because it's perishing doesn't change whether that produce is available within an easily accessed distance to poor neighborhoods.
When I lived in the City of Detroit in the 1990s I lived in the outer edge of a food desert. The only grocery store for several miles was at the border between the city and a suburb. I certainly had the means to drive there whenever I wanted. But the further into the city you went the poorer, so that access diminished, and people without their own transport relied on what was available at places like Rite Aid or convenience/liquor stores.
"The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food."
Food desert doesn't mean one can't find produce if they're looking for it and have means of transit. It means the market isn't supporting ample choice of affordable, nutritious food nearby someone's home. Local neighborhood grocers operating cash strapped businesses with low margins don't dedicate significant shelf space to second hand produce on the verge of spoilage.
Well, what share of your weekly (after-transfer) income would you spend on broccoli that will spoil in the fridge within 72 hours of purchase?
It's not that people don't want to buy this stuff, it's that they have to prioritize what makes sense for their budgets and that in turn drives supplier decisions on what to stock, and then those become self reinforcing because of how markets work. I'm sure many people would love to buy a Porsche but you're not going to see their dealerships in areas where people's income can't drive inventory turnover before that year's model became out of date.
To add to what PP said downthread, the food desert argument only has a chance if it's on the basis of malnourishment. I could listen to an argument that welfare should apply to a higher measure of nutrition, but traditionally, welfare arguments for food have been on the basis of just avoiding outright starvation, and non-perishable goods can achieve that very easily.
For about a year I volunteered at a local food bank warehouse. Most of my time was spent throwing away food, and most of the food I threw away looked perfectly good & edible.
This article felt like a topic one might find in a 00s mass market economics book like Freakonomics -- when the public was still interested in what economists thought. It made me strangely nostalgic.
Thank you for the interesting and informative article!
I hesitate to ask this, but I wonder about this every time the subject of food banks in America comes up: we know that lots of Americans are food insecure/hungry and also that lots of poor Americans are fat. How does that work? How do you stay fat if you regularly, chronically (as opposed to occasionally) don’t have enough to eat? How much overlap, if any, is there between America’s food-insecure population and fat population?
I hesitated to ask this because I don’t want to sound like a callous jerk, like, “oh poor Americans are fat, so they clearly don’t need food banks!” I’m just genuinely curious about this and want to understand.
Also, it makes me terribly sad that produce is considered basically worthless by food banks. The average American doesn’t eat nearly enough vegetables. You can use pretty much any kind of vegetable to make a soup or stew, and it will taste good if you have any cooking skills (which I understand many people don’t).
Similar to what Mariana Trench says, I think it’s more that cheap and, critically, easy to prepare food is calorie-dense than “people are hungry but also somehow consuming too many calories” as such.
The easy to prepare bit is key; cabbage is cheap, but labor-intensive to turn into something appetizing. Come to think of it, most whole foods are labor-intensive to turn into something appetizing.
The standard answer is that things like potato chips are cheap and filling. Oh, and easy to prepare. It's all very well to tell someone to get "a cheap cut of beef" and do some kind of long braise to make it edible, but that takes time you probably don't have and then the kids won't eat it anyway. But they'll eat dino nuggets and potato chips, so that's what they get.
Take a single mom using a food bank. She works, she has an income, but she also has a lot of bills: gas, electricity, rent, car repairs, phone, the fridge broke, etc. She is using the food bank to take pressure off the budget. If she gets $100 worth of food she then has that $100 to spend on other critical needs.
The issue of cooking skills is an important one - high schools should teach an adult survival 101 course that includes basic food preparation, how to save (compounding, etc), recognizing and avoiding basic scams (phishing, time shares), and some other key information that will likely be more valuable to the majority of students than algebra. Home ec for the modern age.
We also need to get more scratch cooking and salad bars into schools so kids learn what tasty, healthy food looks like. Big food and the lunch lady association (real btw) are colluding to deliver absolute garbage to poor kids who deserve better. Certain categories of food like chicken are better prepared offsite (it's a salmonella risk for school kitchens to process raw chicken), but in general more scratch cooking would be a major improvement.
If there are literally a billion videos that show you how to cook literally anything and the kids are already on Tiktok 8 hours a day, is a lack of knowledge really the issue?
I mean, that logic could apply to a lot of what schools currently teach. Peter Thiel famously discounts the value of a college education, presumably on similar grounds, but most kids aren't Good Will Hunting and they need the structure and focused attention of experienced educators to thrive. I'm a fan of curiosity and self-directed learning, but teaching high school kids how to feed themselves with nutritionally balanced meals seems like a good investment.
Add in a bit of minor home improvement skills (toilet tank repairs, drill use) and enough simple algebra/geometry to make woodworking/fabrication useful.
Almost no one in America is unable to find a sufficient number of calories. They may worry about affording food, which how 'food insecurity' is defined, and they are very likely to be eating nutritionally poor, inexpensive mass produced foodstuffs, but no one is literally starving (rare and horrifying abuse/neglect situations excepted)
I would imagine that junk food is one of the few affordable "nice things" to the desperately poor. It's an awful lot harder to tell your kids no when they ask for the packaged snack cakes or the candy at the grocery store if that feels like the only nice thing you can realistically do for them all month.
Boy do I have feelings about this issue, as a grocery worker. Bart writing on a chalkboard forever "I will not allocate scarce resources by price"...and of course, yet another second-order reason to take the Jones Act behind the warehouse. You know what's a lot more efficient than shipping food overland via reefers*...?
The company I work for has a bit of an infamous reputation among food banks. We donate gobsmacking amounts of product each year - my store has cracked $seven digits' worth for years now - but a great deal is in those low-to-negative-shares categories, or otherwise takes additional work to make useful. As workers, we're simultaneously encouraged to salvage anything we can, but also maintain a threshold of "if you wouldn't buy it, throw it away". Which is clearly PR-first, actually-feeding-people second! Even though the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act and related provide a legal shield for charity, there's a certain level of corporate CYA about potentially having An Incident where harm is traced back to our donations. This gets especially tragic when there's some sort of quality assurance issue that doesn't actually affect the integrity, but is annoying to deal with...for example, poor seals on packaging leading to open units. I personally make extra effort to reseal such goods (hey, we get paid by the hour), but most employees...frankly can't be assed. So stuff gets binned. *Lots* of stuff. Sometimes there's at least a fig leaf of "well maybe it got contaminated, better safe than sorry"...but still, come on. Someone starving on the streets is not gonna care if a bag of cereal got nicked by a boxcutter.
Moral impulses really are important though. There's only so far you can go with workplace norms and vague threats of "the company gets fined if we throw away too much food". Employees have to actually care enough to do the donation. Whole system runs on trust, too - no one supervises the donation process to check it's being done correctly (or honestly even that people aren't just recording stuff as "spillage" and effectively stealing it, which is a nonzero occurrence sadly). If you don't earn any extra money for donating stuff, if no one's checking to make sure you do it, if there's no real consequence to doing it wrong or not at all, if you just don't care...then edible stuff gets thrown away. As someone who's been through lean times before, like literally negative bank account and subsisting on plain rice and instant noodles while unemployed, it breaks my heart a little every time someone chooses not to Do The Right But Trivially Inconvenient Thing in this area. I've seen the system from the other end too: used to pick up food bank groceries for a disabled client. The number of times I had to lug home 30 pounds of carrots or whatever...it's insane how much surplus this country produces, and a tragedy that we allow anyone to go hungry.
That footnote really should give people pause, too. It's literally small potatoes to efficiency-maxx the food donation ecosystem. Charity begins at Home Depot...but actually spending real money on the problem, like via SNAP? ~OOM improvement. Many such cases where it's possible to spend a dollar and get more than a dollar back, but we simply choose not to, because Dukes of Moral Hazard. Or something. Cf. "lawyer volunteers at soup kitchen instead of donating dollars" thought experiment. Time is money, friend...
*refrigerated trucks; we may or may not refer to delivery truck-induced stress as "reefer madness"
I really appreciate your insights from this world. So many of the policies you have to deal with seem like stupid bs. I briefly worked in food safety regulation and the whole “expiration date” thing drives me insane. I routinely eat yogurt a month or two past its “expiration” and I keep buttermilk on hand for months and months. I know it’s “best by” not expiration per se, but a couple of days ago I used a can of pumpkin “best by” the early 2020s and it was totally fine, including the taste and texture. I also live in a two-person household so our leftovers can get pretty old by conventional risk-averse standards.
Of course people who are immunocompromised have to take precautions. But so many of these regulations, especially truly bogus standards like “expired” food in undamaged cans, generate a lot of waste. My brother lives in a group home for developmentally disabled men, and they routinely throw away cans barely past their “best by” date. I don’t interfere with people doing their incredibly difficult and poorly paid jobs, but it’s frustrating that some of these labels even exist.
I'm immunocompromised and I've eaten food >10 years past its best by date.
Some of the numbers are arbitrary bullshit- but many of them are based on studies passing a percent threshold. Such as after x time 95% is still good, 5% spoiled. So the question is one of risk- inherently MOST the food will still be good.
What would help are, better, cheaper indicators to distinguish good from bad. For example ph strips built into packaging. The percent spoiled with good indicators would be much further out.
"if you wouldn't buy it, throw it away" is neither a real nor wise policy.
There's a crazy produce store in my city called Freestone, whose parking lot is always full (businesses around it have special "no Freestone customers" signs). Prices are low, quality is inconsistent. The first time I went in there, a guy was handing out free boxes of cucumbers. Each box contained at least a couple of moldy cucumbers on top, and I left with a great big smile on my face because I got a box of free cucumbers and a bunch of other low-priced produce.
Would I *buy* that box? Maybe for $5, probably not $10. I guess a lot of people wouldn't want it for $0, and that's why this is not a real policy. Nobody would pay full price, and the price people would pay varies. And I don't think the policy is wise, as the huge popularity of Freestone's low-quality produce points to the huge importance of price on perceived value. If you're giving it away, no, it doesn't need to be in top condition.
(OTOH I once fed a homeless person by taking him to Subway, except I was only willing to buy him the basic meals that I myself would be willing to buy for myself, and he was unhappy about that. No doubt other charity recipients have a picky mindset too, which makes me think, geez isn't there some way to get this food to someone, anyone, who isn't so picky?)
We did, in fact, once upon a time have the "discount bin" type thing that you can still find at fine retailers like Safeway...lower prices for dented cans, ugly produce, crushed chips. But that program was discontinued long ago, because of the...I guess the polite way to put it is "misaligned incentives"? We still get total cheapskapes these days who peel the stickers off bananas and avocados so they're paying regular instead of organic price, which boggles my mind - you're doing all that work to save a few cents, why? Just to stick it to The Man? It's exactly that sort of disreputable asshole customer that we don't particularly want to invite into the store, and there's a lot of Venn diagram overlap between such nonsense and the sort of person who frequented the "discount bin". This is why we can't have nice things.
And, yeah, part of why I don't work in the produce departments anymore is because I'd spend all my time retrieving the 1-2 moldy [items] from bagged produce so the rest could be donated, which meant not getting any actual stocking done. Sometimes there's a legit food safety reason for this - berries really are extremely perishable, it takes a few days from donation to table, so you often gotta dump the whole thing - but it still makes me rather sad. I've heard that some other grocers used to have waste-minimizing policies along the lines of "any unsaleables can be consumed by employees", but once again, a lack of integrity ruined this for everyone.
Great article, Caroline! It’s not entirely clear to me, though, why the organization is considering changing the model now. If it has held up this well over the last ~ five years, that’s pretty impressive.
Thank you so much for reading! Glad you enjoyed it.
Great to see you on the writing side, Caroline! Hope there's more from you in the future.
This was a clever story to improve output, and to me, actions like this is what it means for charity to get more effective: take a cause that's already established, then find ways to improve what the cause is doing.
The other broad thing I'll add is that while charities want to avoid turning down in kind donations if they can find any use for them, the most flexible donation that best adheres to market principles is straight cash, homey--something that regular Slow Borers are also well aware of.
Thank you, I really appreciate that! It was a fascinating project to learn about.
While cash is certainly the best thing for individuals to donate*, this system seems to exist downstream of some places getting large homogenous in-kind donations, which probably means producers or grocers who have business reasons to be donating something like five tons of rice at once.
(*Actually, the best things to donate are highly appreciated equities, in order to maximize your tax leverage. But you can donate the equities to your DAF, which can then sell them and pass the proceeds on to the food bank.)
Yes, to be clear I would not advocate blowing up this particular system in favor of cash donations without some very good reasons to deviate from the status quo.
(And yes, an endowment would be the most ideal, but is also not as opportune.)
The best donation is straight cash and the best currency is… straight cash. Why go to the lengths of inventing “shares” when food banks could just bid real money? I think the article suggests this would lead to “the biggest” food banks hoarding the resources. Isn’t that a good thing? Presumably they serve the most people.
“Shares” ensure that the biggest food banks get the most goods. Using money means that the food banks with the richest donors get the most goods, which is very much not the same thing. If the Northwest Arkansas food bank gets a big cash donation from the Walton family, it can outbid the food banks of St. Louis and Cleveland that may be serving a lot more people.
To me it seems similar to why games like World of Warcraft don’t operate their virtual currencies in cash. It’s a lot easier to design a system to achieve your desired goals when it’s a closed system. If you use cash then you have to worry about people taking cash out of the system (ie corruption) or about extracting value from the system in ways that you don’t intend to be supporting.
Where would the money come from and who would it go to?
The nice thing if it were cash though? Someone would have come up with a way to make shelf stable broccoli potato chip casseroles.
Sorry, but I don't understand your first sentence?
Edited thanks
I might prefer an actual market with dollars, but keeping 1 level of indirection buy calling them shares a cheap shield against the moral busybodies who insist that late-stage capitalism not starve the people or something.
This is a great piece and belongs in the SSIR. I'd add a personal and selfish analogue to this to draw Slow Boringers attention to an under discussed issue: this is exactly why it's in the national interest to have a vibrant Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that, among other things, funnels grads from top MBA programs into social service and education. This program has been in shambles for the past two years (in ways that have meaningfully upended my life and sent me on a detour into for profit employment), and OBBBA effectively closed off this pathway for young professionals in the future. It's one of the many crimes I'd lay at the feet of bad intentions on the right and poor governance on the left, and the downstream impacts are bad and getting worse.
The attempt to gut PSLF is evil, and my org is also in shambles over it. There’s no reason the current admin should be targeting people who’s given up nearly a decade of corporate earnings to help the poor, elderly and disabled, and yet lots of people are getting stuck unable to satisfy their payments because of forced forbearance or having to consider leaving the public service field because their org might get de-certified this July. And that’s just the EO attack on PSLF; the lawsuits around SAVE et al have been pretty horrible for people who just want to satisfy the forgiveness requirements they agreed to 9-10 years ago.
That is a horrid idea. MBAs do more good for the world than you even have the capacity to conceive of. Taking them away from actual productive enterprises would be like arson. Variation in management quality explains wholly a fifth of the dispersion in productivity in America [1]. It’s a really big deal!!
1. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23300/w23300.pdf
"than you even have the capacity to conceive of"
Maybe don't leap straight to the personal attack?
I didn't take his comment as a direct attack on me but rather on the stupidity of destroying this pipeline of management training for the sector (not to mention the many other impacts of PSLF being diminished).
Unfortunately, based on what regular readers of this comment section know about Mr. Decker (i.e. that he is an extremely dogmatic libertarian), I doubt he sees any value in either the PSLF program or the public sector in general. I would be happy to be proven wrong though...
I admit my feathers also get a little rustled when someone talks about things like, say, optimizing food bank deliveries so 50 million more pounds of food get into the hands of hungry people as not “actually productive.”
Genuinely astonishing you would say that, given that the ideas for improving food allocation came from the UChicago School of Business. Surely you can find an example of people in the program doing good in a way that is better than if they worked on actually productive things?
https://samaltmann.github.io/samaltmann.com/CBD.pdf
I am not a libertarian, and that should be reasonably obvious from my work. I am an economist. I have a contempt for sentimentalism. This need not lead you to a blanket endorsement of markets everywhere.
Who?
are MBA grads better managers
Not entirely sure. We have indirect evidence from things like Bloom et al (2013), tho
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w16658/w16658.pdf
Well, this is entirely anecdotal so take it with all the requisite grains of salt, but I personally was an undergraduate history major, went to work in schools and got teaching experience, lucked into a desk job at a big ed nonprofit, and THEN went to a top MBA program and emerged as a much stronger contributor and eventually leader within the sector. So from my admittedly biased lens, MBAs aren't inherently stronger managers, but an MBA education can absolutely make folks without a business background much stronger operational managers and strategists.
"funnels grads from top MBA programs into social service and education"
Ugh - education? FdB - call your office.
“funnels grads from top MBA programs into social service and education”
So we’d have more people working in social services and education who were trained in business?
What would be the point of that?
Did you read the article? I think the value of having folks trained in finance, operations, marketing, and basic economics in the public sector would be obvious (tech companies and retailers hire from the same programs for a reason), but if it's not this entire article just laid out a pretty ironclad example of the benefit.
“Did you read the article?”
I think so. Wasn’t it about a nonprofit that engaged some academics for a practical research project?
*Larry H. Parker client voice* "PSLF saved me $93,000."
My road to PSLF was a bit weird because my loans came before the program existed and my interest rates were low. But a lot of medical residents with high-interest loans are specifically looking at public-sector and academic jobs because they hear of stories like mine. As SBers now, altruism can only go so far toward meeting needs.
I'm a mediocre poster child for the direct effects of PSLF (since I probably didn't NEED it) but a better one for the indirect effects.
This is one of the most rewarding articles I have read in recent memory. I fits into that area of knowledge of being a good news story with tangible innovative solutions to a seemingly unsolvable problem wrapped for me in the old adage “You don’t know what you don’t know”. Thanks Caroline well done and Thanksgiving timely!
Thank you so much! That really means a lot.
Such a great piece: a topic I care about but where I didn’t know this history. And not overly long to read and digest. Thank you!!
Fascinating article, thank you for sharing
Great article, but since Caroline seems like a nice person who doesn't want to be rude, I'll let Matt do that and point out the corollary point that your food drive isn't nearly as helpful as you think (even if it does let you feel good freeing up shelf space): https://slate.com/business/2011/12/food-drives-charities-need-your-money-not-your-random-old-food.html
"In-kind donations still help, of course, and nobody’s turning away boxes of food. But a fundamental issue is that many organizations feel that asking for money—like requesting cash as a gift—seems somewhat gauche. So, let me be rude on their behalf: Find well-managed charities in your community and trust them to know how to do their job. They have access to food at a fraction of the price. They know their clients, and they have better things to do than to sort through your canned goods."
"Produce, which is perishable and already abundant in the donation pipeline, often cleared at nearly zero shares."
That sort of undermines the food desert theory, doesn't it?
How so? We already know that there is an abundance of produce in the US. That people are willing to give away produce that is near to unsellable because it's perishing doesn't change whether that produce is available within an easily accessed distance to poor neighborhoods.
When I lived in the City of Detroit in the 1990s I lived in the outer edge of a food desert. The only grocery store for several miles was at the border between the city and a suburb. I certainly had the means to drive there whenever I wanted. But the further into the city you went the poorer, so that access diminished, and people without their own transport relied on what was available at places like Rite Aid or convenience/liquor stores.
That's one theory.
"The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food."
Is another.
But Rite Aid and Convenience stores would sell produce if there was a market for it.
Food desert doesn't mean one can't find produce if they're looking for it and have means of transit. It means the market isn't supporting ample choice of affordable, nutritious food nearby someone's home. Local neighborhood grocers operating cash strapped businesses with low margins don't dedicate significant shelf space to second hand produce on the verge of spoilage.
Exactly, they don't sell it because people don't want to buy it.
Well, what share of your weekly (after-transfer) income would you spend on broccoli that will spoil in the fridge within 72 hours of purchase?
It's not that people don't want to buy this stuff, it's that they have to prioritize what makes sense for their budgets and that in turn drives supplier decisions on what to stock, and then those become self reinforcing because of how markets work. I'm sure many people would love to buy a Porsche but you're not going to see their dealerships in areas where people's income can't drive inventory turnover before that year's model became out of date.
"It's not that people don't want to buy this stuff, "
Yes, it is.
"And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food."
“It's not that people don't want to buy this stuff”
Are you referring to broccoli or to orphaned Tupperware lids?
To add to what PP said downthread, the food desert argument only has a chance if it's on the basis of malnourishment. I could listen to an argument that welfare should apply to a higher measure of nutrition, but traditionally, welfare arguments for food have been on the basis of just avoiding outright starvation, and non-perishable goods can achieve that very easily.
Great article! Lovely and inspiring holiday read.
Such a great article and topic! I love reading about how systems can get better. Thank you for covering this!
Nice article on the benefits of markets and good system design!
sorta related
For about a year I volunteered at a local food bank warehouse. Most of my time was spent throwing away food, and most of the food I threw away looked perfectly good & edible.
I stopped volunteering there.
super interesting, thanks.
Thank you so much for reading!
This article felt like a topic one might find in a 00s mass market economics book like Freakonomics -- when the public was still interested in what economists thought. It made me strangely nostalgic.
Thank you for the interesting and informative article!
I hesitate to ask this, but I wonder about this every time the subject of food banks in America comes up: we know that lots of Americans are food insecure/hungry and also that lots of poor Americans are fat. How does that work? How do you stay fat if you regularly, chronically (as opposed to occasionally) don’t have enough to eat? How much overlap, if any, is there between America’s food-insecure population and fat population?
I hesitated to ask this because I don’t want to sound like a callous jerk, like, “oh poor Americans are fat, so they clearly don’t need food banks!” I’m just genuinely curious about this and want to understand.
Also, it makes me terribly sad that produce is considered basically worthless by food banks. The average American doesn’t eat nearly enough vegetables. You can use pretty much any kind of vegetable to make a soup or stew, and it will taste good if you have any cooking skills (which I understand many people don’t).
Similar to what Mariana Trench says, I think it’s more that cheap and, critically, easy to prepare food is calorie-dense than “people are hungry but also somehow consuming too many calories” as such.
The easy to prepare bit is key; cabbage is cheap, but labor-intensive to turn into something appetizing. Come to think of it, most whole foods are labor-intensive to turn into something appetizing.
The standard answer is that things like potato chips are cheap and filling. Oh, and easy to prepare. It's all very well to tell someone to get "a cheap cut of beef" and do some kind of long braise to make it edible, but that takes time you probably don't have and then the kids won't eat it anyway. But they'll eat dino nuggets and potato chips, so that's what they get.
Take a single mom using a food bank. She works, she has an income, but she also has a lot of bills: gas, electricity, rent, car repairs, phone, the fridge broke, etc. She is using the food bank to take pressure off the budget. If she gets $100 worth of food she then has that $100 to spend on other critical needs.
The issue of cooking skills is an important one - high schools should teach an adult survival 101 course that includes basic food preparation, how to save (compounding, etc), recognizing and avoiding basic scams (phishing, time shares), and some other key information that will likely be more valuable to the majority of students than algebra. Home ec for the modern age.
We also need to get more scratch cooking and salad bars into schools so kids learn what tasty, healthy food looks like. Big food and the lunch lady association (real btw) are colluding to deliver absolute garbage to poor kids who deserve better. Certain categories of food like chicken are better prepared offsite (it's a salmonella risk for school kitchens to process raw chicken), but in general more scratch cooking would be a major improvement.
If there are literally a billion videos that show you how to cook literally anything and the kids are already on Tiktok 8 hours a day, is a lack of knowledge really the issue?
I mean, that logic could apply to a lot of what schools currently teach. Peter Thiel famously discounts the value of a college education, presumably on similar grounds, but most kids aren't Good Will Hunting and they need the structure and focused attention of experienced educators to thrive. I'm a fan of curiosity and self-directed learning, but teaching high school kids how to feed themselves with nutritionally balanced meals seems like a good investment.
I guess we'd have to randomly assign kids to the cooking class and check back in with them at age 25 and see if it made a difference.
Add in a bit of minor home improvement skills (toilet tank repairs, drill use) and enough simple algebra/geometry to make woodworking/fabrication useful.
Almost no one in America is unable to find a sufficient number of calories. They may worry about affording food, which how 'food insecurity' is defined, and they are very likely to be eating nutritionally poor, inexpensive mass produced foodstuffs, but no one is literally starving (rare and horrifying abuse/neglect situations excepted)
I would imagine that junk food is one of the few affordable "nice things" to the desperately poor. It's an awful lot harder to tell your kids no when they ask for the packaged snack cakes or the candy at the grocery store if that feels like the only nice thing you can realistically do for them all month.
Empty calories are cheap, nutrition can be expensive (especially in terms of time/effort).