Great read, and amazing context on the history of this. Super interesting, and also goes to show that it still isn't a replacement for SNAP, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try our best to make it useful. Well done Feeding America.
Great article on an overlooked part of the food system (but all the more important given threats to SNAP). Any advice on the downstream consequences for SB readers / potential donors from a philanthropy perspective? Are cash donations to Feeding America more effective given the efficiencies highlighted or do local food banks get better value from local grocery stores, etc?
It really bothers me that at 38 this is the first I'm ever hearing about this. I mean, I've heard vaguely similar stories, but lots of other people haven't. I feel like we *should* be able to get a whole lot of people behind a whole lot of good ideas by spreading understanding of real-world cases of charities helping people at scale by listening to economists who actually know what they're talking about.
I recommend the book *Red Plenty* by Francis Spufford. It's a series of dramatized vignettes centered around logistical problems in the Soviet Union caused by their unwillingness to use prices as signals.
For example, there was a shoe factory that was given an impossible production quota for the year. Why? Because your quota was determined by your reported production capacity, and naturally everyone under-reported their capacity to the central planners. The central planners, not being fools, decided to compensate for this by *presuming* that everyone was under-reporting their capacity. Thus, anyone foolish enough to *honestly* report their capacity would be given an impossible quota.
However, the shoe factory managers found a solution: they only manufactured children's shoes that year because their output was only measured by quantity, not based on weight or any size requirements, and children's shoes used less material.
It's been awhile since I read it so I'm not certain if I reproduced that story accurately (or if it was one where the author took considerable artistic liberty to fill in the gaps of the historical record). But I think its hilarious, and the rest of the book is full of this kind of thing!
You're a single mom with two kids who works as a waitress and things are tight. This month the car you need to get to work needed a $500 repair. It's looking like with that hole blown in the budget that last grocery run is going to be a struggle. Food Banks can help people facing difficult times bridge that gap.
Which brings me to the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation that owns Rolex. One of their main functions is to give grants to folks in Geneva facing hard times. Since the mom doesn't specifically need groceries as much as she needs money for the alternator - would there be a more efficient way of just giving her money as a grant? Or is the Food Bank the least worst option in terms of helping her bridge the gap?
My most fulfilling job has been working for a nonprofit distributing food to food banks during the pandemic. These orgs truly need great systems to succeed and it’s great to learn more about how they’ve been improved!
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.
I heard the Planet Money episode about this many years ago and really enjoyed the fact that the communist guy was originally skeptical but really liked the system once it existed.
"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."
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).
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.
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.
Add in a bit of minor home improvement skills (toilet tank repairs, drill use) and enough simple algebra/geometry to make woodworking/fabrication useful.
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.
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.
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!
Great read, and amazing context on the history of this. Super interesting, and also goes to show that it still isn't a replacement for SNAP, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try our best to make it useful. Well done Feeding America.
Great article on an overlooked part of the food system (but all the more important given threats to SNAP). Any advice on the downstream consequences for SB readers / potential donors from a philanthropy perspective? Are cash donations to Feeding America more effective given the efficiencies highlighted or do local food banks get better value from local grocery stores, etc?
It really bothers me that at 38 this is the first I'm ever hearing about this. I mean, I've heard vaguely similar stories, but lots of other people haven't. I feel like we *should* be able to get a whole lot of people behind a whole lot of good ideas by spreading understanding of real-world cases of charities helping people at scale by listening to economists who actually know what they're talking about.
Markets truly are one of mankind's most beautiful and powerful creations. Really enjoyed this article as an example of their potential.
I recommend the book *Red Plenty* by Francis Spufford. It's a series of dramatized vignettes centered around logistical problems in the Soviet Union caused by their unwillingness to use prices as signals.
For example, there was a shoe factory that was given an impossible production quota for the year. Why? Because your quota was determined by your reported production capacity, and naturally everyone under-reported their capacity to the central planners. The central planners, not being fools, decided to compensate for this by *presuming* that everyone was under-reporting their capacity. Thus, anyone foolish enough to *honestly* report their capacity would be given an impossible quota.
However, the shoe factory managers found a solution: they only manufactured children's shoes that year because their output was only measured by quantity, not based on weight or any size requirements, and children's shoes used less material.
It's been awhile since I read it so I'm not certain if I reproduced that story accurately (or if it was one where the author took considerable artistic liberty to fill in the gaps of the historical record). But I think its hilarious, and the rest of the book is full of this kind of thing!
Have you read Scott Alexander's review of Red Plenty?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/
Yes! That's where I had first heard about it!
You're a single mom with two kids who works as a waitress and things are tight. This month the car you need to get to work needed a $500 repair. It's looking like with that hole blown in the budget that last grocery run is going to be a struggle. Food Banks can help people facing difficult times bridge that gap.
Which brings me to the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation that owns Rolex. One of their main functions is to give grants to folks in Geneva facing hard times. Since the mom doesn't specifically need groceries as much as she needs money for the alternator - would there be a more efficient way of just giving her money as a grant? Or is the Food Bank the least worst option in terms of helping her bridge the gap?
My most fulfilling job has been working for a nonprofit distributing food to food banks during the pandemic. These orgs truly need great systems to succeed and it’s great to learn more about how they’ve been improved!
This helped me see food banks and market forces in such a different way — thank you!
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.
I heard the Planet Money episode about this many years ago and really enjoyed the fact that the communist guy was originally skeptical but really liked the system once it existed.
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."
You’ve gotta mention Sam Altmann (2025), who’s able to precisely quantify the value from the program!
https://samaltmann.github.io/samaltmann.com/CBD.pdf
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).
Empty calories are cheap, nutrition can be expensive (especially in terms of time/effort).
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.
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.
Add in a bit of minor home improvement skills (toilet tank repairs, drill use) and enough simple algebra/geometry to make woodworking/fabrication useful.
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.
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.
Great article, thank you! (Also, an extraordinarily rare example of an SB post getting more "Likes" than replies!)
Such a great article and topic! I love reading about how systems can get better. Thank you for covering this!
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.