Food Banks Merit Praise, Not Criticism

To the Editor:

Far from “intensifying poverty and eroding government assistance,” as Janet Poppendieck charges in her recent opinion piece (“Emergency Food: Moving Beyond the Hunger Trap,” My View, September 10), food banks and food-rescue programs are the only groups keeping millions of Americans from conditions of serious hunger. With “welfare reform” in our wake and “welfare to work” at hand, hundreds of food banks and food-rescue programs have fast become ground zero in our nation’s struggle to feed and empower the millions of poor and hungry people who live among us.

Today in America, 21 million people — including millions in families with two wage earners — are regularly using Second Harvest’s 187 member food banks. This count came from their recent survey, which is the most comprehensive look at who’s hungry in America ever conducted. And because the survey was completed before welfare reform chopped $27.7-billion over six years from the food-stamp program, hunger conditions in America can only have worsened.

With billions of dollars in cuts to food stamps — our most precious safety net, which never covered more than two or three weeks’ worth of sustenance even before welfare reform — where are poor Americans turning just to survive? The answer is, to food banks and food-rescue programs. Unfortunately, those programs are running on empty.

Definitions of the missions of food banks and food-rescue programs paint a rosy picture of dedicated individuals picking up the slack from abandoned government programs. The reality, repeated in thousands of locations across the United States, is a daily struggle to meet even the basic nutritional needs of millions of desperate people.

In the face of all this, what is amazing is the scene at food banks, food-rescue programs, and the thousands of smaller charitable organizations they supply. The environment at these havens is incredibly upbeat and is characterized by an attitude and approach that is fast defining what “welfare to work” actually means. Their scope of activity is moving far beyond simply postponing hunger and toward holistic programs designed to give people the skills they need to succeed.

It seems like food banks and food-rescue programs in America are fast becoming the new community-action agencies. The problem is that food banks and food-rescue programs lack the funds they need to provide the very programs that clients, the public, and policy makers are expecting. These organizations have no resources to meet the demand caused by government devolution.

It is time the nation recognizes food banks and food-rescue programs for what they are — the front line in our battle to empower poor people who are moving from welfare to work. Ms. Poppendieck is full of, well, poppycock. Emergency-food programs did not reduce government help; they arose in response to a huge and constantly growing need that no one else is meeting.

John Morrill
Executive Director
Congressional Hunger Center
Washington