Food Banks Not the Answer

From Eye Weekly, December 20, 2007, pages 8-10, an article about the inadequacies of food banks in dealing with the underlying problem of hunger and poverty:

They're vastly inefficient.
They treat symptoms rather than causes. And as the food bank network expands, so does the number of hungry people.

ARE FOOD BANKS THE BEST WE CAN DO?

By Chris Bilton


'TIS the season: trim the tree, grab a glass of eggnog and drop a can of soup in a food bank collection bin. In the past decade and a half, it's become ingrained in your empathetic psyche that the promise of office parties and statutory holidays also signals the single biggest opportunity for food banks to collect goods from the public. Wherever there's a bin to fill, a few containers of peanut butter or cans of beef stew is all it takes to DO YOUR PART. Besides, unlike giving money to an intangible-yet-undoubtedly-worthy cause, donation to food banks like Daily Bread carries with it the charitable security that everything donated will go directly to someone in need.

Directly, that is, from the big bin by the cashier back into the supermarket's warehouse, where it will be picked up by a delivery truck and driven to the Daily Bread warehouse in Etobicoke. There is will be off loaded by the warehouse volunteers and dumped directly into a cardboard box the six of a SmartCar, which will be pallet-jacked out into the warehouse's main area, where hundreds of volunteers will work together to label and inspect whence it came. Once it's back in an inventory-worthy order, the food agencies around the city, picked by the warehouse workers and agencies around the city, the food will be directly available to fill requests from the various food bank agencies around the city, picked by the warehouse workers who can then pack in into a well-balanced hampers to give directly to those who need it most.

Ironically, this elaborate corporate-style distribution infrastructure developed out of the very basic premise on which food banks operate: that hungry people need food. But that's also the very reason that grocery stores exist, and why, for the most part, everyone in the city lives within a few blocks of one. The food industry has already perfected its methods of harvesting goods from all over the world, packaging them appropriately, importing them to massive distribution centres and shipping them out to every corner of the city.

The food bank collection and distribution network, then, is a staggeringly successful and complex solution to a problem that never existed. People are not going hungry because they lack access to food - nearly all poverty research, including recent studies from the United Way and Daily Bread itself indicates that people are hungry because they don't have enough money. Why do we go through an additional, decidedly labyrinthine, process of collecting food that's already been distributed only to deliver it back to the hungry people who live a few blocks from the grocery store, and not just give them the money to buy it themselves. Could it really be that simple?

Well, yes and no. There's a German adage that says, "Charity sees the need not the cause." And when the needs of hungry people are so great that they require charity on an institutional level, the cause gets harder and harder to see. It's something of a paradox: it may be correct to point out that food banks are a silly way to help poor people, but that doesn't mean they should stop.

Institutionalized food banks: from local charity to big philanthropic business

A recent National Post opinion column sported the heading "Food banks are ridiculous," which in the context of the paper and the spirit it was delivered, seemed a bit of a cheap shot. No one is about to argue that these charity organizations, essentially helping to soften the blow of insubstantial social programs and impoverished living conditions, are doing anything other than what's Right and Good. But there was a small nugget of truth in the Post's prickly declaration - it's not the urge to help the less fortunate deserves ridicule, but that the institutionalization of food banks is actually quite absurd.

In the mid-1980s, they began as a sort of emergency response, but by 1995 (read: the dark years of Mike Harris), the need for food banks spiked. Once the food industry stepped up and offered their unsellable-yet-still-edible extras, organizations like Daily Bread and the Ontario and Canadian Association of Food Banks necessarily assumed the role of food-bank distributors. There are many other prominent food banks that focus on niche communities or specific foods, such as Second Harvest and The Stop and their responsive fresh and organize programs. But Daily Bread, which now, owns it own warehouse and fills orders for is 164 agencies, is by far the largest.

The distribution system established by food banks almost identically mirrors the one that already serves the food industry and supermarkets, except that theirs runs on a veritable army of volunteer labour and donated resources (like fuel, trucking and sometimes physical facilities) to process the food industry's waste. Of the 12 million pounds of food that Daily Bread took in last year, nearly three quarters was mislabelled and about-to-expire food from the food industry otherwise destined for the dump. The industry is more than happy to donate it and save the tipping fees of sending it to a landfill, all the while propping up an image of being good corporate citizens. But what appears to be a commendable effort to reduce waste and satisfy a need is actually something of an illusion.

More food, less waste, compassionate volunteers; what's wrong with this arrangement?

Despite the fact that they are able to solicit specific donations from the food industry, Daily Bread's director of research and communications, Michael Oliphant, explains, "At the same time, we are getting what they can't sell, so that's the part that we don't have that much control over." This is why banks still rely heavily on the thrice-yearly food drives and on purchasing food directly to cover expensive essentials like baby food and canned meats. Ironically, the food donated by the industry that still ends up as waste is almost equal to what Daily Bread receives from food drives.

While the food industry continuously minimizes its shipping and waste (by, for instance, donating unsellable food to save the disposal cost), food banks require a disproportionate amount of labour and resources to expand their operations. According to Valerie Tarasuk, a professor at U of T's department of nutritional sciences, food banks have to do an enormous amount of work to convert any food into edible food donations. As much as the food-drive sorting room provides an excellent photo op, it represents only a fraction of the countless hours of year-round volunteer labour required to feed approximately 75,000 people a month. Just think of the nine million pounds in bulk shipments from manufacturers that also have to be sorted and inspected. And the hours of sorting and re-sorting at the local level. Even after all that effort, it's still not enough.

Daily Bread's statistics show that more than half of the people they serve still need more food either "most of the time" or "all of the time." In terms of a more complete picture of poverty and hunger, Tarasuk says, "The food bank numbers act like a bit of a lightning rod to indicates these problems, but there are probably four or five times as many people in the community who are struggling to get enough food to meet their needs."

So if the biggest food bank in Canada can't meet these needs, what's the alternative? Is there a way to convert the donated food, volunteer hours, financial donations and other incalculable contributions into a more direct link between hungry people and food?

Is an alternative (or a solution) even possible?

What if people instead donated gift cards that could be redeemed at any supermarket, and that came with an automatic discount? Supermarkets and suppliers could write the discount off as a charitable donation to balance out the lost savings in tipping fees, and there would be no need for a massive, inefficient distribution infrastructure, as the food industy has a far better one already in place.

Better yet, the whole operation would be exceptionally accountable and easily managed by a handful of people doing the proper paperwork and handing out gift cards. And since people use food banks for an average of 12 months, as a transitional provisions, all the free-up volunteer labour could be redirected to help them work on the roots of recipients' financial crises and make the transition to self-sufficiency that much faster.

But finding an alternative to food banks still misses the point, considering once again the need over the cause, and ignoring the more pressing issue that almost one third of Toronto families lie in poverty. Consequently, the very existence of food banks creates an accountability vacuum for the government, according to Tarasuk. "From Stephen Harper's perspective, it's a very efficient system," she says. "It keeps everybody thinking the problem's being dealt with. It costs practically nothing, there's virtually no government money moving into the system, and at the same time they can slash away at budgets for things that would allow low-income people to buy their own food."

The real alternative to food banks then, is to make them unnecessary. And not because they are inefficient or unstable or represent a band aid solution but because in a healthy economy where the government boasts a continued surplus, social programs and that healthy private sector economy should be able to provide enough money and affordable groceries. The reason food banks remain a necessity, while the number of hungry people continues to grow, according to Tarasuk, is that "the debate about food banks often becomes an either/or, as if food banks are meeting a need. And the question is [about] their appropriateness to meet that need. ... They're not a particularly relevant part of the solution [to poverty] anyway," she says. "Let's just set it aside and start talking about the problem in other ways."

Even Oliphant stresses the ultimate goal for Daily Bread is to help eliminate poverty itself. "Like any organization that can think critically, when you're faced with a problem that you can never fully resolve, you get to the root of the problem," he says. "And that's why we've put more of a focus on the advocacy and finding political solutions." He thinks that the government is in fact capable of reducing poverty, citing Daily Bread's recent success in influencing policy: a provincial child benefit for low-income kids and a federal income tax supplement for the working poor.

Is it unreasonable to think that food banks could effect a more immediate change in policy by simply saying to the government: "We're not going to do this any ore - it's been your job all along"? Olphant says they're not about to hold the people that rely on Daily Bread hostage. No matter how much they focus on their advocacy efforts, they still devote most of their work to feeding the hungry. And until there is a real effort to reduce poverty, there is no reason to assume that food banks will give up trying to feed those in need.

Only a few weeks ago, as the food drive season was just about to launch, the one Daily Bread food bank in Parkdale came within a few thousand dollars of closing its doors - and still could by the new year. The reflex action from many was to find a way to keep it open at any cost because without it, there is nowhere else for hungry people in that community to turn. Essentially, it's another temporary fix for a temporary solution to a small part of a far larger problem; a clear indication that food bank clients are already hostages, except that no one is making demands and no one seems ready to negotiate.
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