The contested politics of food banking in the United States

ABSTRACT

Rising out of the devolution of public services to private actors during the Reagan administration, the food banking economy in the United States is now a multi-billion-dollar industry. The social and political movements that institutionalized charitable food networks are diverse and often contradictory, offering a window into the politics and competing interests of a U.S. food system that has long grappled with glaring contradictions between food waste and hunger. In this paper, I analyze shifting moral economies of hunger relief within a diverse social movement (re)negotiating a set of legal codes and social norms established over the past forty years of hunger relief through charity. I argue that charitable food networks offer a window into the political contest currently unfolding over the future of the U.S. food system. As such, the debates within these spaces are critical to understand the broader politics of food provisioning in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Hunger
• charity
• food policy
• food justice
• emergency food
• food banks
• activism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank anti-hunger and community food security advocates in West Virginia with whom I have worked for the past 10 years and members of the Global Solidarity Alliance for Food Health and Social Justice who have helped me to articulate these thoughts over the past 3. This paper first appeared in a special issue of Politique Américaine and I would like to thank Alice Béja and that editorial team for shaping this paper for a francophone audience. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of this journal whose comments significantly improved this final version.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2023.2274701

Notes

1. Food banks tend to go through recurrent periods of growing pains and instability. These organizations are not always in a position of financial fragility, the past few years in fact have seen a period of capital investments into the expansion of the network. Many of the local partners do remain at risk of shutting their doors due to financial difficulties, labor shortages or other concerns. Some FA food banks remain extremely under resourced in comparison to their network peers, particularly those in large US cities whose financial clout and material imprint on food and logistics networks in their service areas continues to expand.

2. Commodity Credit Corporation Charter Act (62 Stat.1070; 15 U.S.C. 714). The CCC continues to be a key instrument in the function of the contemporary food system in the United States, the food banking economy is one of the beneficiaries, but it also serves many other roles in child nutrition programs, and the distribution of international food aid for example.

3. Foodchain operated 150 programs across the country that recovered hot, prepared foods from catered events and restaurants for redistribution to charities. Up to that point, Second Harvest concentrated almost exclusively on securing nonperishable goods for its food bank networks and benefited from the institutional expertise and infrastructure that accompanied the merger.

4. Personal Interview – Feeding America director of retail partnerships interview – April 23^rd, 2015.

5. Personal Interview – Feeding America product sourcing manager – May 10^th, 2016.

6. Funding for TEFAP bonus commodity purchases are made possible through section 32 of the Agricultural Adjustment Act which mandates that 30% of all import duties collected from customs receipts are made available to the Secretary of Agriculture for surplus removal and the encouragement of domestic food consumption. When tariffs on steel and aluminum (or any other goods) increase, the pot of money to rescue farmers from food waste crises also increases.

7. Facing Hunger Food Bank Agency Meeting. November 10^th, 2015.

8. ibid.

9. Facing Hunger CEO Interview. May 14^th, 2014.

10. Interview Huntington City Mission. July 15^th, 2014.

11. Mountaineer Food Bank Product Sourcing Manager interview. July 18^th, 2016.

12. Facing Hunger CEO Interview. May 14^th, 2014.

13. Participant Observation at Mountaineer Food Bank Hunger Summit. August 8^th, 2017.

14. Participant Observation at Food for Preston meeting. May 18^th, 2015.

15. Ibid.

16. Interview with Facing Hunger CEO. July 15^th, 2014.

17. Interview, April 27^th, 2022.

18. Participant Observation. WV Food for All Meeting, August 4^th, 2020.

19. West Virginia Legislature. House Joint Resolution 30. Right to Food, Food Sovereignty and Freedom from Hunger Amendment. Introduced March 15^th, 2021.

20. Interview August 5^th, 2020.