It’s fair to say that food banks have a bit of a love-hate relationship with food drives. While they are great for engaging the community and bringing in much-needed food, they are less cost-efficient than cash and can generate heaps of work on the back end in terms of checking…
Food Bank News
The head of the FDA put the transformative impact of good nutrition into perspective when he said in a March 2018 speech that the public health gains of improved diet “would almost certainly dwarf any single medical innovation or intervention we could discover.” Who knew that one of the most…
There is a running motif in Jose Andres’ illuminating book, We Fed an Island, in which Andres and his crew enter through the backdoor of the Puerto Rico Convention Center so they can take part in official meetings about restoring order after Hurricane Maria. Andres has no invitation nor security…
Anyone who’s ever contemplated an all-you-can-eat buffet can easily imagine the epic amounts of food that get wasted every day at every level of the food system — at restaurants, grocery stores, schools, cafeterias, and homes. And that’s not counting the food wasted by farms, manufacturers, and distributors before it…
Have you ever been hungry? Of course you have! While we all share the physical sensation of being hungry, not everyone suffers from an inability to satisfy it because of a lack of funds or access. Being hungry without having the resources to quell it is the definition of food…
To the people who work or volunteer at the nation’s food banks, the premise of Andrew Fisher’s book, Big Hunger, smarts. He means Big Hunger in the same sense as Big Data, Big Ag, or Big Tech — a powerful, behind-the-scenes force adept at manipulating the market, often to benefit…
Nearly ten years ago, on July 24, 2009, the federal government raised the minimum wage from $6.55 to $7.25. Since then, there has been no increase, though other entities have picked up where the federal government has left off. Many states and municipalities have moved on their own to raise…
Poverty has proven hard to beat in America, declining slightly in the most recent estimates, but still barreling along at between 11% and 15% of the total population, as it has for decades. The official poverty rate of 12.3% in 2017 inched down from 12.7% in 2016 and 13.5% in…
If you’re looking for a nice round number to describe the amount of money the federal government spends to help people get food, then $100 billion would do the trick. The USDA spent more than $98 billion in 2017 on 15 domestic food and nutrition assistance programs, down from nearly…