Like many executives who run food pantries and soup kitchens in New York City, Tony Butler has become accustomed to seeing more customers each year than the last. The organization he heads, St. John’s Bread and Life, distributed nearly 313,000 meals in 2012 through its food pantry and thousands more in its soup kitchen. In addition to its growing number of clients at its Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, headquarters, St. John’s also fed new ones in areas hit by superstorm Sandy.

The Sandy spike in demand was temporary. The toll of a new storm is likely not. On Nov.1, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cut benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as food stamps, as a provisional boost from the 2009 federal stimulus program expired. The almost two million New Yorkers who receive food stamps are now getting about 5 percent less each month than previously, down to $632 for a family of four.

Diane Harris (right) and Ruby Collins chose food for pantry bags at St John’s Bread and Life, a large food pantry in Brooklyn. Photo: Charlotte Keith

Like many food pantries, St. John’s Bread and Life began informally, with members of the congregation of St. John the Baptist Church giving out sandwiches after services. Now housed in a renovated warehouse, St John’s boasts a touch-screen ordering system for the pantry, a mobile soup kitchen and a range of social services.

St John’s exemplifies much of what is best about charitable provision of food. Clients are treated with a compassion not often found in other centers. They receive fresh produce not often available or affordable in neighborhood bodegas.

Nonetheless, Butler is skeptical that his pantry, or any private charity, can manage — much less solve — the city’s hunger problem.

“We’re one of the biggest food providers in the city,” he remarked. “Competent, efficient, everything else. But we just kind of keep a lid on it.”

Like many pantry directors, he worries about the long-term effectiveness of emergency food. “The numbers haven’t changed in a long time,” he said. “The faces do, but the numbers don’t.”

In New York City and across the country, food pantries have been booming for decades – in good times and bad. In 1979, the city was home to around 30 emergency food providers, according to the Food and Hunger Hotline created the same year.

New York is now home to an extensive network of food pantries and soup kitchens – at least 850, according to the Food Bank for NYC, which acts as a regional hub for food distribution.

Warehousing and distributing the goods is big business. The Food Bank raised and spent $75 million in the year through June 2012, including the value of goods it acquired via donations from food manufacturers and distributors. Every day, truckers drive thousands of pounds of food from the Food Bank’s Hunts Point warehouse to its hundreds of member organizations.

Still, hunger persists. If anything, it has worsened.

Does it make sense that so many people – 1.4 million New Yorkers, by some estimates – are relying for food on the kindness of strangers?

Does the proliferation of charitable food programs actually entrench the problem of hunger by promoting the role of charity at the expense of government accountability?

And could all those dollars devoted to emergency food be put toward advocating for more fundamental change that would help eliminate the need in the first place?

Food bank managers used to see the problem of hunger as a primarily logistical one. They thought that if food banks could solve the problem of distribution – getting food from a supplier to a regional food bank to a local food pantry without it spoiling – they would be able to solve hunger, said Jessica Powers, an advocate at WhyHunger, an organization that brings pantries together to promote social change.

Then, in 1998, Janet Poppendieck, a professor of sociology at Hunter College at the time, published “Sweet Charity: Emergency Food And the End of Entitlement.” The book is a searing critique of the methods and, more profoundly, of the underlying rationale of charitable food provision. Poppendieck found that pantries and soup kitchens were struggling to keep up with rising demand for their services. Further, she argued, by appearing to tackle hunger while overlooking its root causes, food banks created a “moral safety valve” that lets citizens and legislators off the hook.

The emergency food system, she concluded, made it easier for governments to shift responsibility for hunger onto private charities, which are so immersed in meeting day-to-day needs that they fail to ask why people are relying on charity in the first place.

Even the best-run, best-stocked food pantry is, from this perspective, a symbol of failure. “It is not an accident,” Poppendieck writes, “that poverty grows deeper as our charitable responses to it multiply.”

An Ongoing Emergency

In 1983, the federal government created a program to funnel government dollars to food banks. It was called TEFAP, an acronym for the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program.

Seven years later, the acronym remained the same, but the agency’s name was tweaked to become The Emergency Food Assistance Program. There was no longer anything temporary about it.

Since 2000, food stamp use has risen to record levels – but so has the number of people visiting pantries. Even between 2001 and 2005, when the U.S. and New York economies were doing well, both food pantry use and food stamp enrollment increased.

For many people, choosing between food stamps and food pantries is not an option. A 2005 study found that people who participate in one program are more likely to participate in another: neither safety net individually provides enough to get by.

Break down another acronym and you can see why. The food stamp program is now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. It was never designed to be a household’s primary source of food. SNAP benefits are still based on an outdated plan, which assumes that households spend about one-third of their income on food. Now that households typically spend a larger proportion of income on housing costs, fuel, and medical care, the 30 percent figure is obsolete – hence the increased demand for emergency food.

While demand for charitable food continues to rise, supply is increasingly unpredictable.

In a 2011 survey by the Food Bank for NYC, almost 80 percent of pantries reported an increase in visitors over the course of the year, and 90 percent reported an increase in first-time visitors. Sixty-three percent of pantries said they had experienced food shortages at some point in the past year, compared to 50 percent in 2007.

Rachel Sheffield, a policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, argues that “the government can only do so much. It’s very good at redistributing food, but actually dealing with the causes of poverty and helping with individual needs is best left to civil society.”

In ways that few people realize, private food pantries are supported heavily by city, state and federal governments. The Food Bank for NYC, the nation’s largest, reports that about half the food it has distributed in recent years was procured via government contracts.

A recent study in the policy journal Public Administration Quarterly found that food pantries are increasingly becoming “institutionalized quasi-governmental support structures.” The division between public assistance and private charity is, in reality, blurred.

Politically, though, the charity-versus-government idea persists – at least in part because pantries don’t often publicize the amount of government assistance they receive. Government-supplied food is not even tallied on emergency food providers financial statements, which in New York must be made available for public inspection. The silence helps perpetuate the myth that private charity can feed America’s hungry.

When it comes to fund-raising, hunger as a cause has a broad, nonpartisan appeal: Everyone can understand what it’s like to feel hungry. And so charities tend to sell hunger, not low wages or a lack of affordable housing, as the problem.

“Charity,” said Robert Egger, founder of the DC Central Kitchen, a food recycling program and community center in Washington D.C., “is based on the redemption of the giver, not the liberation of the receiver.”

Poppendieck writes in Sweet Charity that “emergency food has become very useful” for many parties involved in the process. The USDA distributes surplus food through TEFAP; businesses burnish their public image by making donations; volunteers feel they are doing something worthwhile; celebrities earn ethical credentials by appearing in food bank PSAs. “If we didn’t have hunger,” she concludes, “we’d have to invent it.”

All Together Now

Critics of the system usually agree on one thing: Pantries ought to be doing more to change the underlying problems.

Andy Fisher used to be executive director of the Community Food Security Coalition, a national alliance of food systems and anti-hunger groups. He points out that of the roughly 200 food banks that partner with Feeding America, a major domestic hunger charity, more than half don’t advocate at all — not even to support renewal of the SNAP program. And yet the huge number of people who are involved in emergency food — pantry staff, volunteers, visitors, board members – could be a force for political change.

On Sept. 17, Feeding America organized a phone campaign, encouraging people to call their representatives to protest impending cuts to SNAP. About 5,000 calls resulted – a tiny number, given that more than 61,000 pantries are affiliated with the organization.

Already struggling to meet demand for their services, many pantries simply see advocacy as being outside their missions. Advocacy by nonprofits for specific legislation is limited by law; urging broader social change is not. Still, some pantries worry that any political engagement could jeopardize fundraising efforts. Others contend that they don’t have the time or resources.

“We’ve had pantries say, ‘A living wage campaign is outside of our mission,’” said Powers of WhyHunger. “But if you don’t see the connection between wages and food, how are you ever going to be more than a Band-Aid?”

And any advocacy push raises its own problems. More money spent on advocacy means less for food, or social services. Volunteers and donors are often less enthusiastic about advocacy efforts because the effects are less tangible. Feeding people yields immediate results; advocacy is a long, hard slog.

Less Is More

Mark Winne spent 24 years running a pantry in Hartford, Conn. Now he is one of the staunchest critics of traditional food banking. He ended his keynote speech at a recent food security conference in Tucson, Ariz., by describing an imaginary fund-raising letter he would like to receive from a food bank. “Dear Mr. Winne,” it read, “We have great news for you this year! We at the Food Bank are happy to report that for the first time in our history we have donated less food this year than the previous year.”

The letter goes on to describe a progressive food-banker’s dream: the make-believe food bank mobilizes volunteers and donors to advocate for a living wage. They launch a phone campaign and attend public hearings. They persuade Congress to fully fund nutrition programs.

This is the dilemma that pantries have to confront: Giving out food is not the same thing as ending hunger. Food banks and pantries have traditionally evaluated their performance in pounds of food given away, not how — if indeed at all — they have reduced hunger.

Winne said measuring the weight of food distributed is meaningless. “It makes them look like they’re distributing heaps of food, but we know that doesn’t mean anyone’s life is better in the long run,” he said.

“WE NEED A VOICE”

New York is unusual in having an organization dedicated to finding long-term solutions to hunger. Established in 1983 with the aim of coordinating the efforts of emergency food providers across the city, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger — motto: “Moving society beyond the soup kitchen” — has evolved into a dedicated advocacy organization.

Executive director Joel Berg is a regular at media outlets. He is a passionate and articulate advocate, but, he said, “not as passionate as a mother who’s unable to feed her kids.” One of the Coalition’s major initiatives is its Food Action Boards, a series of local training programs that teach skills ranging from how to lobby elected officials to understanding how government funding works. The basic premise is that those affected by the problem should be the ones to advocate for change.

It’s not easy work.

Joshua Rivera, a community organizer with the Coalition Against Hunger, explains that it takes time to get to know people, talk to them, and gain their trust. It’s not about numbers. “I’d rather have two people sitting and planning than 20 sitting and complaining,” he said.

Some of Rivera’s recent recruits, however, are buoyant. Tyrone Davies, 63, speaks with the authority of someone who has extensive experience of the city’s emergency food system. “We need a voice”, he said, “a voice that’s effective. There’s no voice for food stamp recipients that I’ve heard.”

He remembers clearly his first trip to a food pantry, when he was so ashamed of coming for help that he walked around the block five or six times before forcing himself to go inside. When he worked as a messenger at the New York Daily News, he avoided going to pantries too close to the office, afraid that someone would recognize him.

“Now I could dance a jig outside,” he joked. “We have to make noise, put our faces and stories in front of people that matter.”