There’s an article in the NY Times about the enormous increase in the usage of foodstamps. The numbers are startling. For Dane County, 7% of the population relies on food stamps; 15% of children; 51% of African Americans. In other counties I have lived: Greenville County, SC: 12% overall 24% of children; 31% of African Americans. In Elkhart County, IN usage has increased 75% since 2007. The article and the interactive map are here.

I’m reading Mark Winne’s Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty. Winne was for many years director of the Hartford Food System in Hartford, CT and describes the many problems associated with the attempts by non-profits to provide food for the food-insecure. I’ll have more to say about this later, but he is critical of the food pantry and food bank system on a number of grounds.

Grace has had a food pantry for thirty years. That’s an achievement, whether it deserves to be celebrated or not is another question. Certainly, we’ve fed a lot of people over those years. But it’s a bandaid, and the fact of the matter is that more people are food-insecure today than ever before, and as Winne and others point out, the food pantry system is constructed in such a way that it makes volunteers feel good, the nonprofits that serve the hungry feel good, and it gives the food producers that provide food for the pantries an outlet for product they don’t want. Winne argues that if all of that volunteer energy were directed toward solving the underlying issues of hunger and poverty, more progress would be made in the long run.