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May 1998. The Stop, a small food bank in Toronto, doesn’t open for another hour but already a lineup has formed at the double-steel doors opening into a back street. I nod at one of the guys, someone I recognize, and he looks back at me hopefully. I shake my head and point to my wrist. Not yet. 

Inside, three volunteers are busy stacking canned goods and sorting the skids of donated food, mostly the sort of thing nobody else wants: damaged tins of creamed corn, boxes of macaroni and cheese, a few perishables like chicken nuggets with a serious case of freezer burn. But we did just get a donation of toilet paper: food-bank gold. It’ll be scooped up faster than you can say single-ply. 

Richard Thompson, his grey hair like a helmet around his ears, walks in carrying plastic bags bursting with fruits and vegetables. Once a week, Richard volunteers to go around to the greengrocers and collect the produce they can no longer sell. There are tomatoes with splotches of brown, and bananas—some a bit overripe, others so soft you could drink them. It’s often the only fresh food we have to offer.

Despite having worked as the executive director of this food bank for several months, the truth is that I’ve never cared much for the idea of food banks. They’ve always seemed to me like a band-aid solution, an inadequate response to hunger. 

After all, 45 percent of the adults who use our food bank still go hungry at least once a week; 25 percent of the children from families who rely on these handouts say the same. And as a result of shortages, many food banks have to turn people away, close early or cut back on hamper sizes. Nearly 90 percent of people who use food banks still have to go into debt just to buy other necessities. 

In fact, I’ve come to believe the very existence of food banks has played a role—however inadvertently—in making hunger worse.

I know from first-hand experience that people working or volunteering in food banks have the very best intentions. These institutions have stepped into the breach as governments around the world have withdrawn their social safety nets, failed to establish adequate minimum wages and cut back on affordable housing and childcare. But the good people working in the food banks have become so consumed by the day-to-day pressures of delivering food to desperate people that they have no time to ask larger questions about what brings the hungry to their doors in the first place.

In the U.S., more than 50 million people don’t know where their next meal will come from. 

May 1998. The Stop, a small food bank in Toronto, doesn’t open for another hour but already a lineup has formed at the double-steel doors opening into a back street. I nod at one of the guys, someone I recognize, and he looks back at me hopefully. I shake my head and point to my wrist. Not yet. 

Inside, three volunteers are busy stacking canned goods and sorting the skids of donated food, mostly the sort of thing nobody else wants: damaged tins of creamed corn, boxes of macaroni and cheese, a few perishables like chicken nuggets with a serious case of freezer burn. But we did just get a donation of toilet paper: food-bank gold. It’ll be scooped up faster than you can say single-ply. 

Richard Thompson, his grey hair like a helmet around his ears, walks in carrying plastic bags bursting with fruits and vegetables. Once a week, Richard volunteers to go around to the greengrocers and collect the produce they can no longer sell. There are tomatoes with splotches of brown, and bananas—some a bit overripe, others so soft you could drink them. It’s often the only fresh food we have to offer.

Despite having worked as the executive director of this food bank for several months, the truth is that I’ve never cared much for the idea of food banks. They’ve always seemed to me like a band-aid solution, an inadequate response to hunger. 

After all, 45 percent of the adults who use our food bank still go hungry at least once a week; 25 percent of the children from families who rely on these handouts say the same. And as a result of shortages, many food banks have to turn people away, close early or cut back on hamper sizes. Nearly 90 percent of people who use food banks still have to go into debt just to buy other necessities. 

In fact, I’ve come to believe the very existence of food banks has played a role—however inadvertently—in making hunger worse.

I know from first-hand experience that people working or volunteering in food banks have the very best intentions. These institutions have stepped into the breach as governments around the world have withdrawn their social safety nets, failed to establish adequate minimum wages and cut back on affordable housing and childcare. But the good people working in the food banks have become so consumed by the day-to-day pressures of delivering food to desperate people that they have no time to ask larger questions about what brings the hungry to their doors in the first place.