UC Davis

This dissertation examines the privatized social safety net provided by the U.S. food banking system and the implications of relying on this network of nonprofit organizations to address the issue of hunger. U.S. food banks have been collecting and redistributing food waste to other nonprofit organizations that provide food directly to people since the late 1960s, and prior literature criticizes food bank structures for perpetuating inequities and detracting from efforts to enact systemic changes to the political economic system that produces hunger and poverty (e.g., Fisher, 2017; Poppendieck, 1998; Riches, 2018). However, the Covid-19 pandemic represented a moment of significant changes in both food banking and the framing of hunger and inequality in the United States. During this period, food banks were frequently represented in media portrayals as a response to hunger, and food banks became more central to the U.S. public and private social safety nets. Since Covid-19, food banks received increased resources, expanded to serve new organizations and people, made programmatic changes, and grew their focus on equity throughout their work. I found food banks have begun to shift their attention away from predominately being supply-driven, gleaning organizations that procure excess food toward being organizations increasingly focused on ending hunger and poverty. Thus, I examine how food banks and their administrators changed during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as how they situated their work within larger questions of how to address hunger and poverty. To examine how U.S. food banks address hunger and poverty, I specifically explore: (1) How food banks distribute resources to address hunger, and what models, programs, and metrics they use to define their missions, guide their decisions, and reach goals; (2) How food banks respond to broader social and political contexts and changing ideas regarding hunger and poverty; and (3) How food bank resources are distributed locally, regionally, and nationally, and how this influences the distribution of food to people in relation to poverty, race, and urbanicity. I draw on 62 interviews conducted from 2021 to 2022 with food bank administrators from across the United States, archival materials on food banking, and geospatial analysis of a nine-state Food Bank Census. I find food banks are working to center addressing hunger’s root causes, but these changes are happening unevenly within the food bank sector and within individual food banks. Food banks are also grappling with competing ideologies around the root causes of poverty, which has led their structures to have be a patchwork of different ideological approaches to hunger. These findings elicit further questions of why food banks are implementing structures based on disparate ideologies for addressing hunger. Below, I briefly address findings from each of the above-listed questions and the further inquiries they provoked. I find that food banks’ missions, programs, and metrics align with three models of addressing hunger and poverty—the traditional charity model, the personal responsibility model, and the systemic change model. Under the traditional charity model, food banks alleviate hunger through food provision. However, some food banks are increasingly taking steps to end hunger and poverty using either individualized approaches under the personal responsibility model or structural approaches under the systemic change model. I find most food banks have missions and operate programs that fall under a hybrid of the three models, but I find that food bank metrics align heavily with the traditional charity model. I further explore why food banks simultaneously operate approaches rooted in multiple ideologies of addressing hunger. I find that food bank programs and metrics are heavily influenced by their efforts to please funding sources and signal their legitimacy as an effective response to hunger. Their economic model of fundraising through private dollars and administering government programs means that food banking activities are all influenced by economic and political elites. Food bank programs are thus responsive to philanthropic trends of how to address hunger and poverty. However, they rarely discontinue programs, which has led to durable impacts from early donor trends. I find their metrics are the most mismatched with their missions because this is the key means they use to signal legitimacy to funding sources, which leads to an emphasis on always showing growth or success. Food banks’ agency in determining their own metrics of success is further limited by specific reporting requirements from funding sources. Additionally, I explore food banks’ political advocacy and how they frame their own politicization. Food banks play a key role in framing to the public and policymakers how hunger in the U.S. should be resolved. I find that many food banks frame themselves as politically neutral, despite all food banks in my sample being involved in some form of political action. For example, food banks conduct educational campaigns about hunger, lobby for public policies, and control the distribution of billions of dollars of resources annually. For this reason, I further explore why food bank administrators depoliticize their work and how these efforts to depoliticize their work limit the scope of their political advocacy. I find that political advocacy work can be challenging to food banks’ efforts to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the donors and public, especially as they begin to engage in practices that are in contradiction to the status quo. I further explore how food banks engage in politics to either effect change or uphold the status quo regarding social safety net policies and inequality. While food banks generally uphold the status quo, they are also increasingly creating systemic change through political organizing for social justice. I also find that food banks are increasingly using their economic and political power to effect systemic changes to the political economic system, such as through advocating for living wage policies. Despite the challenges food banks face in engaging in politically divisive debates, I find that food banks are increasingly able to draw on new narratives that question the political economic system that has produced both hunger and the food banking system. Food banks are thus engaging in a two-part approach—feeding people who are experiencing food insecurity today while trying to prevent it in the future. Lastly, to examine the constraints of relying on localized and privatized social safety nets, I examine geographical disparities in both food banks and their resources. I do not find evidence that such resources respond to levels of community need. Instead, I find resource differences based on racial demographics and urbanicity, which lead to an uneven social safety net that perpetuates existing inequities. These findings raise questions about how one’s local food banking infrastructure can dramatically impact the available social safety net and why we are increasingly relying on these private systems to administer federal social safety net programs. Together, these findings point toward the need to revisit the taken-for-granted assumptions of how to address hunger. Instead of trying to best redistribute the corporate food system’s excesses to people experiencing poverty, a better social safety net could be built through centering the needs of people experiencing poverty and changing the systemic structures that produce poverty in such a wealthy nation.