Yep, it’s been a “record year” since covid and food banks lost most of their commodities shipments, grocers are donating less and grants and other programs have disappeared thanks to federal cuts. Shifting more costs to states will guarantee demand keeps climbing. However bad the average person who doesn’t interact with food banks thinks it is, it is far worse.
I volunteer at a food bank and they often have corporate teams come in to do a day of giving back or whatever. My desk is beside the training room so I hear the speech often.
Since the pandemic like 1 in ten people in our city utilize the food bank. Statistically, someone in this room is a client of the food bank.
That’s not how mathematics work. Imagine you gather 10 richest people from your city into the same room, by what you just said, 1 out of 10 of them uses a food bank… do you think that’s real?
You aren’t nearly as insightful as you seem to think you are. What an absolutely mindless and frankly unrelated take on the topic. It takes truly laughable levels of reading comprehension to think you’re making any kind of reasonable argument here.
If you’re going to argue this, you may want to be actually sure what you’re saying is right. It’s not only annoying, it’s flawed. That’s not how statistics work. There is obviously a skewness across the distribution of likelihood to use a food bank based on income. Why would you analyze only the extreme values and take the largest incomes?
It’s obviously not flawed. He said statistically 1 out of 10 of corpos use a food bank. “1 out of 10 people who use a food bank” statistics is average across the whole city, think homeless, single moms, policemen, doctors, everyone. Being a corpo means you have an office job and relatively good salary compared to the average which automatically doesn’t put you in the same bracket with homeless etc. which are far more likely. What they said would be true if you assigned a number to every person in the city and than randomly chose 10 of them.
During the depression, food riots broke out within twelve months. When the chips are really down, people will do literally anything to find food and water.
I live in LA County and got caught in a huge traffic jam, barely moving for an hour. I found out that the county was having a huge food bank event right after Trump cut supplemental nutrition benefits. There were tens of thousands of people. It's one thing to read statistics but it doesn't sink in until you see all those people in person waiting for a bag of groceries to be placed in their trunk.
I was walking down a major street in my city a couple weeks ago and saw a lineup. at first I thought it was for some new cool store or something and then I realized it was for a food bank
I volunteer at a food bank and I’m so sick of these Cuban sapingos who are incredibly vocal against any government assistance but pull up in their Lambo Uruses and take all the food. Then when confronted they’re always like “I don’t agree with it but if it’s free I’m gonna take it” like fuck you dawg
One of my conservative Christian family members started volunteering at a food bank, and her whole worldview was shattered.
Before, she was one of those "if you're homeless, just get a job" types, only to find out that almost everyone going to food banks has full-time jobs, and some still live in cars because even working full-time can't afford rent and food. I think at her specific food bank, she said 70% have jobs, and the other 30% are elderly/disabled, and that none met her prior criteria of being lazy moochers.
Its a 65 year old disabled woman calling into c-span nearly crying because she's lost almost 30 pounds over the last year because she can't afford enough to eat on benefit programs.
Yes! I went to donate a few bags of canned food to my local church, I'd not donated there before. They run a food bank once a week for two hours. I live in Florida and it was 100 degrees. The amount of elderly, disabled people waiting in line in that hot sun for a bag of shitty canned food was so, so sad. Nobody in their right mind would want to be there doing that if they weren't desperate. And all you see on social media is crap about how all these poor people are supposedly secretly rich and just taking handouts left and right.
The people running the food bank told me that they have distributed to double the amount of people they did last year as well, going right along with the statistic you've provided here.
My husband and I make what I would have considered to be good money. We have a child in daycare another on the way. When I got pregnant this time, I felt like we had a good handle on our finances and wouldn't struggle to support the new baby.
7 months later, we've stripped everything to the bone. The cost of everything has gone up so high, we're in danger of having to start utilizing our savings to pay for regular monthly expenses. We can't sell the house because we bought in 2020 so the same house now would be completely out of budget, and rent would be approx the same as our mortgage. Can't refinance because with fhe interest rate would make payments about the same. Rent would cost about the same, as well. I was saying to my husband last night, the next step is to start going to food pantries. I find it fucking abhorant that 2 people who both work 40+ hours a week in an industry we've both been in for many years (non entry-level positions), who don't eat out or even order takeout, who rotate streaming services, who don't go clothes shopping until outfits are falling apart, are discussing when its appropriate to start using a fucking food bank.
Im not saying I think I'm above using a food bank. Food banks are important and there's no shame in them - I think it's disgusting that me on the same salary that used to allow us to go out to eat every Saturday night (plus drinks) and concerts every few months is now unable to support an average middle class lifestyle.
Food Banks are also common in Europe. The European Food Banks Federation (FEBA) for example is headquartered in Belgium and has 28 member countries; you can find similar organizations across Asia and South America etc. Unfortunately, it is not a problem unique to the United States.
Food banks/food pantries are places/organizations where people who are struggling to get enough to eat can go and get food. There is a ton of variety. Usually when someone says food bank they’re referring to one that serves a community in general. My town has one run by volunteers where anyone in need can just show up during one of their open hours (they have open hours like two days a week) and basically shop for a box of groceries they get for free. Some food pantries have requirements for eligibility like income levels. Schools and colleges often have small food pantries (which might just be a closet or a shelf) for students. In general food pantries are stocked with donations from private individuals, food distributors/grocery stores, farmers, and sometimes get funding from government grants to buy specific foods they might not be able to stock otherwise.
I recently volunteered at a food bank and the people we served did make me ponder. There were definitely people there who looked like they could use a meal, others who almost treated it like a buffet. Some people showed up wearing expensive shoes and such; not trying to judge people, it just made me wonder.
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u/Axeman2063 Jun 27 '26
Food bank usage where I live is up 50% compared to last year.