Hunger In America

General Discussion
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After volunteering for several weeks at a local food bank, I have made the following observation concerning the clientele:

  1. Most arrive in late model cars, some in luxury vehicles (Mercedes, Lexus).
  2. Many (most?) are overweight or obese.
  3. Almost all have nice iPhones/Android (i.e., at least two rear cameras).
  4. Some also receive pet food.

These are all markers of relative affluence or, at least, not indicative of poverty requiring food assistance unless some very poor life choices have been made. In particular, items 1, 3 & 4 indicate prioritizing nonessential items over food; item 2 suggests poor use of a limited food budget.

A few more tangentially-relevant facts:

  • The contributions are overwhelmingly from grocery stores; individual/church contributions are negligible.
  • The bar codes have to be defaced so that recipients will not be able to return items to stores for money.
  • The median household income for my zip code, county, and state are roughly within 10% or 15% of the national average: some higher, some lower.

All of this came as a shock since I was expecting a very different picture. My purpose in joining this effort was to help people who were truly in distress. There were some clear exceptions but that didn’t seem to be the norm. Sure, these observations are anecdotal but I have seen hundreds of recipients. The plural of anecdote is data.

There is a well-known correlation between obesity and poverty in First World countries as illustrated by this graph of obesity rate versus wealth quintiles, taken from this paper:

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The issue of hunger, or food security as is its current fashionable name, has a long history. Almost 60 years ago, CBS produced a documentary with the same title as this post:

Putting aside the usual caveats about the dishonest of journalism, it is of some value in putting the problem in context: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The good: nobody was obese.
The bad: the documentary consisted mostly of anecdotal human interest stories and very little objective data.
The ugly: quote from a doctor in Loudon County (VA):

These people … seek immediate forms of enjoyment. This is why we frequently see a late-model television set in the living room of a family that has not tasted meat for six weeks. This is why we frequently see a late-model baby in the crib. This is why we often see empty pint bottles in the yard.

In the over half-century since the documentary was produced, it seems the main change has been that the poor(?) get more calories so they’re no longer undernourished but they’re probably still malnourished. The documentary closes on this note, foreshadowing the expansion of the concept of rights from negative rights to positive ones:

In this country, the most basic human need must become a human right.

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2

First, thank you for volunteering.

Second, what you are seeing seems parallel to what one of the volunteers at a local charity thrift store said – this is a religious organization store which aims primarily to help people who have had family disasters like fire or divorce: We have to help a lot of people who don’t need the help to make sure the ones who do need the help get it.

As for the late-model cars – maybe people who are gaming one system are gaming others too? I won’t bore you with the details of the Canadian illegal immigrant I met – in the US illegally, jobless, no fixed abode, probably no valid driver’s license, certainly no insurance. An auto dealer gave her a no down payment loan to buy a car and watched her drive it off the lot.

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Bill Gross of PIMCO fame made a somewhat similar observation in late 2021:

But here’s the interesting part. Having volunteered at this same soup kitchen before, I was expecting a similar cast of “down and out” people in need of a hot lunch. Indeed, as Amy and I cut chicken for the soup and fruit for the fruit cups, we were then assigned to pass out what was actually a gorgeous enchilada lunch replete with cheesecake and chips when the doors opened at noon. Due to COVID, however, there was no indoor dining – in fact the new routine featured a drive-through lane where a large percentage of cars were nice SUVs and pickup trucks. “Say what?” I whispered to Amy.

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Food stamps are ending for 42 million recipients who are overwhelmingly Democrat.

In fact many are foreigners.

Some are threatening to shoplift. Others say they’ll riot.

Happily, food is free in prison. FAFO. pic.twitter.com/RivG5ntZKs

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) October 29, 2025
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5

He probably never considered that this can be detrimental to the people that need it.

By definition you cannot be helping someone that doesn’t need help. Therefore, the statement should be we have to detrimentally hurt a lot of people that don’t need help in order to help the ones that do.

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Well, that could be one way of looking at the situation.

We come back to the old statistical concept of Type 1 errors and Type 2 errors – do we set the sensitivity on the fire alarm at a level that gives us false alarms, or do we set it so insensitive that it fails to give an alarm when there is a fire? The one thing we know is that we will never set the sensitivity perfectly.

Arguably, the people who are gaming the food banks are not being detrimentally hurt – they were damaged people before they ever heard about the food bank, and that is why they think they are being smart by misusing the food banks.

What damaged those people? Some were born damaged. Others were damaged by a generation of politicians who bought into the chimeras of “Free Trade” and open borders, destroying jobs, dignity, and the ability of individuals to look after themselves.

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Right now, the alarm is set to “Whatever. We don’t give a damn.” There is plenty of room for improvement.

Rewarding bad behavior is damaging the miscreants and to the society. It erodes trust: the foundation of social cohesion. Even if the miscreants were beyond help, enabling or condoning this behavior is corrosive. However, it is also sad to adopt the attitude of hopelessness that these individuals are beyond redemption; one can’t know. Even if they are, it’s still wrong to look the other way. The society is already slouching toward low-trust as it is.

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This is way too reminiscent of “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” What’s missing from this analysis is the unseen harm. Some, perhaps most, of the freed guilty will be at liberty to commit more crimes. The harms suffered by the many innocent victims of the freed criminals are left out of this calculus. This applies to the present case, as explained elsewhere.

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Fair enough. You have spent some time volunteering at the food bank. Have you formed a view about how procedures could be changed so that the undeserving get turned away while the deserving get helped?

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Check out the “EBT of TikTok” account that’s sharing videos of people threatening to burn the country down over food stamps

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Related:

Nothing will destroy your sympathy for the poor faster than living among them and watching how they spend their money.

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12

It’s not rocket surgery: means testing of recipients as a minimum. That would be a good start.

It’s currently being run on the honor system. Trouble is, there’s not much honor. The fact that we had to deface the bar codes to prevent the food from being exchanged for money tells you all you need to know. If this weren’t a massive problem, it would never have been discovered and it wouldn’t be worth the effort to defeat.

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A reasonable idea … but how would this means testing be done? Bring along a copy of your most recent 1040? Or your SNAP card? Or what? And who would analyze the information and decide which person was entitled to receive food from the food bank and which was not? And how many lawyers would be standing there waiting to sue the individuals in the food bank when they turned someone down?

Practically speaking, the people who are gaming the system will have no problem satisfying whatever means test is devised.
Q: Why are you at a food bank in a late-model high-end SUV?
A: It’s not my vehicle, it is my brother-in-law’s. He lets me use it to drive his mother to her dialysis treatment.

The person down on his luck with nothing left but his pride will be too ashamed even to subject himself to the indignity.

Charity seemed to work when communities were small and everyone knew everyone else’s business, such as in 18th Century Scottish presbyterian parishes. It was clear who needed help and who needed to be told to straighten up. It is hard to see how to devise an effective system for today’s anonymous societies.

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You nailed most of what I meant by hurting those that did not need help.

I have one additional angle. I think you kind of touched it, but I think it is even more direct. People that take from “charities” that don’t need help are stealing. Stealing is not only bad for the victims of theft and society, it is bad for the thieves.

Unlike many thieves, these folks probably don’t think of themselves as thieves. Character is tricky. It is built by constant effort and erodes when never exercised. If people enable a person to steal and also pretend that the person didn’t steal, they are reinforcing a thought process that is wrong. This isn’t stealing.

I think the Christian’s say that the devil is tricky. Allowing someone to steal and pretending that it is ok is tricky.

Non-Christians may think this is Christian nonsense. However, I think there is evidence in many areas where people get tricked into behavior that is bad and detrimental to themselves, others and society.

In the small town of my birth, when gambling was made legal and available in every bar and most gas stations, I witnessed two families destroy their finances. I know that neither would have done this to themselves and the ones they loved had it not been accessible and normalized.

I had a gal one time tell me she wanted to have sex and nobody would ever know. Fortunately for me, I was aware enough to tell her that I would know. Had I not been aware, it would have certainly been bad for me regardless of whether anyone ever found out.

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15

For starters, if someone shows up to a food bank, they should already be on SNAP. If they do not qualify, as I suspect many do not, they’re out. I’m guessing even the stupidest food bank worker can determine if the client has shown a SNAP credential or not.

I don’t think charitable organizations are obligated to give anything to anyone. This is not an entitlement. But if lawyers want to shut it down, that might reflect poorly on them. Even sleazy lawyers care some about their public image.

So, you think they would be forging SNAP credentials? That’s probably a federal crime.

Look, I can’t work out all the details for you, especially for free. Your argument (it’s too hard!!!) is the same argument used to explain why we can’t have a secure border, why we can’t have safe streets, why homeless are camped out all over leftist cities, and every other leftist argument against solving a social problem. Miraculously, we now have a secure national border, I live in a community with safe streets and public places, and there are no homeless encampments. It must a miracle!

The other issue with your complaints is that, while approaches may not solve every problem, there are ways to make the situation better. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. Throwing up your hands because a problem is hard is just a cop out.

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Calm down, drlorentz. We are in more agreement than you seem to think. We agree that stopping people from abusing food banks is desirable, but not simple or straightforward. I also note there is a real risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater if efforts to minimize abuse have the unintended (but predictable) consequence of discouraging people who really could use the help from going to a food bank. No easy solution in the kind of society we live in today.

By the way, you do know that people sell government -issued SNAP cards because they want cash rather than food? And other people buy the SNAP cards to cut their food bills. Any system (especially one created by a government) is going to be gamed.

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It used to be that people would get food along with coaching and community. Now they get food for nothing - and stay in the rut they’re at.

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Instead of engaging in snark, you might have engaged with the substance of my comment. Where are your constructive suggestions?

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Would it be snark to quote a respected individual?

“Look, I can’t work out all the details for you, especially for free.”

We agree that abuse of food banks is a problem, and it looks like we agree that it is not an easy problem to solve. That is especially true of a problem which has been created by well-meaning people trying to solve a different problem.

Eggspurt points to the real but difficult approach – community and coaching. However, that approach seems to have worked best as part of a society which had moral standards (often religious) to go along with the distribution of aid to the deserving.

It is fascinating that the nominally-communist government of China has nothing comparable to the SNAP program, and yet does not seem to have a problem with starving people nor with the issues we are discussing here. Since we in the US have given up on community standards, perhaps the issue of abuse of food banks is one with which we will simply have to live?

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