Month: January 2026

Food Pantries and Food Safety

I once met a food pantry volunteer who told me that at their pantry, they checked the quality of donations of milk by opening one container and drinking it. If it tasted okay, the donation was put through.

There are a million things wrong with this strategy. The one I can’t get over is that pantries rarely get large donations of the same product, which means that you can’t assume it all has the same expiration date or even comes from the same source. Tasting one carton tells you nothing useful, and I can’t figure out how this would ever be considered an appropriate strategy.

Many food pantries depend on donations from stores that are made because products are at or past their expiration date. This means that we carry the burden of ensuring all the food we distribute is safe to consume.

It’s important to remember that many people experiencing food insecurity also lack access to affordable healthcare, which means getting sick from food pantry food could be catastrophic.

Besides offering real health risks, distributing unsafe food demonstrates a profound disrespect for the people we are supposed to be uplifting. The responsibility is not one to be taken lightly.

The challenge is that few pantries have enough food to serve their community, which increases the temptation to distribute questionable items.

While there are clear requirements about how to manage food safety in donation programs, food pantries also don’t always have the infrastructure or training necessary to maintain it.

At one of the first food pantries I worked at, our refrigeration was limited to three regular sized refrigerators while regularly serving over 100 households. I spent many winter days with the warehouse door open to chill the items that didn’t fit in the fridges. This is not how this should be done, but illustrates the impossible situation we put food justice organizations in.

It’s important to appreciate just how hard it is for food pantries to maintain food quality while depending on inadequate infrastructure, insufficient resources, and an absence of training.

This is why food safety training needs to be an ongoing priority for all staff and volunteers.

Volunteers often do not receive adequate food safety training because staff may not have the time or the knowledge themselves. Many volunteers come to food pantries with a primary goal of reducing food waste– which often translates into trying to distribute as much as possible and discarding as little as they can. An unintentional consequence of this goal is that they may distribute foods that are no longer safe to consume.

How food pantries can foster food safety:

  • Don’t be afraid to say no to a donation you don’t think is safe. I once had a manager with a fear of confrontation, which means my team found ourselves regularly throwing out unsafe donations so that we didn’t risk offending the donor. This is a waste of time, energy, and resources. If a donor is only giving you garbage, there’s no value in the relationship anyways.
  • Host regular food safety trainings for your volunteers. When I worked at a regional food bank, we had a volunteer shift sorting fresh donations that included a ten minute orientation on food safety standards that we shared with every single shift. It was boring and repetitive, but also essential for keeping our food supply safe and helping volunteers become better-informed consumers. Normalize sharing it so often that your regular volunteers can recite along with you. They’ll be more likely to help teach new volunteers and maintain appropriate standards.
  • Empower your staff to take more advanced food safety training courses than just getting their food handlers card. Consider what other advanced certifications are out there, and see what options there are to take regular or ongoing trainings, instead of just when their cards expire.
  • Don’t be afraid to advertise your infrastructure needs. Encourage donors to contribute to your refrigerator fund or help with the purchase of a three-compartment sink instead of the food purchasing fund. Brainstorm ways that you can navigate the space and resources available to help your team be more effective based on the types of donations that you regularly receive, or that you’re trying to get more of.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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Preparing for the Next Hunger Crisis

With the end of the year comes planning for the one to come, and this year most anti-hunger organizations are preparing for a much more difficult next twelve months.

With cuts to SNAP, purchasing restrictions, implementation of new eligibility requirements, and the expiration of ACA subsidies leading to higher healthcare costs, many, many more people are going to face hunger in 2026.

Frustratingly, the chronic nature of hunger and perishability of foods means that it’s incredibly difficult to preempt it in the food banking system.

In a perfect world, we’d take the policy steps necessary to prevent it by ensuring people have money to buy what they need and that healthy food is accessible to everyone.

The next best option would be to ensure that food pantries and food banks have an abundant support so that they don’t ever have to send someone away hungry.

Tragically, most anti-hunger advocates have access to none of these options. But that doesn’t mean that we must just sit back and wait for the coming crisis. There are still steps that we can take to preemptively fight hunger and make our communities stronger. Effective action demands that we recognize the complexity of hunger and acknowledge that it does not exist in a silo.

Food insecurity is not really about the cost of food or the absence of the resources to pay for it.

It’s about the health of individuals and communities, both physical, economic, and social, and what resources are made available to them. Hunger is no accident.  

Most importantly, hunger is not something that we can manage individually. The only way we can successfully fight it is through coalition building with traditional and unconventional partners.

What can anti-hunger organizations do to fight hunger without food:

  • Connect with organizations who can provide support on health insurance. Health insurance is a confusing monster. I can’t pretend to understand how it all works, and I also don’t have the time (or patience!) That’s why it’s so important to seek out people and organizations who understand the details and can offer resources and empathy to individuals who face astronomically rising costs or having to go without it altogether.

Instead of waiting for the deluge of phone calls, start researching today who can be on your support team. Find shareable links or the phone numbers of real human beings. With costs doubling or more, it means people will have to choose between eating or having health insurance, which leaves them less healthy overall and vulnerable to emergencies.

  • Make friends with your local housing advocates. Housing security is closely tied to many other factors, and keeping people safely housed can help them weather significant other challenges. Housing resources are highly localized and almost as confusing as health insurance, but most big cities will have several organizations specializing in housing support. They are likely also overwhelmed but can hopefully still offer opportunities for information sharing and collaboration that can benefit you and the people you serve.
  • Connect with local schools. While they’re just as strapped for funding as any food pantry, they offer enormous access to children and local families, compelling opportunities for storytelling, and motivated advocates. Maybe they’ve already got teams engaged around school lunches or a backpack program, and there may be opportunities for collaboration or expansion. Anti-hunger issues are too often managed alone, but now is the time to eliminate those barriers.

I confess that I don’t have good feelings about 2026 overall. However, I find solace in the knowledge that there are so many people doing anti-hunger work right now driven by passion, empathy, and fierce determination. Every day, I see incredible innovation, experimentation, and a willingness to think outside the box that we haven’t previously harnessed in this field.

This is exhausting work, but I’m excited and honored to be among peers committed to ensuring all our neighbors are nourished with compassion and dignity.

The opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.

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