Ending Hunger by Eliminating Food Banks?

Mark Winne, former director of Connecticut's Hartford Food System, is among the most highly regarded anti-hunger advocates in the country. So hopefully people have been and will continue to pay special attention to his November Washington Post opinion piece, "When Handouts Keep Coming, the Food Line Never Ends." Winne argues that "The cycle of need -- always present, rarely sated, never resolved -- will continue...Unless we rethink our devotion to food donation." Winne's main argument is that food banks and food distribution as a response to hunger actually perpetuates hunger, both by creating "troubling" co-dependency (e.g. between volunteers and the need) and distracting energy that might otherwise be targeted towards ending poverty by demanding "a living wage, health care for all and adequate employment and child-care programs."

I think there's certainly a lot to be said for Winne's courageous editorial, but one thing that he doesn't clearly address is how we address trade-offs between addressing hunger right now and ending hunger in a sustainable way? Surely there is some trade-off and Winne doesn't want an immediate end to the provision of food to those who are hungry today and will not eat a nutritious Christmas meal because of a Food Stamp expansion two years from now. Our tendency to focus on our urgent, deep psychological impulse to help those suffering in the present often prevents us from acting to end root causes of suffering. This phenomenon isn't unique to economic deprivation. The same could be said of aspects of the Bush Administration's response vis-a-vis Iraq to the horrific and unjustified attacks against American on September 11, 2001. The same could be said of many fixes proposed to our health care system. And the same could be said of countless other problems we face individually and collectively. In many ways, it is often a strategic decision to focus on the urgent versus the root cause (e.g. focusing on an urgent problem might help build support for focusing on the longer term problem). Nevertheless, at least with regard to hunger, Winne rightfully points out the pitfall of how we might be deceiving ourselves into thinking we are addressing a problem when we may actually be delaying a genuine solution.