Why Food Banks Can't Fix Hunger

SNAP, the federal food benefit once called food stamps, reached about 41.7 million people each month from October 2023 through September 2024. That's close to one in eight Americans. SNAP arrives as money on a card and is spent like cash at the checkout, so it also brings business to local grocers. The USDA estimates that in a weak economy, every new dollar of SNAP generates about $1.50 of economic activity.

Even so, the benefit is thin. At the end of 2024, the largest SNAP benefit didn't cover the cost of modestly priced meals in 99 percent of counties. It fell about $53 a person short each month. A 2025 law lets the formula behind that benefit rise only with inflation. The same law cut SNAP off for refugees, people granted asylum and some other immigrants who are here legally, and it widened the three-month work rule. Enrollment has fallen since: the USDA's preliminary count for July 2026 is 36.1 million people (data as of October 9, 2026), down about 13 percent in a year. To see who is coming off SNAP, read Who Loses SNAP Now.

Food banks and pantries are what most of us picture when we think of fighting hunger, and where most donations go. They matter, but next to SNAP they're small. Feeding America, the national network of about 200 food banks, puts it in one ratio: for every meal its food banks provide, SNAP provides nine.

The ratio cuts both ways. It means the food bank is doing a lot of good, and that SNAP, a public program most donors never think to thank, does nine times as much. It also means the tenth cannot become the whole. Ask the food bank to replace SNAP and you're asking it to grow roughly tenfold, out of donations, on short notice. That does not happen, and acting as though it might is how people end up with empty cupboards.

When the federal government shut down on October 1, 2025, November SNAP payments were thrown into doubt for about 1.35 million North Carolinians. Western North Carolina braced. MANNA FoodBank, already seeing close to 200,000 pantry visits a month, watched demand climb about 15 percent in October as families prepared for the pause. It expanded its food-purchasing budget by 200 percent to try to meet what was coming. A MANNA "Food for All" event in Asheville gave food to more than 1,800 households.

From late October into late November, Buncombe County held a food drive, with bins at every library branch. People gave generously. By the middle of November the drive had pulled in more than 8,540 pounds of food, which the county counted as roughly 7,000 meals, and it was still going.

By the county's own count, about 29,000 Buncombe residents relied on SNAP during the pause, with benefits averaging $171 a person a month. That adds up to somewhere near $5 million in grocery money flowing into the county every month (a rough figure, 29,000 times $171). A weeks-long drive across an entire county had raised roughly 7,000 meals. Even several times that wouldn't come close to one month of SNAP benefits in Buncombe. The drive was fast, real, and admirable. It was still a rounding error next to the benefit it was being asked to replace. That is not a failure of the food drive. It is the ratio, showing up in one county.

The pause didn't last. In North Carolina, partial November benefits went out on November 7. At 43 days, the shutdown was the longest government-wide one in the country's history. When the government reopened, full benefits in North Carolina followed within days. For the weeks the pause ran, though, people in Western North Carolina saw clearly what happens when SNAP payments are held up: the food bank can't stretch to cover the gap, however hard it strains.

Later donations showed the same limit. In June 2026, more than 4,000 gallons of milk, given by Ingles shoppers and matched by the company's own dairy plant, moved through MANNA to pantries across the western counties. Days later, a settlement over egg prices promised about 3 million eggs to food banks across North Carolina. The state attorney general had reached that settlement along with 16 other states and the Justice Department. Milk is one of the most requested items at pantries and often harder for food banks to get than canned and boxed food, so the gifts were welcome and they mattered. But a donation like that lands once. It can't become a regular grocery budget the way a monthly benefit can.

During the pandemic, SNAP benefits were temporarily raised through emergency allotments. When those extra payments ended in March 2023 across the 35 states and territories still paying them, researchers tracked what came next. A study in Health Affairs found that food hardship rose among people on SNAP there within months. An earlier study looked at the 18 states that ended the payments sooner. Applied to the whole country, its results would mean roughly 2 million more Americans without enough to eat. Food banks and pantries did not make up the difference, because they could not. We walk through both studies in When the Aid Stops.

The national food budget shortfall is the extra money food-insecure households say they'd need to buy enough food. It comes to about $33.7 billion a year, roughly $23 a week for each food-insecure person. That's the size of the hole. It's a number for the federal budget, not for charities, and a job that size takes SNAP.

A food bank can feed people tonight. Hurricane Helene drowned MANNA's warehouses on the Swannanoa River in September 2024. Within a week the food bank was moving into a Mills River warehouse it was already buying. Even then, the charity was what kept food going out the door while the government was still gearing up. In a disaster, no federal program can act that fast.

A food bank also catches the people the federal program misses. SNAP has income limits. By Feeding America's modeled estimates, nearly half of the people facing hunger nationally may have incomes too high to qualify for it. North Carolina sets SNAP's gross income limit for most households at 200 percent of the poverty line, the highest any state uses. By the same estimates, about 40 percent of the people facing hunger in North Carolina may have incomes too high to qualify. The household that earns too much for SNAP and far too little for groceries has nowhere to go but the pantry. That's a real job, and a permanent one, and it belongs to the food bank.

And a food bank does things a benefit card can't. It puts a person across a table from a neighbor, helps with the SNAP application and the renewal paperwork, and knows which holler lost its only grocery. Still, MANNA's chief executive is blunt: philanthropy cannot replace government support, and the food bank cannot make up the difference when the benefit is taken away. When we say the food bank can't end hunger, we mean it's doing one job well and being handed a second one that was never its to carry.