During the first year of the pandemic, I put out a few rolls of toilet paper in my Little Free Library. I found myself adding more and more, until one day, I realized I was running a free pantry. People kept showing up, asking for food and supplies. Soon there was a fridge, too, with a sketchy extension cord running back to the house to keep it powered.
I didn’t know it at the time, but our family would run this pantry for more than a year, providing fresh vegetables, herbs, meat and dairy to our downtown Las Vegas community. Neighbors often wanted to chip in and help. They asked what the pantry needed.
I rattled off the most popular things. “Bread. Milk. Cheeses. Meats. Greek yogurt. Eggs. Fish. Condiments. Canned Meats. Vegetables. All the damned vegetables. Salad-y things. Oil. Butter. Salt.”
“Fresh,” I added. “Things that people can cook easily and that will make them feel good.”
But I was new at this and naive about pantries and what they could and couldn’t give the community. For a while, I controlled what went inside the pantry. I’m a food writer by trade and a cook, and I had this vision for how the food would be and what we could do.
This vision changed quickly.
Turns out, the Clark county school district, the fifth largest in the country, was handing out lunches and breakfasts at the elementary school down the street. They dumped all their leftovers in the pantry every day.
At first, this seemed like a great thing. The more food, the better to feed people. Right?
They left tacos and burritos wrapped in cellophane, chicken sandwiches with lettuce and quesadillas. These packaged foods can provide important calories for kids and families living in places where people can’t cook, like motels. These meals nourish folks living in their cars or managing active eviction, or those with busted kitchens or pantries overrun by vermin and roaches. Yes, it was convenience food, but it fed people who needed something to be easy in already-hard lives.
This plastic-wrapped food is not what bothered me. It was the packaged chips and sugary snacks that unnerved me. I opened the doors of the pantry to find bag after bag of Doritos stuffed into the pantry; boxes of single-serve Corn Pops and Frosted Flakes; little cartons of chocolate milk stacked in the fridge; and countless chocolate Pop-Tarts and frosted doughnuts.
How was this coming from a school?
This food got a swift reaction from my youngest kids, my nine-year-old son, Raffi, and my five-year-old daughter, Desi, who both came to us from foster care. Raffi had experienced a lot of food scarcity with his biological family and was ravenous for sugar and processed foods. The pantry was a Hieronymus Bosch-level cornucopia of things he wanted to inhale, an orgy of dyes, synthetic flavorings, chemicals that created texture and satisfying smells, a storm of sugar, aspartame and cruddy oils. Such substances can disrupt metabolism at a cellular level, but they taste like a chemicalized fever dream to a kid who craves food in compulsive ways.
He was beyond thrilled!
At about 3.45pm each day, the house grew eerily quiet. Raffi and Desi would disappear to the front yard, little urgent faces pushed up against the door glass of the fridge, looking for treasure. For the longest time, my husband, David, and I controlled the type of foods Raffi could snack on at home. Now, all of that was out the window, and he could access junk food constantly.
So how did all that junk food get into the school and pantry food system? And what did it mean that kids could eat all this sugary food in their elementary school?
In December 2010 under the Obama administration, Congress enacted the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. This legislation provided for more fruits and vegetables in school meal programs, a focus on whole grains and a lot fewer starchy vegetables and trans-fat laden foods. This legislation also required federal nutrition standards for all “competitive foods” sold in school stores and vending machines and used in fundraising campaigns. They compete with federally funded meal programs for kids’ attention and dollars. Because these foods are branded, under this legislation they are required to meet certain nutritional requirements. In response, some food companies rejiggered ingredients just enough to add “whole grain” to their packaging.
Things went downhill from there. Congress caved to lobbying in 2014, allowing schools to serve high-salt french fries and pizza sold by these companies. Again, big food lobbied hard and legislators pulled back on restrictions for sodium levels, flavored milks and amounts of refined grains. It got even more slippery during the Trump administration.
But perhaps the real culprit is how we think of education. We in the United States seem to believe that the cafeteria is not the classroom, that education is unconnected to food and how we eat.
Instead, our kids are at the mercy of the companies and brands inundating them: Tyson, General Mills, Kraft, Heinz and many others. These companies are teaching taste preferences with packaged and nutritionally deficient foods at earlier and earlier ages. That kind of marketing makes lifelong consumers and brand loyalty for generations. We know that before the pandemic began, the overwhelming majority of US schools offered branded foods during or around mealtimes, and that this is worth $20bn in preference-setting profits for the food industry. These businesses have a huge stake in fighting any kind of legislation that would turn this back. And our kids and their health suffer.
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At our pantry, the most egregiously offending food product was Raisels. Think naturally sweet raisins (dried fruit tends to have a lot of natural sugar) dipped in sour-dust candy. The school dropped cases of them off to the pantry. Sold as a competitive food, Raisels come in flavors like “Watermelon Shock” and “Lemon Blast”. They are on the list for approved snacks in our school system.
One 47g box of Raisels can contain up to 31 grams of sugar, much of it processed. Consider that an orange has 9-14 grams of natural sugars (and of course, this affects the body differently than processed sugar). Raisels were the subject of a huge controversy in Denver schools back in 2016, where they were famously served in their breakfast program to elementary students. The Raisels were used as a fresh fruit stand-in. They were served to kids with a box of fruit juice (more sugar) and graham crackers (sugar on top of sugar).
You know the food system is in disarray when smart, educated school professionals decide it’s OK to use candy as a substitute for fresh fruit. And hunger-relief organizations often play a huge hand in helping this preference-setting to happen.
Pantries and food banks get in bed with corporate food companies because they don’t want to lose access to large quantities of foods and beverages that fill people up. That these products are unhealthy is a secondary or tertiary concern. Food banks and pantries are not always meeting the nutritional profiles of the people they serve, particularly people who are struggling with diabetes, obesity and decades of poor eating. This is compounded by many communities’ marginalization from the healthcare system. This lack of access has severe and lasting health ramifications for deeply impoverished people; longtime pantry users; and Black, Latino, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ folks.
This is part of the reason I wrote The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City, a book about what people are cooking and eating when they’re faced with poverty, incarceration, mental illness, family separation due to child protective services and addiction. I wrote about how the foods you eat, cook and buy depend a lot on how much money you make, how high your rent is, how able-bodied and stressed you are, how many hours you work, how many kids you have, how many people you care for and the kinds of work you do.
When I spoke to people who depend on pantries for long-term sustenance, they told me about their preferences for branded foods. One woman, named Amara, told me that sugary cereals and cookies were her mainstay.
“I know how they will taste, the same every time,” she told me, “and I crave the sugar.”
In a 2020 study from the University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health, lead author Kristen Cooksey Stowers noted that long-term pantry users “have significantly greater odds of being burdened by both food insecurity and obesity when compared” with temporary users – and that food banks feared what would happen if they turned down large corporate donations of unhealthy food and beverages.
Our lifestyle determines what we eat. And big food is all over it, hoping to make a buck.
While the pandemic raged, and the pantry continued to serve people, a team of us cooked meals for the families who came to the pantry. One day, I was taking down the hachiya persimmons I had hung to dry into a kind of natural candy. The little orange globes hung via kitchen string from the lattice overhead. We had planned salads for the pantry with these persimmons, goat cheese, fried pumpkin seeds and a light vinaigrette.
I offered Desi a slice, cut with a small jack knife. The slices were sweet, chewy and dense, our special treat. She refused.
“I like Raisels,” she said, and left the kitchen.
