Can government investment in food pantries decrease food insecurity?

About 10% of Americans are food insecure, lacking consistent access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle. One way that the federal government seeks to reduce food insecurity is by investing in charitable food providers, such as food banks and pantries. This paper highlights a limitation on the potential effects of these investments on food insecurity: some communities have more charitable food providers than others. We support this claim with an analysis of the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, a U.S. COVID-19 program which distributed about 175 million boxes of food worth $9 billion to food pantries from May 2020 to May 2021. Consistent with our expectations, we find that food was targeted primarily to food insecure counties, but that counties with high rates of food insecurity that lack many food pantries received significantly less food than counties with equally high rates of food insecurity but more food pantries. Moving forward, policymakers should focus on providing direct aid to those in need, and on building a charitable food system rather than only investing more resources in the existing system.