Op-Ed: America’s Charitable Food System Is Missing the Most Important Ingredient
By Daniel Leckie
America’s fight against hunger has long centered on one question: Are people getting enough food?
That narrow focus is no longer enough — and thankfully, the federal government is starting to take action. The U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Agriculture (USDA) just invested millions of dollars in an initiative to expand access to protein-rich foods nationwide.
That investment couldn’t come at a more critical time. Staple protein-rich foods, like beef, seafood, and dairy, are among the most expensive items in Americans’ grocery carts.
Millions of households have turned to the charitable food system for assistance. But there, too, protein is missing. That should concern us all: as nutrition insecurity deepens, it fuels a parallel crisis in chronic disease.
Roughly 50 million Americans rely on charitable food assistance every year. And that number is likely to rise: recently passed legislation will cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding by 20% over the next decade, affecting benefits for more than 22 million families.
As the need for charitable food support grows, the system will have to evolve if it’s to provide the nutrient most essential for satiety, muscle development, metabolic stability, and healthy aging.
The issue isn’t a lack of supply. America produces an abundance of eggs, dairy, beef, pork, and poultry. The problem is that our charitable infrastructure was never built to move perishable protein efficiently at scale.
Animal protein requires specialized refrigeration, coordinated transportation, and predictable purchasing systems. Right now, cold storage capacity varies widely across the pantry network.
Most food banks were designed around donated, shelf-stable products because they’re easier to store, transport, and distribute. As a result, highly processed foods flow through the system far more consistently than fresh, nutrient-dense proteins.
Today, three in four American adults are overweight or obese. Nearly one in three teenagers already has prediabetes. These conditions are particularly prevalent in the communities that rely most heavily on charitable food assistance.
It’s time to reexamine how we think about food access. For decades, nutrition programs and hunger efforts have focused on general food security. That focus must expand to include nutrition security: pairing caloric quantity with nutritional quality, so that families can obtain diets that are both satiating and healthy.
At HATCH, the nonprofit I lead, we see the need every day. Food banks are explicitly requesting eggs, ground beef, milk, and cheese. Families want real, whole foods; the obstacle is purely a matter of access. And that access gap can be overcome with targeted infrastructure investment, coordinated purchasing systems, and long-term public-private partnerships capable of moving protein predictably across the country.
If we are serious about reducing chronic disease, improving childhood nutrition, and supporting healthier communities, protein access must be at the center of the national conversation. America already produces enough protein to solve this problem; now we need the collective will — and the right partners — to deliver it.
Daniel Leckie is the CEO at HATCH, a nutrition-focused nonprofit that connects protein producers, food banks, and donors to build a reliable supply chain for animal protein. For more information, visit hatchforhunger.com. This piece originally ran in Newsweek.