I began working in the food banking industry five years ago, just wrapping up training when the pandemic hit — and boy, did it hit. We serve a region where the cost of living dramatically outpaces the average person’s wages, so the leviathan of the paycheck-to-paycheck community was suddenly exposed and without a life vest. People were scared. Our services needed to effectively double overnight.
Everyone wanted to know what was going on in real time: How many people were showing up to distributions? How much food did we need? How much food did we have? What about homebound seniors? What about kids home from school with working parents?
Our marketing manager at the time was on top of it, flitting like a hummingbird from department to department to get the most up-to-the-minute facts and figures, to demonstrate the stunning magnitude of food going out of our warehouse doors.
We had many people to inform and thank, and data told the story. Data was king. Data became a central part of my job, both our internal service statistics and the available data in the social and economic landscape: poverty rates, living wage estimates, the gaps between federal assistance programs and real life conditions.
Five years later, and data has seemed to take even more central place in our world. Funders want to understand what communities have the highest rates of food insecurity, and how we are measuring need. They want to understand the demographic breakdown of the thousands of individuals we serve: where they live, their age, their gender, their race, how often they come for help. They also want to know that our nutrition programs are achieving their intended results, and rightfully so.
The data-centric zeitgeist presents us with the challenge of answering new questions that were taken for granted in the past: Does giving someone food automatically make them less hungry?
To be clear, I am certainly not criticizing or blaming those who want to ensure results are being achieved when they give an organization large sums of money. This is both reasonable and responsible. There are many tangible things we can account for in the food banking world, but a conundrum we are facing — one of many — is this: How much should we attempt to measure? How much should we ask the people we serve about how they feel about getting food, and how it’s affecting their lives? And how can we demonstrate to our community the intangible, incalculable long-term benefits of introducing people to whole foods, nutritional knowledge, and the opportunity to learn food-related skills?
But how exactly do we measure, can we measure, the downstream effect of gaining a skill or an experience? How do we measure the effect of a third grader attending the Kid’s Farmers Market program after school, where she tries broccoli for the first time because the boy she likes dared her to, and now it’s part of her repertoire of foods for the rest of her life?
The Foodbank isn’t just in the business of food, which is measured in pounds, meals, calories, cans, boxes or bags. We’re also in the business of health, which is infinitely more complicated. It’s the most important thing in the world, and yet it is impossible to measure: What makes a person healthy?
It seems simple, but it’s not. Ask yourself: How do I measure my own health? Is it simply the absence of active illness and lower back pain? Is it my blood pressure, my lung capacity, how I feel when I catch a glimpse of myself in a dressing room mirror? (Dear God, let’s hope not.) Is it my mental well-being, my mobility and ease of life’s daily activities, the health of my gut microbiome, enjoying the simple pleasures of regular BMs and a good night’s sleep?
The answer is of course, all of it, and more. Health is an intrinsic, internal scoresheet of a thousand little things, all stacked up to put you together, to bring you enjoyment of living and peace of mind. Just as the innumerous benefits of health can’t be measured, health itself simply can’t be reduced to a statistic or a study.
I am relentlessly — if not foolishly — hopeful that our country’s attitude about food and health is shifting for the better. While some are embracing a futuristic view of food (full meals in pill form, anyone?), others are glancing backward to the simple wisdom of our grandparents: to eat real foods, to cook from scratch, and to enjoy the slower rhythms of putting good food in a more central place in our lives.
I’ll never forget reading in one of Michael Pollan’s books that 20 percent of American meals are eaten in our cars. There’s a stat that should give us pause. I know that for many this is simply a matter of necessity. Modern life is busy. Work days are long. Kid-chauffeuring can take up an entire evening. Drive-thrus and microwave meals present an irresistibly convenient shortcut. But we can glance back at the last 30 years of this cultural norm and we can measure its consequences. We’re paying for it with our health and with our lives.
At the Foodbank, we’ll never know exactly how many lives we’ve changed. We’ll never be able to compile a database of every person who smiled a sigh of relief when they opened their fridge, or how many drive-thrus were surpassed, or every third grader that now eats broccoli. We can’t see it, but we don’t need to. We know the value of what can’t be measured.
