WIC provides food for pregnant women and infants. The school lunch program covers the breakfast & lunch of pre-school and school age kids (and some schools are extending this to non-school days and summer vacations). Meals-on-wheels delivers all 3 meals to the elderly. And greatest of all EBT cards (food-stamps) are now covering 46 million.
Who is left who actually needs "food pantries" to feed them? How are these "food pantries" not also being scammed by those taking the food and/or scams of those running them?
Here in NJ we have a large population that until recently was well-off, that is now unable to pay their bills. Most probably don’t qualify for welfare etc., but are in very real danger of losing their homes.
For the most part, food pantries do not check whether the person coming in grabbing food is actually "needy". So you have middle-class scammers grabbing food there, so as to have more disposable income for other things.
You also have people on Food Stamps going to the pantries, getting most of their staples there, then using their food stamp allotment for steak and lobster (which they can sell). I would not be surprised that there are a number of cooks/housekeepers working for the wealthy "off the books", who do shopping for their employers, paying for it via food stamps, and pocketing the cash their employers give them for shopping.