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Feeding American Food Bank Essay

Decent Essays

Have you ever donated food to a local food bank? If you haven’t or don’t know what a food bank is, I am hoping that you will by the end of this paper. Did you know food banks have their own type of a free market? While reading this article, Sending potatoes to Idaho, I discovered many interesting facts about food banks that I didn’t know. I have learned what a free market is and how foodbanks have been able to apply this economic principle to run more efficiently. Before 2005, Feeding America food banks would just keep what was donated to them or new donations went to the food banks that had been waiting for a long time. This method of collecting and distributing food seemed to work, but they didn’t consider what certain food banks needed. …show more content…

Up until this point, they were running on a system where only a few main people made the decisions. Switching the market made it so food banks could make decisions, and there were more than two or three people that made all the decisions. At first it didn’t go over well. Many people liked the old system. A lot of them argued that it was better off as a socialist system, but once people fully understood the system, it caught on quickly. A free market is a system that basically allows the voluntary exchanges of food or items to occur as needed. The law of supply and demand is more of what runs the market rather than the government. In this case, a free market in a food bank is ran by the supply of food that is donated and the demand of food that people need in certain areas. This method of distributing food was drastically different than the previously method used by food …show more content…

They are also able to barter items. Bartering is when someone trades goods or services that they have for goods or services they need. By bartering, then can negotiate equal values of goods or services to trade. For example, if a food bank has extra canned goods, they can barter with another food bank that has excess fresh produce. There are food banks all over the United States, and they each can grow or specialize in different things. This variety is critical to the free market system being used by the food banks. This way everyone sort of shares what they have, and it gets distributed equally. Feeding America started its own market and they made their own type of currency. Making your own currency is difficult because there are many factors that you must consider. How are they supposed to decide who gets how much, or how do they make it so the prices can fluctuate and have the price level remain somewhat stable? Switching over to a free market system came with a lot of those questions, but for the most part everyone seems to like the system. They have had no major problems with the new

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