A USDA program gives food that stores won’t sell a second chance

Volunteers are packing up meals in the production hall at the Northern Illinois Food Bank — about an hour west of Chicago.

The majority of food banks across the country, including this one, report increased demand. In 2022, 13% of U.S. families said that they were food insecure at some point in the year.

“Right now we're working really hard on our holiday meal box program, getting about 50,000 traditional holiday meals out our food pantries,” said Jacob Lamplough, the food bank’s interim director of food procurement and donor development manager.

Over the past few years, the Northern Illinois Food Bank has been able to provide a lot more local produce to residents. They’ve received 400,000 pounds of food that otherwise would have nowhere to go.

“The peaches are the big one, we've had apples, and then we've even had things like squash and a bunch of different peppers,” he said.

That additional food has all been through Farm to Food Bank, a federally-funded program that’s currently in 28 states, including Illinois. It focuses on food farmers can’t sell to supermarkets because it has a blemish, a weird shape or just isn’t the right size. Before the program, such food often rotted away on farms, because there was no market for them.