Feed the hungry or feed political ads?

[Angrboda]

Totally not where I'm at.  I'm suggesting a way to make the most out of our dollars toward a particular goal.  It's universally true that food banks capacity to hold and deliver is limited by just that one thing all over the world.  Lack of adequate refrigeration. This means that they already have more product, but they can't distribute it.  It means that they can only distribute a specific range -of- products.  It's a thing to consider if you spend any money and know other people who do or can find a food bank that would be interested.  That's all.

I think that a deeply emotional attachment to the issue, produced from experience like yours, might be a requirement to solving the larger issue of hunger.  There's going to come some point or moment where any dollar spent towards preventing people from starving one way ends up starving someone else another.  This isn't some hypothetical system where a rational consistency towards a singular end can be maintained or discovered.  It;s the real world where we can be constrained to exclusively bad options and inherently contradictory policies.  Spending the dollars will not make sense, at some point, and that point will come before we eradicate hunger.  We'll just be shuffling around those final margins.

People who have ever felt hunger or who can feel for people who feel hunger are needed to get the thing rolling, and at some point, they'll be needed again to push it over the line.

I think you need to consider the human element as well. People are more likely to engage in charitable action that is more accessible and for which they can generate a strong emotional reason for doing. Donating a bag of groceries hits both, whereas donating money toward the purchase of a refrigeration unit doesn't. One might decry the irrationality of preferring the first to the last, but that difference has an effect on behavior. So discouraging immediate, accessible giving in favor of more effective but less immediate solutions might in fact worsen the problem of food insecurity, rather than help it.