We hope all of our U.S. readers enjoyed a happy Thanksgiving yesterday. Today we’re sharing a guest post from our Assistant Editor Caroline Sutton on an innovative system for getting donated food to the places it’s needed most.

One of Susannah Morgan’s early memories from her years running the Food Bank of Alaska involves a truckload of pickles she never wanted. Not jars of pickles, either — five-gallon buckets. Accepting them meant paying $5,000 to ship that heavy load across the Gulf of Alaska. Rejecting them meant losing her place in line and waiting who-knows-how-long to be offered another donation from Feeding America, a clearinghouse that collects surplus food from grocery stores, producers, and farms and routes it through a national network of food banks like hers. In that moment, she was forced to choose between wasting scarce resources or wasting scarce opportunities.

For decades, this was simply how the largest charitable food network in the United States functioned.

Food banks waited their turn. A donor offered the central clearinghouse whatever he happened to have on hand. And each food bank, equipped with imperfect information, faced the same narrow question when it finally reached the front of the line: yes or no? Either take the pickles or fall to the bottom of the list. Either pay to ship something they sort of wanted, or save scarce resources in the hopes something more useful would be available later.

The entire system relied on generosity, and it did receive immense generosity, but lacked any of the institutional structure that would allow that generosity to turn into something bigger. Morgan told me the old system created a “scarcity mindset,” in which food banks compared their luck with everyone else’s and quietly resented the randomness. At one point she had been desperately requesting frozen chicken for months, only to get a call announcing: “Good news — we finally got you chicken. Bad news — it’s in Alabama.” She was sitting in Anchorage at the time. Under the old rules, she either had to send a truck across the continent or lose her place in line. “Nobody does their best work in a scarcity mindset,” she said. It was a system powered by goodwill but governed by guesswork.

Twenty years ago, Feeding America decided to try something different. And the story of that experiment begins at the University of Chicago, which is not where you might instinctively look for anti-hunger policy ideas, but is a place unusually well equipped to think about allocation problems.

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Building a better food bank

In the early 2000s, the charity brought in Chicago business school professors — including economist Canice Prendergast, operations expert Donald Eisenstein, and organizational behavior scholar Harry Davis — to help figure out how to allocate donated food across more than 200 food banks in a way that reflects real needs, real preferences, and real constraints. Feeding America was facing one of the classic dilemmas of public policy: how to match scarce resources to competing priorities fairly, efficiently, and predictably.

What struck the economists was the absence of information. Food banks had no way to express what they valued, no view of what was available, and no means to coordinate across regions. Some were excellent at logistics. Others had deep relationships with donors. Others had neither advantage. Yet all were trying to serve their communities under enormous pressure.

The Chicago team proposed something that, at the time, sounded like an odd choice for a charitable network: a market, complete with a custom-designed currency called “shares.” Every food bank would receive an allotment of shares based on how many people it served. Those shares could then be used to bid on truckloads of food in a daily national auction.

If a food bank desperately needed cereal, it could signal that by bidding more. If it already had enough cereal but urgently needed rice, it could save its shares for that instead. If something undesirable arrived — like potato chips or, true story, Tupperware lids missing their containers — the auction assigned it a negative price: taking it earned you extra shares.

It was a system designed to convert preferences (information each food bank had about its community’s needs) into visible, actionable signals. Prendergast describes this as the price discovery function of markets: the mechanism that reveals “how much you like a certain kind of food compared to another kind of food.” The bidding activity quickly revealed patterns no centralized planner could have seen.

Cereal, for instance, wasn’t just more valuable than broccoli; it was dramatically more valuable. The economists had assumed maybe a 6:1 ratio in preference intensity. The auction showed a ratio closer to 35:1.

Produce, which is perishable and already abundant in the donation pipeline, often cleared at nearly zero shares. Shelf-stable foods like pasta, rice, and canned goods drew consistently high bids. Potato chips, which are low in nutrients and break easily during transport, were so unwanted they routinely required subsidies to move.

And the system changed donor behavior as well. Under the old queue system, donors could wait days for a food bank to accept or reject an item, leaving their warehouses clogged with product they were trying to move quickly. But once 200 food banks were simultaneously able to bid, donations moved immediately. The increased liquidity, as Prendergast put it, made donors more willing to give, and the supply of food moving through the network rose by 50 million pounds in the first year after the new system’s introduction.

Under the old queue, food banks routinely received items that another food bank valued far more — a mismatch the Chicago team saw everywhere. Idaho might be offered yet another truckload of potatoes when its warehouse was already full, while a different food bank hundreds of miles away was desperate for produce. A food bank heavy on dairy but low on dry goods might be offered more milk it couldn’t refrigerate. Fresh produce often arrived close to expiration, meaning that a single misdirected shipment could spoil before anyone could use it. And food-rich banks, the ones with strong donor networks, often had surplus in the categories that food-poor banks lacked. The market allowed all of this to be reshuffled toward higher-value uses. Prices revealed which food banks needed what, and donations flowed accordingly. It was an example of something Slow Boring readers know well: moral impulses matter, but systems are what make moral impulses effective.

Morgan told me the biggest change wasn’t any single donation but the visibility the system gave her. For the first time, she could see what was being donated nationally and how often certain items appeared. She knew what she already had in her warehouse, what it would cost to bring something to Alaska, and what her community actually wanted.

“I had all of this data that the central clearinghouse didn’t have,” she said. “I could use [it] to make good decisions.”

That meant she could plan instead of react. If apples from Seattle were appearing regularly and surviving the trip north, she could save up just a few shares for them and make sure Alaska had fresh fruit for the holidays. If something was unpopular, like Tupperware lids, the system eventually assigned it a negative price, letting food banks earn shares by taking it.

“It was transformational,” she said. “We could actually change our strategy around what food that we purchased, what food that we got through this system, what food that we tried to get through the government systems, in order to make all of that balance better for the people who are experiencing hunger in Alaska.”

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What the future holds

Now, with nearly 20 years of price data behind them, Feeding America is considering whether to evolve the system again. If prices are this stable and predictable, does the network even need an auction? Should they move to something more like a supermarket model, where prices are posted and food banks buy what they want directly, without bidding?

It would be faster, simpler, and more intuitive. But the auction has safeguards that a posted-price system wouldn’t. Right now bids are sealed and only accepted twice a day, which prevents large, well-staffed food banks from hovering over the system and “sniping” high-value loads at the last minute. Share budgets were originally set according to need, so the highest-need food banks entered the market with more purchasing power. And smaller food banks can delegate bids to an employee of Feeding America, where a food bank simply outlines in broad terms its needs to that person, which helps level the playing field. In a shock like this month’s SNAP freeze1 during the shutdown, when demand jumped overnight, a posted-price system could break down into a first-come, first-served rush. The auction, for all its friction, preserves fairness.

This is the eternal challenge of market design: optimizing for both efficiency and equity at once. The Chicago team solved one version of that tradeoff 20 years ago. Now the charitable network is debating the next version.

What stands out most, though, is how impactful the original choice system turned out to be. It took a sector defined by goodwill, volunteerism, and moral urgency and gave it a structure that made those virtues effective. It replaced guesswork with information, rivalry with trust, and improvisation with planning.

Food banks no longer have to choose between shipping pickles and losing their place in line. They can get the things their communities actually need. Donors know their generosity is used well. And families — millions of them — receive more food than they would have otherwise.

Abundance isn’t just about having more. It’s also about making the most of what we already have. And sometimes, that begins with a market, a handful of shares, and the decision to build a better system.

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In Louisville, Kentucky, Cuqita Boyd was charged with DUI after a minor crash in January 2022, despite repeatedly asking for a portable breathalyzer, which the arresting officer did not provide. In a deposition, the officer explained that using breathalyzers "wasn't my thing." Boyd later got a breathalyzer test at the jail, which read 0.0, and a blood draw found no detectable alcohol in her system. Body camera footage shows the officer admitting she did not smell alcohol and that Boyd was not slurring her words, but claiming she was too slow to follow commands. Boyd spent 14 months fighting the charges before they were dismissed. Her family has sued, claiming the prolonged legal ordeal contributed to Boyd's death in May 2025 from high blood pressure complications.

The post Brickbat: What Is This Breathalyzer You Speak of? appeared first on Reason.com.

When the Tofurky research division is working on new alternative protein products, they tend to worry about taste. They tend to worry about appearance. And they tend to worry about texture. 

If they’re making an alternative (i.e. no-animals-were-harmed) turk’y slice, they want to make it look, smell, and taste like the real thing, and they care about proper distribution of fat globules within the alt-slice. 

But here’s a hot take, might even be true: people don’t mainly eat food for the appearance. After all, they would still eat most foods in the dark. They don’t mainly eat foods for the texture, the taste, or even for the distribution of fat globules. People eat food for the nutrition. 

This is why people don’t eat bowls of sawdust mixed with artificial strawberry flavoring, even though we have invented perfectly good artificial strawberry flavoring. You could eat flavors straight up if you wanted to, but people don’t do that. You want ice cream, not cold dairy flavor #14, and you can tell the difference. This is a revealed preference: people don’t show up for the flavors.

A food has the same taste, smell, texture, retronasal olfaction, and general mouthfeel when you start eating it as when you finish. If you were eating for these features, you would never stop. But people do stop eating — just see how far you can get into a jar of frosting. The first bite may be heavenly, but you won’t get very deep. The gustation features of the frosting — taste, smell, etc. — don’t change. You stop eating because you are satisfied.

Assuming you buy this argument, that the real motivation behind eating food is nutrition, then why do people care about flavor (and appearance, and texture, etc.) at all? We’re so glad you asked:

People can detect some nutrients as soon as they hit the mouth: the obvious one is salt. It’s easy to figure out if a food is high in sodium; you just taste it. As a result, it’s easy to get enough salt. You just eat foods that are obviously salty until you’ve gotten enough. 

But other nutrients can’t be detected immediately. If they’re bound up deep within the food and need to be both digested and absorbed, it might take minutes, maybe hours, maybe even longer, before the body registers their presence. To get enough of these nutrients, you need to be able to recognize foods that contain these nutrients, even when you can’t detect them from chewing alone. 

This is where food qualities come in. Taste and texture are signs you learn that help you predict what nutrients are coming down the pipeline. Just like how you learn that thud of a candy bar at the bottom of a vending machine predicts incoming sugar. The sight of a halal van predicts greasy food imminently going down your drunk gullet. How you learn that the sight of the Lays bag means that there is something salty inside, even though you can’t detect salt just from looking at it. You also learn that the taste of lentils means that you will have more iron in your system soon, even if you can’t detect the iron from merely putting the lentils in your mouth.

To give context, this is coming from the model of psychology we described in our book, The Mind in the Wheel. In this model, motivation is the result of many different drives, each trying to maintain some kind of homeostasis, and the systems creating the drives are called governors. In eating behavior, different governors track different nutrients and try to make sure you maintain your levels, hit your micros, get enough of each. 

There’s still a lot we don’t know about this, but to give one example we’re confident about, there’s probably one governor that makes sure you get enough sodium, which is why you add salt to your food. There’s also at least one governor that keeps track of your fat intake, at least one governor clamoring for sugar, probably a governor for potassium. Who knows. 

Governors only care about hitting their goals. Taste and texture are just the signs they use to navigate. And this is where the problem comes in. 

Consider that for all its flaws, turkey is really nutritious. Two slices or 84 grams of turkey contains 29% of the Daily Value (DV) for Vitamin B12, 46% of the DV for Selenium, 49% of the DV for Vitamin B6, and 61% of the DV for Niacin (vitamin B3).

Tofurkey is not. As far as we can tell, it doesn’t contain any selenium or B vitamins. Not clear if it contains zinc or phosphorus either. Maybe this is wrong, but at the very least, it doesn’t appear that Tofurkey are trying to nutrition-match. And that may be the key to why these products are still not very popular. If you try to compete with turkey on taste and texture, but people choose foods based on nutrition, you’re gonna have a problem.

This is just one anecdote, but: our favorite alternative protein is Morningstar Farms vegetarian sausage links. And guess what food product contains 25% DV of vitamin B6, 50% DV of niacin, and 130% DV of vitamin B12 per two links? Outstanding in its field.

In the Vegan War Room

We believe this has strategic implications. So please put on your five-star vegan general hat, as we lead you into your new imagined role as commander of the faithful.

General, as you may be aware, the main way our culture attempts to change behavior is by introducing conflict. We attempt to make people skinny by mocking them, which pits the shame governor against the hunger governors. We control children by keeping them inside at recess or making them stay after class, which pits the governors that make them act up in class against the governors that make them want to run around with their friends. Or we control them by saying, no dessert until you eat your brussel sprouts.

This is an unfortunate holdover from the behaviorists, who once dominated the study of psychology. In behaviorism, you get more of what you reward, and less of what you punish. Naturally when they asked themselves “how to get less of a behavior?” the answer they came up with was “punish!” But this is a fundamentally incomplete picture of psychology. Reward and punishment don’t really exist — motivation is all about governors learning what will increase or decrease their errors. While you can decide to pit governors against each other, this approach has serious limitations. It just doesn’t work all that well. 

First of all, conflict between governors is experienced as anxiety. So while you can change someone’s behaviour by causing conflict, you’ll also make them seriously anxious. This is fine, we guess, if you hate them and want them to feel terrible all the time. But it’s more than a little antisocial. 

Anyone who’s the target of punishment will see what is happening. They don’t want to feel anxious all the time, and they especially don’t want to feel anxious about doing what to them are normal, everyday things. If you try to change their behavior in this way, they will find you annoying and do their best to avoid you, so you can’t create so much conflict inside them. Imagine how much less effective this strategy is, compared to finding a method of convincing that people don’t avoid, or that they might even actively seek out.

On top of this, conflict dies out without constant maintenance. In the short term you can convince people that they will be judged if they have premarital sex, but this lesson will quickly fade, especially if they see people getting busy without consequence. The only way to keep this in check is to run a constant humiliation campaign, where people are reminded that they will be shamed if they ever step out of line. This is expensive, neverending, and, for the obvious reasons, unpopular. Scolding can work in limited ways, but nobody likes a scold.

Many attempts to convince people to become vegan, or even to simply eat less meat, follow this strategy — they try to make people eat less meat by taking the governors that normally vote for meat-eating (several nutritional governors, and perhaps some other governors, like the one for status) and opposing them with some other drive. 

You can tell people that they are bad people for eating meat, you can say that they will be judged, shamed, or ostracized. You can tell them that eating meat is bad for their health or bad for the environment. This might even be true. But just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s motivating. This strategy won’t work all that well. It only causes conflict, because the drives that vote against eating meat will be strenuously opposed by the drives that have always been voting to eat meat to begin with.

But you don’t need to fight your drives. Better to provide a substitute.

No one takes a horse to their dentist appointments anymore. Cars are just vegan carriages; hence “horseless carriage”. We used to kill whales for oil. We don’t do that anymore, and it’s not because people became more compassionate. It’s because whale oil lamps got beat out by better alternatives, like electric lighting. People substitute one good for another when it is either strictly better at satisfying the same need(s), or better in some way — for example, not as good, but much cheaper, or much faster, or much more convenient. 

Whale oil lamps burned bright, but with a disagreeable fishy smell. Imagine if in the early days of alternative lighting, they had tried to give whale oil substitutes like kerosene or electric lights the same fishy smell, imagining that this would make it easier to compete with whale oil. No! They just tried to address the need the whale oil was addressing, namely light, without trying to capture any of the incidental features of whale oil. They offered a superior product, or sometimes one that was inferior but cheaper, and that was enough to do the job. We don’t run whale ships off Nantucket any more. 

So if you want people to eat less meat, if you want more people to become vegan, you shouldn’t roll out alternative turkey, salami, or anything else. You should provide substitutes, competing superior products, that satisfy the same drives without any reference to the original product. Ta-daaaa.

No one eats yogurt because they have an innate disposition for yogurt. Instead, they eat it because yogurt fulfills some of their needs. If they could get those needs met through a different product, they probably would, especially if the alternative is faster / easier / cheaper. 

For the sake of illustration, let’s say that turkey contains just three nutrients, vitamins X, Y, and Z. 

If you make an alternative turkey that matches the real thing in taste and texture, but provides none of the same nutrients, then despite the superficial similarity, you’re not even competing in the same product category. It’s like selling cardboard boxes that look like cars but that can’t actually get you to work — however impressive they might look, they don’t meet the need. People will not be inclined to replace their real turkey with your alternative one, at least not without considerable outside motivation. You will be working uphill.

Making a really close match can actually be counterproductive. If an alternative food looks/tastes/smells very similar to an original food, but it doesn’t contain the same nutrition, this is basically the same as gaslighting your governors. And the better the taste match, the more confusing this is.

Think about it from the perspective of the selenium governor. You’re trying to encourage behaviors that keep you in the green zone on your selenium levels, mostly by predicting which foods will lead to more selenium later. But things have recently become really confusing. About half the time you taste turkey flavor and texture, you get more selenium a few hours later. The other half of the time, you encounter turkey flavor and texture, but the selenium never arrives. 

By eating alternative proteins that taste like the “real thing”, you end up seriously confusing your governors, with basically no benefit.

We recently tried one of these new vegan boxed eggs. It did have the appearance of scrambled eggs, and it curdled much like scrambled eggs. It even tasted somewhat like scrambled eggs. But the experience of eating it was overall terrible. Not the flavor — the deep sense that this was not truly filling, not a food product. Despite simulating the experience of eggs quite closely, we did not want it. Maybe because it was not truly nutritious.

If you make an alternative turkey that contains vitamins X, Y, and Z, you will at least be providing a real substitute. People will have a natural motivation to eat your alternative turkey. But if you do this, you’re still in direct competition with the original turkey. You’re in its niche, it is an away game for you and a home game for turkey. You have to convince the consumer’s mind that your alt-turkey is worth switching to, and that takes a lot of convincing. People prefer the familiar. Unless the new product is much better in some way, they won’t switch. 

If you are trying to replicate turkey, you need to make a matching blob that matches real turkey on all the dimensions people might care about. A product exactly like that is hard to make at all, and forget about doing it while also being cheap, available, and satisfying. This is why it’s an uphill battle, you’re trying to meet turkey exactly.

Those of us who have never tasted tukrey are in ignorance still, our subconscious has no idea that turkey slices would be a great source of vitamin X. We’re not tempted. But people who have tried turkey before have tasted the deli meat of knowledge, and there’s no losing that information once you have it. Vitamin X governor gets what vitamin X governor wants, so these people will always feel called to the best source of vitamin X they’re aware of. You’ll never convince the vitamin X governor that turkey is a bad source of vitamin X; you’ll get more mileage out of giving it a better way to get what it wants!

So instead of shaming, or offering mock meats, the winning strategy might be to just come up with new, original vegan foods that are very good sources of vitamins X, Y, and/or Z. Just make vitamin X drinks, vitamin Y candies, and vitamin Z spread. If you don’t try to mimic turkey, then you’re not in competition with turkey in any way. You don’t need to convince people that it’s better than turkey — you just need to convince them that it’s nutritious and delicious. Why try to copy turkey when you can beat it at its own game? 

You don’t need alt-turkey to be all turkey things to all turkey people. As long as people get their needs covered in a way that satisfies, they’ll be happy. 

It seems like it would be easier to make a good source of phosphorus, than to make a good source of phosphorus PLUS make it resemble yogurt as much as possible. Alternative proteins that try to mimic existing foods will always be at a disadvantage in terms of quality, taste, and cost, simply because trying to do two things is harder than doing one thing really well. You’ll lose out on a lot of tradeoffs.

If we created new food products that contain all the nutrients that people currently get from meat, except tastier, cheaper, or even just more convenient, people would slowly add these foods to their diet. Over time, these foods would displace turkey and other meats as superior substitutes, just like electric lights replaced gas lamps, or like cell phones eclipsed the telegraph. Without even thinking about it, people will soon be eating much less meat than they did before. And if these new foods are good enough sources of the nutrients we need, then in a generation or two people may not be eating meat at all. After all, meat is a bit of a hassle to produce and to cook. Not like my darling selenium drink. 

We see this already in some natural examples. Tofu is much more popular in countries like China, Korea, Japan, where it is simply seen as a food, than it is in the US, where it is treated as a meat substitute. You don’t frame your substitute as being in the same category as your competitors unless you really have to. That’s just basic marketing.

We have a friend whose family is from Cuba. She tells a story about how her grandmother was bemused when avocado toast got really popular in the 2010s. When asked why she found this so strange, her grandmother explained that back in Cuba, the only reason you would put avocado on your toast was if you were so dirt poor you couldn’t afford butter. It was an extremely shameful thing to have to put avocado on your toast, avocados grew on trees in the back yard and were basically free. If you were so very poor as to end up in this situation, you would at least try to hide it.

In Cuba, where avocado was seen as a substitute for butter, it was automatically seen as inferior. But when it appeared in 2010s America in the context of a totally new dish, it was wildly popular. And in terms of food replacement, avocado is a stealth vegan smash hit, way more successful than nearly any other plant-based product. It wasn’t framed that way, but in a practical sense, what did avocado displace? Mostly dairy- and egg-based spreads like butter, cream cheese, and mayonnaise. There may be no other food that has led to such an intense increase in the effective amount of veganism, even if the people switching away from these spreads didn’t see it that way. They just wanted avocado on the merits.

This product space is usually thought of as “alternative proteins”. Which is fine, protein is one thing that everyone needs. But a better perspective might be, “vegan ways to get where you’re going”. And just because some of these targets happen to be bundled together in old-fashioned flesh-and-blood meat, doesn’t mean they need to be bundled together in the same ways in the foods of the future.