Remembering Angel Food Ministries

Over the past few days I've been sorting through some stacks of papers in my office area, in preparation for some repair work that needs to be done in it. As I was sorting and disposing, I came across a number of materials from Angel Food Ministries, a faith-based cooperative food buying system that allowed people to buy pre-packaged selections of food at a reduced price, via the sponsorship of local churches who collected the money and distributed the food. It worked because the parent organization pooled the contributions of hundreds of host sites and thousands of people to buy in bulk, directly from various food companies. Although some of the food came in retail boxes, a lot of it was in very plain packaging, further reducing the costs.

 It was particularly nice because there were no income qualifications, so if you were on the edge or had irregular income, you didn't have to worry about whether you qualified. Since it wasn't a distribution of a fixed pie of goods, you didn't have to worry whether you were taking food from those even more needy than yourself. In fact, because pooling money enabled the organizers to tap economies of scale that individual church food pantries couldn't have accessed, participating actually helped food become more available to the needy, and even made it possible to fund free boxes to the destitute.

And then, in 2011, everything came crashing down. I missed the September order cycle because we were going to be out of town on distribution Saturday, but when I went to their website in October to plan my order, I discovered that there would be no October distribution, and people's money for September was in the process of being refunded. The official explanation was financial trouble as a result of decreased participation, necessitating the discontinuation of the entire program.

However, that story was a fairy tale to comfort us. In truth, the leadership of the parent organization, Pastor Joe Wingo and his family, had been caught with their hands in the till by the Federal government. Several members of the Wingo family would ultimately be convicted in Federal court of various crimes, including money laundering and various forms of interference with a criminal investigation. It was a huge shame to discover that the leaders of an organization that so many deeply faithful people had come to believe in were in fact wolves in sheep's clothing, stealing in the name of the Lord.

 Looking over the materials with the benefit of hindsight, there were some odd warning signs. When I first began participating in 2008, each box of food came with a full-color eight-page magazine that included articles, recipes, and the next month's menus. At the end of 2009, it shrank to a single-sheet flyer with articles and recipes on one side, and the next month's menus on the back. During the last few months of the ministry's existence, it became nothing but a single-sided page of recipes, and the host sites had to print up their own copies of the menu sheet.

 Since the collapse of Angel Food Ministries, a number of organizations have tried to take its place, but none of them have been able to gain the sort of national reach that AFM possessed at its height. In 2018 we were introduced to a program called King Foods through one of the Lenten soup suppers that some of our local churches hold every Wednesday of Lent. Its menus and ordering systems looked very similar to AFM's, so we decided to give it a try and see how it worked out. Unfortunately, they had a catastrophic failure of the walk-in freezer at their central distribution site that month, and while they struggled to get their equipment replaced, they lost the momentum they had, and they appear to have ceased operations after November of 2018. Their Facebook page is still up, but their domain is now parked by GoDaddy.

 It's a real shame.