While I didn't email the Hunger Site to find more concrete info, I did look more into their website for answers. What I saw seemed...sketchy, although more detailed info from an email might have offered satisfactory answers.
Their results page measures success in "cups of food". They have a list of "charitable partners": GreaterGood.org, Mercy Corps, Food Recovery Network, Millenium Promise, and Partners in Health. Mercy Corps does include food help on its list of things it does, but that food work is mostly about helping poor people create sustainable agriculture and other things like that, that don't involve actually donating food. Food Recovery appears to be about scrounging surplus food and giving it to other food charities.
All in all, that gives me the impression that "cups of food" has little or nothing to do with actual cups of food. Instead, I think it's a proxy for "we donated X dollars to partner charities, and they did whatever with it that they usually do".
That doesn't *have* to be a deal-breaker, since those charities are still doing good things, probably worth donating to. But it does make me feel like I can't trust Hunger Site to accurately portray what it's doing. Furthering that, the chart on the results page has a column ambiguously labelled "pounds", without any indication of what that means. Pounds of food donated (if so, through which charity, and where)? Money donated in U.K. pounds (unlikely, b/c I think it's a U.S. charity)? That column is stuck off on the side as if it's the black sheep in a family photo. I don't know what to make of that.
While I didn't email the Hunger Site to find more concrete info, I did look more into their website for answers. What I saw seemed...sketchy, although more detailed info from an email might have offered satisfactory answers.
Their results page measures success in "cups of food". They have a list of "charitable partners": GreaterGood.org, Mercy Corps, Food Recovery Network, Millenium Promise, and Partners in Health. Mercy Corps does include food help on its list of things it does, but that food work is mostly about helping poor people create sustainable agriculture and other things like that, that don't involve actually donating food. Food Recovery appears to be about scrounging surplus food and giving it to other food charities.
All in all, that gives me the impression that "cups of food" has little or nothing to do with actual cups of food. Instead, I think it's a proxy for "we donated X dollars to partner charities, and they did whatever with it that they usually do".
That doesn't *have* to be a deal-breaker, since those charities are still doing good things, probably worth donating to. But it does make me feel like I can't trust Hunger Site to accurately portray what it's doing. Furthering that, the chart on the results page has a column ambiguously labelled "pounds", without any indication of what that means. Pounds of food donated (if so, through which charity, and where)? Money donated in U.K. pounds (unlikely, b/c I think it's a U.S. charity)? That column is stuck off on the side as if it's the black sheep in a family photo. I don't know what to make of that.