Is It OK to Lie in Order to Feed Hungry Families?

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The Ethicist

Is It OK to Lie in Order to Feed Hungry Families?

I worry that taking extra food for the people our organization serves means that others won’t get what they need.

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Illustration by Tomi Um

By

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah has been The New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist columnist since 2015 and teaches philosophy at N.Y.U.

April 11, 2026,

6:00 a.m. ET

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I volunteer for a small nonprofit organization picking up free food from pantries and delivering it to an impoverished local community. Recently I learned that one of the directors of the organization lied to food pantry personnel to obtain more food for our clients. The pantry normally allocates one bag of food per week for each family. Our director said we were delivering to twice as many families, so each family actually received two bags a week. When asked to provide the names of the clients we were delivering to, our director gave fake names.

I’m uncomfortable with lying to sister organizations so we can procure more food than our families would receive under the established rules. And I worry that the extra bags for our families mean that other needy clients don’t get what they need.

When I discussed this with another volunteer, they reminded me that one bag of food could never feed our large client families and that the director’s intentions were good. Please help me sort this out.

— Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

Oh, dear. Accepting donations from a food pantry, pretending to deliver them to twice as many families as are actually receiving help and fabricating nonexistent recipients? Whatever the motives in this case, deception of this kind raises serious issues of integrity, especially because your organization’s leader is lying to people who are themselves trying to do good. The director is also courting scandal of the sort that could damage the organization’s ability to carry out its mission.

If the families you’re serving need additional help, there are at least two obvious ways to look for it. One is to look for more assistance elsewhere. Another

is to go back to the folks at the food pantry and talk to them about adjusting the allocation. Because of this deception, there was no opportunity to talk with them about the needs of these families and no opportunity for them to explain their policy or to think about changing it. Right now, you don’t have the answer to the question of who’s being deprived by the diversion of those extra bags. And you don’t know whether the food pantry could raise more supplies for you had it recognized the need. In the meantime, if your director’s charitable chicanery comes out, the pantry will have every reason to distribute its bags through a different channel.

Consider raising your concerns directly with the director. Failing that, share what you’ve learned with the board members of your nonprofit. They can investigate and try to set things right. If they don’t, you may wish to find another place to volunteer. In the long run, the families who depend on this help are best served by an organization that deals in good faith with its partners. Charitable work depends on trust, and when that trust is abused, the people most likely to suffer are those who rely on the work being sustained.

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