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Hi, no offense taken.
If I may ask, are you basing that on personal experience, or your own research into the effectiveness of community food fridges?
Personally, I don't see it as terribly different from the work of Food Not Bombs, which provides food to anyone who needs it at a particular location at set schedule.
The usefulness of a community fridge is that it can often be used to prevent food wastage. As an example, if your garden produces too many zucchini for you or your neighbors to eat, the extra can be distributed to the food fridge for anyone who needs them. Local small businesses also often participate, and donate their unsold food to prevent having to throw it away.
The Teach a Man to fish analogy is sometimes not viable in vulnerable communities or impoverished ones. As an example, if someone lives and works in a food desert, they may not have access to a car to get them to a grocery store with more healthy food options, and their job's low pay may effectively trap them in that area if the places closer to a good grocery store are too expensive to rent. You could potentially teach them how to grow their own food if they have a viable place to grow them, but they may not be able to spare the extra funds to purchase the seeds or the equipment required to start growing effectively. Everyone has different circumstances.
I'd suggest taking a look at this instructional video on how to set up a food fridge by someone who has already done so to see how viable it is in practice, and how much good it can potentially do. You may find that your views on it change when its laid out in such a way.
You make several compelling points.
My cynicism is based on my general view that anonymous strangers are often unhelpful, but to be more accurate, I would have to acknowledge my feedback would vary a lot based on region. For instance, I mostly grew up in TX (nearish I-35). However, I lived in Western Washington for years, and I can easily see a community pantry being appreciated there.
So if I were to revise my comment now, I'd seek to emphasize that some regional populations have been propagandized and are destructive. And like some people don't mind contributing like that, but I see it like trying to fill a jug with a hole in the bottom.
If viewed from the perspective that the community fridge isn't solving the issue of the people near it needing it to be continuously resupplied, then yes, it is a 'bottomless pit'. But at the same time, what it is providing is a somewhat constant relief from the system which created the circumstances for a community fridge to be needed, which means its also a source of endless/ongoing harm reduction.
But, if the community fridge is viewed as one tool in our belt with which to build alternative systems that would eventually allow us to decouple from our current one, then it is not a bottomless pit, and instead is one very needed and useful stepping stone leading to a much more egalitarian and prosperous society that could eliminate food deserts and wage labor entirely. In that way, a community fridge is just one form of prefiguration. Specifically, a community fridge is building out one part of a gift-economy.
If you'd like to see the end result of those efforts visualized in a very realisistic manner, I'd highly suggest The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, which is a classic sci-fi novel based in an egalitarian gift-economy, and goes quite in-depth on how it functions.
I know The Dispossessed!
I'm generally supportive of the idea of feeding people. I'm further supportive of like people helping people. I think the part that makes me apprehensive is that the system you describe fundamentally operates on assumptions that sidestep the matter of beneficiaries knowing the source of the benefits, which seems very dubious. The idea seems to be quite kind and selfless, but I still think this is a scenario where folks will fail to appreciate the kindness involved because they're simply unaware of the effort made by numerous folks involved