I also believe that serving hot meals may be one of the better options. It's slightly more social and fun to eat together with other people rather than that each family takes home a box of food. If done in a good way, it may prevent food from being resold, it may give more "calories for the buck" as one can buy discounted food in big packages, and if done right less food may be wasted.
On a related note, we have some places in Oslo where it's possible to get food for free - it's meant to be an offer for homeless, but I suppose anyone can just come and say "I'm hungry, can I have some food please?". Some years ago we had a guest living with us for maybe two weeks - I think he he was Ukrainian, a tourist that came with empty pockets. He considered it to be a good idea to "pay back" for the hospitality by bringing food for us from that place. Unfortunately we were not quite able to appreciate it fully. He brought quite a lot of food, most of the products were things we don't use in our daily cooking so it would just take space in our food storage - and quite some of those products were things we simply never would eat - so in the end I think a lot of that food was just going to waste.
RE: Charity exhaustion