Once every couple of months…but we do our best to find another organization to help them out.
Just paying it forward-I used to be homeless until someone helped me out.
Why is santa fat?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=16959830#post16959830
see 7th from bottom. err, currently. : /
Oh dear, hope everything is ok Czarcasm! Thanks for your work.
My sister is currently working for a project where, among other things they do, they have an open kitchen for children in the evening. The children can come in when they want and then they all cook and eat together. Apparently it’s quite popular, even among older children. Other people can also eat there for €2,50.
Update: My boss, Kathleen, is currently in communication with the bomb squad. They sent in the robot and said that the box definitely contains something suspicious. They are going to try to transport it to their designated boom-boom area out of town and shoot it.
Found this thread today, totally didn’t expect that “twist” at the end. :eek: Hope everything’s okay!!
Anyway…here’s my question:
Aside from today, what’s the most exotic or unusual food donation you’ve ever received? (such as durian, surströmming, etc.)
We once got a couple of cases of elephant pepper gift packs, and due to an eccentric anonymous donor we were giving out caviar. 
Hi, I have a few questions about your facility and the types of food you prefer. So I made a topic around Thanksgiving of 2012 asking what types of food people think I should be donating because I was trying to maximize my donation efficiency. Canned food like Spaghetti-O’s, I explained, is not something I personally like to give because it lasts for one, maybe two meals, while something like a bag of rice can last for weeks.
Is your facility like a warehouse/office where food is stored and then given out? I ask because one of the things I’ve donated in the past few years is a 25lb bag of rice. If you give that out, do you just give the whole thing to a lucky family or portion it out in ziploc bags or something and give it to people? Would you prefer smaller bags if I were to give rice?
Also, going with the rice theme and eating for a long time, one time our work’s donation suggestion list had things like coffee and flour and sugar. Some Dopers speculated that if the facility doesn’t ask for those specifically, it may be because they have no place to cook. Does your facility include a kitchen and staff that can make use of raw cooking ingredients such as flour, salt, and dried pasta or do you prefer already-cooked things that you can just open up and give to people? I donated a gallon of cooking oil this year, I hope that will help because someone can make use of it for a while, but if you don’t have a kitchen, or if the family can’t cook, then I would rather give them something easier to manage
I guess my two questions above is mainly asking whether, in general, do you prefer cooked stuff that lasts a few meals or larger quantities of raw ingredients that has to be prepared? And do you prefer we give in smaller portions or in larger portions that you can make use of or separate yourselves?
Regarding price, I can obvious donate a lot more stuff that’s cheap, but I’m guessing you guys probably get a lot of that. Would you prefer large quantities of cheaper stuff (canned vegetables, mac & cheese, etc.) or would you rather people get smaller quantities of more expensive things (exotic coffee, gourmet brands of canned soup, stuff like extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, exotic spices) to break up the monotony of cheap stuff?
What do you get a lot that you don’t really need much of and what do you want that nobody ever donates?
Every food bank and food pantry has its own rules. We have storage space, but no cooking facilities. When it comes to food we will take anything(we can always barter with other facilities if it is something we can’t use, but it saves us time if food is already portioned out and sealed.) We will take raw foodstuffs if we think we can get it out in three days time. As far as more expensive items go we love donations like that-we just put it on the same self as a lesser priced but similar item. Everybody deserves a treat every once in a while, right? The elephant pepper gift packs in their designer caddys were a big hit for awhile, I’ll tell you.
Only in Portland will you find a comment like this from HeatherB, about liberal gun nuts.
And the sad thing is that liberal gun nuts and poverty pimps is not a contradiction. I blame Lewis and Clark.
Are you able to enforce any kind of minimum food quality standards, or do you pretty much just have to take whatever is donated?
The reason I ask is that my experience as a client of a food pantry was… not great. Like you, they had categories of food and we could each get X amount from each category. SNAP could only, at best, cover half our monthly grocery bill, and we’d had a bad month where I knew we couldn’t pay rent and buy food the last week of the month too.
So, the dry pasta was fine. Pretty much all of the rest of it was the cheapest generic processed shit, that we discovered we couldn’t even eat. The jar of pasta sauce contained HFCS (seriously? who puts sugar in tomato sauce?), so it was cloying, but we choked it down anyway. The big can of baked beans, which I thought I could get at least three meals out of, was utterly unpalatable. As in, I put one spoonful in my mouth and gagged. I couldn’t even swallow. The entire thing went in the trash, because I literally could not eat it. We never went back.
The net result of the experience made me feel like the rich folk had decided that poor folk don’t deserve to eat quality food, so they give us the cast-offs that they wouldn’t even consider eating themselves. I would have appreciated raw ingredients, personally – I can make food with flour, sweet potatoes, dry beans, and it won’t have a chemistry set inside it to make me feel sick 10 minutes after I eat it. I seriously would have killed for something that came out of the ground instead of a can. Apples and pears are pretty shelf stable, but there was nothing like that there.
I don’t think you should ever buy food to give to a food pantry–give them the cash instead–they know what they need and can buy it a lot cheaper.
You mentioned that big can of grape leaves someone donated. Hey, if they were still good, in my town there’s an Orthodox church that has a food festival each year.
Dolmades!
Although it sounds weird I’m not surprised someone took the grape leaves. If I had a big family(I live alone) I might have.
Fresh foods are dicey for obvious reasons. Most groceries that don’t outright discard their less-than-perfect produce simply mark it down right there in the store, and there are people who donate their extra garden goodies, but only in season.
I like to get, as you put it, “raw ingredients”, but also get canned and packaged things for people who might not have the facilities or ability to prepare things from a recipe.
Both are fine, really. As noted elsewhere in this thread by me and others, having a variety of each type of food is preferable for both diet and self-esteem. There will be foods that people will donate that just can’t be gotten very often in bulk-we don’t have the time or the money to go down to the local natural foods market to get gluten-free, dairy-free or any-other-free foods that people may ask for…but people that buy those foods as a matter of habit tend to donate the same. We can spend money so that we can get the most for our money, and the good people out there can donate that which we cannot usually shop for. Win-Win.
Just wanted to ask again because I think you missed it, but can you tell us what type of foods you get a lot of that you don’t really need much more of? And also, what do you guys want more of that nobody ever seem to donate? Thanks!
I don’t think we ever get too much of any one item in, because we can always use it for barter. What do we want more of? Canned fruits and veggies, soaps, laundry detergent, antiperspirants/deodorants, diapers, baby food and drink.
How about feminine sanitary products? That all too often seems forgotten. Also, shaving items, both male and female. Really, and toiletries. And toilet paper.
That’s aside from the food products, of course, but somehow food panties have become distribution points for things beyond food.
ALL toiletries are needed.