sigh I love Emily. I have always loved Emily. It’s as if God had taken all my triggers and built my perfect woman.
Imho if you’d eat it yourself it’s good enough to donate. (And no I don’t include recently expired packaged/canned goods in this statement even though “best before” does not necessarily mean “immediately bad after” )
No, but it does mean that by the time it gets to the food bank, is processed and shelved, picked up by the local food pantry, put up on the shelf then picked up by the client there is a chance it has gone bad. If someone decides on their own that a can of food that has gone past date while on their own shelf is still good enough to eat, then what happens afterwards is on them. If we knowingly give out food that is past date and something happens, it is on us.
If this is true, that is the world’s worst slogan. Why the hell would they use “$1 gets you 7 meals” if the dollar is actually getting them 33 meals?
From the vast list of programs that the SAFB details in their Annual Report, providing direct financial support is likely a tremendously more efficient donation, as you can’t pay case managers in creamed corn. And other than the 67,000 lbs. of venison they get every year (which sounds like an amazing program), I’m not sure what “free food” is - every donated can had to have been purchased somewhere. And while I can get 10 cans of beans at Kroger for $10, I also know that my local food bank can get far more than 10 cans for that same $10 (because they buy in bulk, they have access to store managers who set aside remnants and dented cans to sell at a reduced rate, they don’t pay taxes on their purchases, etc.).
Okay, the word “vile” was hyperbole. I guess I got upset because the list of acceptable donations specified only low or no salt items. When I got to unsalted nuts, I just went berserk.
It doesn’t help that a number of studies show that salt-phobia in food may be overblown. Yeah, you may want to cut down on salt, but not eliminate it altogether. “Or else you will die horribly,” as Uncle Cecil said in one of his epistles to the Teeming Millions.
I agree that a food bank shouldn’t turn down donations. . . but if you are picking up a bag of food and there’s 3 cans of spicy chile and you don’t like spicy food, or you know it will be a fight to get it down your little kids–no matter how hungry they are–is it really wrong to say “Hey, I hate spicy things. Can we swap this for something else?” Would you really call a mom who said something like this “ungrateful”? I know I’d be happier to get the spicier food, so I might be glad she ended up taking the tuna instead (which I dislike).
I know our local food pantry also lets clients shop; a friend of ours visits it about once a month.
Just giving people the dignity they deserve. We even have a section set aside for people with dietary restrictions.
Yes, how silly of me to have turned my nose up at canned tomatoes. I should have eaten them and gone into anaphyllaxis thereby causing even further expense to the public from my hospital treatment.
Or maybe you’d get really lucky and I’d simply die and then no longer be a problem instead of a human being.
Poverty doesn’t cure allergies, diabetes, or a host of other ills where treatment involves dietary restrictions.
Actually, peanuts are another one of my allergies - but I should just shut up and eat up. I’ll call 911 quietly as I go into shock.
I got enough of that sort of scorn and contempt in my hungry years. Thanks god I’m clawing my way back into the middle class where I don’t have nanny-state types poking their noses into my pantry.
So, what I am getting from this discussion is that I shouldn’t give food, I should give money. OK, I get that, but I am kinda busy with work and family and other obligations, so tossing cans into a bin is much easier than remembering to find a way to give money.
Today, I ran into a grocery store with one of those donation bins and actually had a discussion with myself about if I should buy something to put in the bin, or hope that I remembered to look up the webpage and donate money after I got home. Figuring that I would forget to do it later, I bought a few extra items to toss in the bin.
Please don’t hate me.
A few very kind people here will back me up: I have been very poor, in the very recent past. I’m not too proud or too delicate, I think. I will go to bed hungry before I will eat canned fish (I just can’t,) or most peppercorns (allergies.) No, beggars can’t be choosers, but no one chooses an allergy, and no one chooses to eat something that is just going to make her yak.
I’ve been to the food pantry. And I’ve donated items back, because I absolutely can’t eat it, and there’s no sense in taking it home if it’s just inedible for me. That’s not any sort of value judgment.
I had to take an antihistamine before and after lunch today, because I ate with my kids at school, and I’m allergic to black pepper. My whole face is swollen, and I’m wheezing. I am not picky about food, and I am grateful if someone wants to share. But I’m not in a good position to die right now, so I can’t just eat anything someone is kind enough to donate.
I’ve worked with a couple of the local county food banks here, doing everything from sorting plums to organizing fundraiser events.
They ADORE cash but won’t turn away food unless it’s expired or very close to expiring. Not just for the “$1 donated feeds x people” multiplication, but because they know what they need, and can plan ahead for it and balance it through the year. Around here, at least, donations from the public spike up madly from mid-November to the end of the year. Then they sink like a stone. People don’t think to donate food in March or July - just when the barrels are out in their office building lobby.
All of this multiplication is due to their buying power with the Feeding America coalition, regional partnerships, and being willing to take the “ugly” stuff. Those plums I was sorting - they were purchased directly from the orchard. Most were perfect, just smaller or lumpier than the American consumer prefers at the grocery store. We tossed the squashed or bitten (rats?) ones and bagged up the good ones for distribution to food pantries later that day.
One time when I was there, they had a few pallets of mis-print canned corn. Brand new, fresh off the line, good for another two years, perfect in every way except for a printing mishap on the labels. It’s cheaper for DelMonte to scrap the run rather than to pay people to strip off the labels and try again.
The one thing they had that annoyed me was five pallets of hot chili paste. What the hell are they going to do with five pallets of that? They didn’t know either. But someone got a nice tax credit for it.
With shelf-stable stuff like canned veggies or boxed pasta, I recall the rule of thumb was they wanted it to be good for at least six months beyond whenever you donate it.
They actually need more and better nutrients, due to obstacles they have to healthy eating. That also includes people who are not homeless but have issues with things like transportation and refrigeration.
People who get belligerent or otherwise misbehave at a soup kitchen or food pantry can be kicked out, or even banned for varying lengths of time.
The big food pantry near my house, which is mainly stocked from the city’s central repository, gives people a cart after they sign in (they are open 3 times a week but people are allowed to “shop” once a week) they can go through aisles with pallets and gaylords full of food, all of which have signs in English and Spanish telling them how many of each item they can take per household. I’ve stopped by there, just to see it, and there would be people trading items after they were finished, which is OK. For example, they could have 4 cans of garbanzo beans per household, and 4 cans of chicken noodle soup, and people who liked one item but not the other would swap. When I was there, they also had fresh seedless watermelons and pineapples, 1 per household. Again, there was some trading going on. They don’t want people taking things they can’t or won’t eat, which is part of the concept behind shopping.
Right now, we have a milk surplus, and this is what’s being done with a lot of it. This food bank has had a free milk giveaway, 1 gallon per household, no questions asked, on a weekday at an out-of-the-way location. People still turned up in droves.
I think Manson was kidding about the muffin stumps.
The kind of things you describe really ought to be going to livestock. I’m surprised that someone at the store doesn’t have chickens, which will eat just about anything, or other poultry or even goats or pigs. I do realize that there are also regulations about that, mainly so people don’t deliberately damage items so they can take them home for free or at drastically reduced cost.
Some people advocate that we give the poor commodities, because that’s what they used to do, and dang it, they LIKED it. :smack: That’s not how we do things nowadays.
Not at all- but if all they got is spicy food and you’re all hungry, then that’s what you take.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t have choices, but upthread, it was being made to sound like food pantries and patrons were basically griping about donations they didn’t like vs. cash, which I found perplexing and a bit irritating.
I always assumed canned food drives were just a way for middle class people to clean out their pantries of stuff they weren’t going to eat anyway rather than throw it away.
From that perspective its a good idea.
Wesley:
For many years, my city has had a “Student Hunger Drive” where the junior high and high school kids collect food items (and won’t turn away nonfood items if people wish to donate them) and have all kinds of crazy competitions and fundraisers.
Early in its existence, there was a teacher who had a relative who owned a cannery a few hundred miles away that would donate improperly labeled things, like the corn mentioned earlier in this thread, as long as people would pick it up. They raised money to rent a truck, which a student’s CDL-certified father drove up there with his wife and a SUV full of kids following behind, and picked up a truck full of items that were certainly usable but not salable. That school won the pounds-per-student division just because of this.