For the win.
When I go to a supermarket, I know what the food bank want, and look for anything that is on offer.
Sure! Someone might see them and say, “Hey, Del Monte tomatoes! Those are the best.”
MHO: That Spam was a flavor she really liked that she’d had a hard time finding, and she got all of it to stock up.
I personally don’t think I’ve bought it since I graduated from college.
That was true for me up until about 15 years ago, so then ~30 years out of college.
IME the bloom had fully fallen off that rose by then. I expect I’d enjoy it even less today. You have been WARNED. 
Yeah, this is the way to do it. A lot of the food banks here are small and many of them cannot handle fresh/perishable foodstuffs at all, but they usually publish lists of items that are suitable to donate (most often that list is something like: dry pasta/rice, canned meat products/beans/soup/vegetables/fruit, cereal, UHT milk, toothpaste, sanitary products).
Check, also, whether your local pantry will take pet food. Some of them will. Many people without money have cats, dogs, etc. and need help feeding them; and the central distribution systems for human food don’t provide any of that.
Great Idea!
The food bank where I volunteer takes pet food. Pet owners are always really happy and grateful when they find out we have food for their pets.
I’ve told this story here, but for those who haven’t seen it, here it goes again.
My favorite story in the book “Burma Surgeon”, about a WWII-era surgeon who worked in the American theater in Burma/Myanmar during that era, was when they got an airdrop, and when the crates were opened, several soldiers vomited upon seeing the crate full of SPAM, because they were plain old just that sick and tired (pun intended) of eating it. The book is long OOP but not hard to find.
I also saw on a message board, which may have been this one, from someone whose family fell on hard times, and one day, his mother took the “Serving Suggestion” on the SPAM can literally, and served it as one would a roast. His dad saw what was for dinner, and walked back out the door.
I had an uncle who served in North Africa and he claimed there were caches where tons of Spam were abandoned because the troops refused to eat it after months of nothing but.
Not quite the same, but I had an uncle (Mom’s older bro) who served in the army in WWII. She was a bunch younger and still a tween at home when the war ended & he came back.
She liked to tell the story of when some other older relative bought him a can of canned Vienna sausages a couple months later as a gag gift. He’d bitched long and loud about being sick of the things for life after his time at the war. He was very much not amused with his gift and the ensuing argument became Family Legend.
I also just remembered a zine I wrote for many years ago, where someone said of SPAM, “That jellied shit that surrounds it looks like alien jizm.”
Maybe THAT’S why I haven’t purchased it in 30-odd years?
OK, but if you donate $20 worth of food, the charity will deduct $10 from their budget used to buy the same food wholesale and use that money towards new computers instead vs they can deduct $20 if you give them $20 of straight cash instead. Until the food bank is spending $0 on food because they are overwhelmed with donations, food and cash are fungible, just at a drastically lower exchange rate because you buy food with cash far less efficiently than a food bank.
It’s not that simple as has already been explained a number of times in this thread. The one large food bank where I took my friend a couple times isn’t set up that way. I’m sure that they’ll graciously accept a few cans of whatever but the way they operate is with bulk buys.
Have you ever used or worked at a food back? It’s not that difficult. Call them and ask. They operate differently.
This reminds me that back when I used to cook spam I’d always run the loaf under warm water in the sink to rinse away the bulk of the jelly. There’s always be a bit of it in the interior, but a quick rinse got rid of 90+% of it.
It was also interesting how porous and swiss cheesy looking the loaf became once rinsed. Compared to real cheese, it was just smaller and less rounded cavities.
Which of course called to mind the ever present bit of corporate skullduggery: the more and heavier cheap filler you put into the can, the less actual expensive product you can get away with. Profit$!!1!
The jelly is just fine, no need to rinse it away, a quick wipe with a paper towel if you must. It it just natural gelatin.
Yeah, the jelly on the outside (and somewhat inside) a spam loaf is just the same stuff they make into Jell-O or other gelatin. Arguably, it’s one of the least objectionable parts of the spam.
Most likely, it’s in there to keep the loaf from drying out in the can, just like putting water or oil in cans of fish.
Then what keeps the jelly from drying out - the meat?
I think of the jelly as poor man’s aspic. Kind of like Fran Lebowitz described meatloaf as a marvelously rough sort of pâté.