Member-only story
Food Banks Don’t Need Your Food. Keep Your Chocolate Sauce and Baby Corn. Please.
You know full well what they actually need
Many years ago I reluctantly became a food bank client. Trying to feed two kids as a single mother with only one income was a challenge after paying to keep a roof over our heads, among other things. There was a recession and I was laid off from my job. The same old story that keeps repeating for most of us.
It was humiliating.
I got over that feeling of humiliation after the first day of standing in a long, slowly moving line, but it still hurt. We’re taught to not rely on charity. You better believe that for a large swath of the population there’s a stigma attached to taking “handouts”. On the other hand, that same swath usually believes you shouldn’t rely on government handouts but on private charities if you’re down on your luck, even when those charities can’t possibly meet the demand. But, there wouldn’t be such a demand if we weren’t all so lazy.
You can’t win.
Every trip to the food bank became an adventure. What would be available? What would I be able to get based on my family size of three? Two cans of green beans instead of one? A fancy bottle of chocolate sauce that clearly came out of someone’s cupboard? A bag full of fresh produce because so many clients were homeless and couldn’t cook potatoes and eggplants, so there was a lot available?
I have endless stories about the six months I visited the food bank, and I’ll probably tell them all in time, but the most important thing is that food banks tried really hard to work with what they had, but it was rarely enough. Or good enough.
A lot of people donate a lot of crap to food banks.
Don’t get me wrong. Food drives can be good things. Donating extra food from your cupboards can be helpful on a really small scale, as long as it’s what you’re really, truly eating, and not something that’s been sitting there for years because you don’t actually want to eat it.
The idea that what you don’t want should be good enough for someone else is at the root of all that’s wrong with food bank donations.
