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The Food Bank Doesn’t Need Your Food. Please Keep Your Chocolate Sauce and Baby Corn.

There's something else they need much more

By Maria Shimizu ChristensenPublished 2 years ago 4 min read
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The Food Bank Doesn’t Need Your Food. Please Keep Your Chocolate Sauce and Baby Corn.
Photo by Ismael Paramo on Unsplash

Some 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 so many 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.

I don’t mean the can of clam chowder your partner bought even though you’re lactose intolerant. I mean the can of water chestnuts that expired three years ago. You know what I mean.

Do you know what food banks need the most? Money. That’s it. Pure, plain and simple.

Food banks have relationships, sponsorships, wholesale suppliers and more that allow them to purchase bulk quantities of food for much, much cheaper than you or I can buy food. Better even than shopping at Costco. But they need money donations to make those purchases.

Yes, many receive government and non-profit grants, but all it takes is a measly recession to empty the cupboards. Not ours. Theirs. Then something like a pandemic comes along and we’re in a crisis. Donations are the bread and butter of many food banks, especially the smaller ones – individual donations and community food drives.

So, unless you’re going to donate the good stuff – and I mean things like cans of tuna fish, milk, and jars of peanut butter – just please give them your money. They can make $5 go a lot further and feed more people than you can.

Thanksgiving in the U.S. is coming up as I write this. In my neighborhood the food bank I used to visit holds a food drive in front of a big grocery retailer, with big empty barrels waiting to be filled by shoppers. There are things I buy and put in the bin because I know they’re not things the food bank can or will buy in bulk because they have to be strategic when it comes to feeding hundreds or thousands of people.

I also give them money. And if I’m short during the holidays I’ll just give them money and skip putting things in the barrels. If all I can afford is $5, then that’s what I give. Some day I’d like to add a couple or a few zeros to that number.

It feels good to help people, but many people have a bias against giving money to people for a variety of reasons and justifications. Somehow that often gets extended to food banks. I don’t know why. Fight the bias if you have it.

The single most important thing you can do for food banks, year round, is give them money. They tend to get more during the holiday season and then struggle to help people during the summer months because donations decrease dramatically then.

So, give what you can, when you can, but making your donations in dollars makes sense.

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About the Creator

Maria Shimizu Christensen

Writer living my dreams by day and dreaming up new ones by night

The Read Ink Scribbler

Bauble & Verve

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Also, History Major, Senior Accountant, Geek, Fan of cocktails and camping

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