I have read a couple of articles in the paper recently regarding food shelf donations. It seems they have an overabundance of weird things that people wanted to get rid of...like artichokes.
I tend to get rid of things we haven't used or items I bought really cheap. Is that bad? lol
My standard selection is tuna, canned veggies, mac and cheese, and ramen. I think I will have to improve on that.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/389/4208782.html
Kim Ode: Area food shelves need what you eat, and more
Kim Ode, Star Tribune
Published November 16, 2003 ODE16
If past experience holds, bins for food shelf donations soon will contain a disproportionate amount of canned cranberry sauce. Fa la la la la. Not long ago, a news story noted a profusion of artichoke hearts at one food shelf, presumably donated by all the hostesses who keep a can handy for party dip, but never actually make it.
Confession time: When one of the kids needed to bring a donation to school, I grabbed the can of creamed corn that I'd once bought for who knows what reason. When it was time to give, it didn't hurt.
Area food shelves take it all, from the beans -- many beans, always beans, lotsa beans -- to cans of black olives, apricot halves, sauerkraut, crab and spaghetti sauce. The need is great, and there's always a way to use what comes in, even if a client might need some recipe-storming to figure out what to do with beets.
In the back room of St. Louis Park Emergency Services, hundreds of bags of donated groceries await sorting by volunteers. Steve Kessler, the operations coordinator, remembers when some high school kids did a food drive. "Suddenly, we had tons of ramen coming in and I'd never seen it before. So I asked them, 'Do you like this?' and they were like, 'Oh, yeah, ramen rocks!' "
Hold up on the canned peas, though.
For years, those assembling the bags of food followed a familiar script -- can of peas, can of beans, box of spaghetti, etc. A few years ago, Kessler began surveying clients "and we found out that not everyone likes canned peas," he said. "I mean, hardly anybody likes canned peas."
In fact, given a say in the matter, 98 percent of families prefer corn and green beans. Choice may seem like a little thing, given the far larger reason that brings someone to a food shelf in the first place. But it's the sort of thing that can take a bit of the edge off being on the edge.
Now is the time of year when malls sprout bins for food shelf donations, when we're encouraged to bring a canned good to the chorus concert, or bolster our grocery bill with a donation. Summer is when food shelves field the greatest demand because kids are home from school. But the holidays encourage beneficence. And canned goods have a long shelf life. The food will be used.
A glimpse at a couple of food shelves provides a glimpse into what is, in many instances, a singularly bad week in a family's life. A food shelf is not meant to be a steady source of food, but a handhold to get someone from bad to better -- or at least to not so bad, said Lisa Buck, development coordinator for the Emergency Foodshelf Network.
More than 60 percent of families who use food shelves in the Twin Cities have jobs. Maybe someone's hours were cut that week, or one of the kids got sick and needed some medicine, or gas prices took another inexplicable jump. It doesn't take much to make a bag of groceries look like a miracle.
Or here's an increasingly familiar scenario: A family comes in from one of those big houses in Eden Prairie, an empty house if you looked inside because there was no money left to buy furniture. And now even the refrigerator is empty because Dad just got laid off. "The idea that people in the suburbs don't use food shelves is a myth," Buck said.
What do food shelves need? Everything, but there are some popular items in perpetually low supply: whole grain cereals, raisins and dried fruit, coffee, tea, canned tuna and canned chicken. Think about the ethnic needs of a certain food shelf. (EFN can help: call 952-925-6265 or contact its Web site at
http://www.emergencyfoodshelf.org.)
And when in doubt, send money. Food shelves use it to buy bulk foods and hard-to-find commodities.
For example, Community Emergency Services in Minneapolis' Phillips neighborhood has a need for goat to serve its Somali families, and a determined search by EFN resulted in finding a steady source. While the average household might not have goat to give, there's a need for other, less exotic foods -- such as dates.
"Our ancestors tell us dates give you energy," said Mohamed Haji-Husein, executive director of the Somali Benadiri Community of Minnesota, who translates for those who use the food shelf.
Food can provide energy, but it takes opportunity to maintain it. The prospect might dim, but it might be just a meal away.