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Ways to End Hunger |
Reduce Waste and Humiliation—Let Clients Assemble Their Own Food Boxes<< previous page |
Benefits of client-assembled boxes
Letting clients assemble their own food boxes respects clients, their well-being and their dignity, as well as your dignity.
There is no such thing as an average family or need. Every family your food pantry serves is unique. The notion that it is somehow better or fairer to give every family the same quantity and variety of food is just wrong. What is fair about giving a family that needs a single day’s worth of help and a family that needs 10 days’ worth of help both five days’ worth of help? What is fair about giving an Anglo-American family that doesn’t eat rice and a Vietnamese-American family that eats mostly rice a one-pound bag of rice each? What is fair about giving dried beans to a family whose utilities have been cut off and so have no way to cook them? What is fair about giving bacon to a family whose religion abhors pigs?
What families will and will not eat, can or cannot use, is so unique to each family that ignoring or disregarding those differences genuinely is profoundly disrespectful of those families even if and when it arises from the purest of motives.
Standardized boxes increase waste
Our Waste Not Want Not research found that when people are given arbitrary selections of food without regard to their needs, tastes, habits, traditions, abilities and circumstances that up to half the food given will not ultimately be consumed by those intended beneficiaries.
You can rail all day about how “if they are hungry, they should eat it,” or how “beggars can’t be choosers,” or anything else along those lines that you’d like to. But at the end of the day the fact will remain that up to 50 percent of what you will have given out that day will have been wasted.
So, letting people pick out their own food achieves the third huge leap of cost-effectiveness that is necessary to draw the cost of ending hunger down to levels communities can afford.
What are the implications of this for your community?
If you continue giving out standardized food boxes, you will need to double both the estimated food need and the estimated number of food pantries in order to end hunger.
Why? Because, if you employ practices that result in 50 percent of your food being wasted, you need twice as much food to end hunger.
The Waste Not Want Not Project recommendations show that the average community in America today can essentially double its capacity to address its hunger problem by switching from giving out standardized food boxes to letting clients pick out their own food.