The more variety you offer your pantry’s clients, the more you increase the chances of meeting their needs, and the more you and your pantry can become miracle workers.

When the modern food pantry era began in the early 1980s, food pantries all across the country seemed to ask themselves the same question, “What food are we going to give out?” Within minutes the volunteers had gathered around a table with pen and paper and talked through what a family’s three-day food supply might be comprised of.

This exercise, repeated at hundreds of pantries across America, results in a list of specific food items that their pantry seeks and gives out.

These lists must go away! No matter how well-intentioned they are, they have become one of the most vexing barriers to ending hunger in America, blocking billions of pounds of other food products from being made available to the needy, and driving the cost of ending hunger hopelessly up out of reach.

 

Adding variety increases available food aid

It was the assessment of our Waste Not Want Not Project researchers that as much as 80 percent of the food a food bank can access will never be able to reach a needy family so long as fixed lists of what to give out govern the distribution system. Four out of five pounds of available food won’t be used. As a result, communities will never have enough food to meet the need. What food are we talking about?

Many agencies won’t give out:

Many agencies won’t stray from their standardized lists to offer food to families that need that help even when their area’s food bank has truckloads of these goods available that will otherwise go to waste.

This is crazy! We will never end hunger if we use only a fraction of the quantities and varieties of food available to us for that purpose.

An infinitely more reasonable, more cost-effective, more practical and more effective approach is to assume that if a product has found its way into your area’s food bank or food rescue organization that it is there for a purpose that may well involve one or more of your food pantry’s clients. Take some of it—not huge amounts—but enough to put out for your pantry’s clients.

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