Cornmeal in the parking lot

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

This story about the importance of individual choice (and the silliness of standardized food bags/boxes) comes to us from the late John Arnold, who at the time was the Executive Director of Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank.

This story involves a pantry in the greater Grand Rapids, Michigan area that grappled with a quandary that I only learned about when they discovered a solution and came into the Food Bank on one of their normal visits.

This pantry had received lots of leftover bags of cornmeal from the community action agency that handled most of the mass distribution of USDA commodities in the area.  Of course the leftovers were available because very few people had wanted any cornmeal in the first place, but the pantry immediately started giving every one of their clients a bag of cornmeal in their standardized food bag.

Unsurprisingly, they started to find bags of cornmeal out in the parking lot.  Clients would come to the pantry, be given a standardized bag, and would get outside and realize there was this silly bag of cornmeal in there and they would abandon it.

So the pantry convened a committee to try to figure out what to do.  Continue reading “Cornmeal in the parking lot” →

Following a Client “To See What Really Happens to the Food”

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

This is a story that was told to John Arnold by a food pantry director.  This pantry director had become convinced that client choice and the other Waste Not Want Not methods were the right way to go, and had the authority to force the implementation of those practices in the pantry that he ran, but he was not able to really convince some of his volunteers, who remained pretty openly skeptical about how this was all going to work.  Interestingly, their own skepticism led them to discover the trustworthiness of the clients they were so anxious about.

Just a few days into using the new system, the volunteers noticed a particular client who was radiating a certain amount of guilt in his body language and was clearly taking an unusually large amount of food. By the time the pantry director became aware of the situation, they were actually congratulating one another on having their suspicions confirmed that you really could not trust the kind of people who came to food pantries to get food.

The pantry director found their attitude and behavior to be inappropriate and upsetting, occurring as it was in a church; but he himself was a little shaken by the episode and allowed himself to be coaxed out the door with the most antagonistic volunteers so that they could get into a car and follow this particular client to see what happened – what really happened – when you let people take as much food as they want. They surreptitiously followed the client’s car until he pulled into a driveway. Continue reading “Following a Client “To See What Really Happens to the Food”” →

You Can’t Survive A Heat Wave With Powdered Milk

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

A widespread practice in the charity food system is the preemptive filtering out of products that could potentially be offered to people in need, either for reasons of nutrition, or because we think that the people being served won’t want/need them. When instead we get out of the way and let food, even obscure or unhealthy food, find its way to the right hands, it often solves problems we never even imagined.

This story comes to us from the late John Arnold, who at the time was the Executive Director of Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank.

In 1995 there was an absolutely killer heat wave that moved into the Midwest. It actually came east from Chicago. While it was in Chicago, somewhere between 600 and 800 people died of heat related conditions or circumstances.

When the heat wave moved on into Michigan, the Public Health people declared a heat emergency, essentially a disaster declaration urging players of all sorts to take extraordinary steps to try to minimize the danger and damage that might occur. In particular they were trying to get people whose utilities had been cut off and/or who didn’t have air conditioning to go to shelters that were air conditioned. Continue reading “You Can’t Survive A Heat Wave With Powdered Milk” →

On Variety: Water Chestnuts

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

A widespread practice in the charity food system is the preemptive filtering out of products that could potentially be offered to people in need, either for reasons of nutrition, or because we think that the people being served won’t want/need them. When instead we get out of the way and let food, even obscure or unhealthy food, find its way to the right hands, it often solves problems we never even imagined.

This story comes to us from the late John Arnold, who at the time was the Executive Director of Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank.

Before we conducted the Waste Not Want Not research project, most food banks around the country had never challenged the agencies they served to expand the range and variety of products that that they would take and offer to their clients. These food banks were very limited in what product they could take, because it made no sense for them to take product that the agencies they served would not take. So, periodically, the Second Harvest (now Feeding America) national office had to contact food banks like ours, food banks that had been working on trying to expand agency receptivity to new and different products. We would be asked to take loads that many of the food banks wouldn’t even consider taking.

That happened to us one time when the national office had been trying for years to get a particular multi-national producer to donate. When the company finally called with an offer of product, it was unfortunately product that most food banks wouldn’t even consider taking – water chestnuts in gallon size cans. They were in big SeaLand cargo containers, three of them, coming across from China, not labeled yet – they were going to be labeled when they arrived in the U.S. – and the ship had come through a typhoon. Some sea water had gotten in the containers and the cans had rusted. It turned out to be purely cosmetic rust, not deep product-integrity threatening rust. The rust was just something that made cans quite ugly – to the point that the buyer here in the U.S. refused to accept the product.

The company, wanting to cut its losses, offered them into the food banking system, and the national office was not succeeding in finding anyone willing to take them. So they called us and asked us to take one of those loads as a favor to the national program.  Continue reading “On Variety: Water Chestnuts” →

I Wonder What Vegetable He Likes?

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

A critical component in running an effective charitable food distribution program is to provide foods that your clients can and will actually use. This story from John Arnold shows just how small a process change is sometimes needed to achieve this…

This story came from Texas.  I was down there presenting, and I forget now whether it was for the Food Bank in Dallas or Austin, since I’ve done this for both of them.  But I was able to go around and visit some of their agencies.

One of the agencies that we got to was cute, in a funny kind of way.  It was maybe twelve feet by twenty-five feet, maybe not even that long.  We came in the door, and to either side of you there were maybe three or four little guest chairs, and then straight ahead of you was the intake desk, and no wall or anything behind it.  There were shelving units that pointed the length of the room so you could see up and down those aisles between the shelving units with all the food on it.

As we arrived, the elderly woman who was staffing the pantry was doing an intake interview with an elderly gentleman.  When she finished, she said that he qualified to get food, and told him to go have a seat again in one of the guest chairs.  Then she got a box and started walking up and down the shelving units, picking out the food that he was going to be given.

I was absolutely riveted by his face as she went up and down those aisles.  She was probably twelve feet away from him, and he was sitting there in absolute anguish while she mused aloud to herself, “Hm, I wonder what kind of vegetable he likes?  I’ll give him these.” And she’d take a couple of cans and put them in the box.  She did the same with all the other food products.  Obviously it never occurred to her what was happening, and how horrible this experience was for him – how excruciating it was to have someone else picking out his food without him having any voice in the matter whatsoever when he was sitting ten, twelve feet away.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to just look over and say, “What kind of vegetables do you like?” and then give him those, but she never did.

Giant Tubes of Pizza Sauce

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

A widespread practice in the charity food system is the preemptive filtering out of products that could potentially be offered to people in need, either for reasons of nutrition, or because we think that the people being served won’t want/need them. When instead we get out of the way and let food, even obscure or unhealthy food, find its way to the right hands, it often solves problems we never even imagined.

This story comes to us from the late John Arnold, who at the time was the Executive Director of Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank.

One day, Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank was asked to take one of the 200 tractor-trailer loads of Pizza Hut pizza sauce being distributed through Feeding America. The sauce came in a multiple gallon plastic tube.  Clear, thick, tough plastic.  Definitely a container meant to be put in an institutional dispenser and not in the little 18 oz. jars people are used to having their pizza sauce in. Being food banking’s Mikey food bank – as in “Give it to Mikey, he’ll try anything” – I said that we would take one.

When the pizza sauce arrived, indeed it did look a bit challenging.  But I had developed a list of clients who were willing to let me ask them questions about product.  So I decided that I would make the rounds of seeing them and learn what they thought about it.  I wrote out a little script so that I would be reasonably scientific in this whole deal and would pretty much have every conversation – at least my side of it – go pretty much the same way, so we’d have an ‘apples to apples’ comparison.

I took one of the big sleeves of pizza sauce with me.  I would go up to the door, and I would knock, and the person would come to the door.  I would say “Here, take this,” and then put the thing of sauce in their arms so there was no question about what we were talking about or how it was packaged or anything else because they were holding on to it.  Once they stopped laughing and stopped sort of ooching it with their fingers, I read my first line of the script, which was, “This is pizza sauce, I can get a lot of it, what do you think?”

Eleven out of eleven clients gave some variation on “Oh my goodness, this would be wonderful. I could use this in so many different ways.”  And then they would rattle off the pizza, the lasagna, the spaghetti, the casseroles, the chili, the goulash, soups, stews, all kinds of different ways because indeed it was a tomato sauce sort of thing that presumably could be used in a whole variety of ways.  And they all, every one of them, ticked off a list of ways they would be able to use it.

My next line was one that in a courtroom would have got me gaveled down for leading the witness, but I was concerned that sometimes when people feel like they are not important and they’re dealing with someone who is important, they will be agreeable – because a survival skill they’ve developed is not confronting authority unless they really need to because there’s no gain, and often some pain, that comes from doing that.  So the last thing in the world I would want them to do is tell me that the pizza sauce package was just all hunky-dory and no problem at all when what they were really thinking was, “Oh my gosh, who would ever think that this would be a reasonable thing to do!”

So the second line I read was, “What about the package? That’s got to be a problem.”  I told them that in my opinion the package is a problem.  So if that’s what they’re thinking, I’ve made it very easy for them to just agree with me.  It’s only if they really believe otherwise that they might say anything else.

Ten out of the eleven clients just gave me a quizzical look, and then asked me some variation on the theme of “Have you ever heard of Tupperware? It’s a wonderful tool, these little packages that you can put things in and then freeze them, and take them out when you need them.  And that’s what I’d do with this.”  The eleventh client said, “No, the packaging’s not a problem.  I’d just freeze it the way it is, and then just break off the size chunk I need as I need it.”

So eleven out of eleven clients affirmed – readily affirmed – that they could easily use this product, that they would in fact use it, and that they would use it in a whole variety of ways they already were familiar with, knew about, and knew how to do, and that the packaging was no problem whatsoever.

Then I went around and visited eleven food pantry directors, and never got to my second question because they never stopped sputtering after the first one, just going on and on and on about what an impossible situation our, and their, having this product would be.  That there was no way that clients would ever be able to figure out how to use this product, and oh my goodness, such a huge amount of extra work for the pantry to have to buy jars and make labels and develop sheets of recipes and develop cooking classes, and oh my it’d just be impossible and couldn’t possibly work.

Our food bank requested and received seven trailer loads of that product, and as fast as pantries that were willing to take it and offer it out put it out on their shelves, it flew off those shelves to clients who knew absolutely how to use it.

And with those seven trailers we took more than any other food bank in the nation.

This food is for the birds!

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

A widespread practice in the charity food system is the preemptive filtering out of products that could potentially be offered to people in need, either for reasons of nutrition, or because we think that the people being served won’t want/need them. When instead we get out of the way and let food, even obscure or unhealthy food, find its way to the right hands, it often solves problems we never even imagined.

This story comes to us from the late John Arnold, who at the time was the Executive Director of Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank.

Occasionally the food bank receives 4 foot by 4 foot by 4 foot tote bins of assorted product from various drug store chains.  They may have closed a store or done a renovation or something, and they’ve pretty much swept the shelves of the product and given it to us.  In the same tote you might have lawn chairs and camera film and sunglasses and lip balm and who knows what else.  So we would go through those totes.  Sometimes we would sort out the product in reasonable ways and group similar items together.  In some other cases we would merely ensure that each and every item was intact and fit for use, fit for its intended purpose.  In those cases we just carefully put it back in another tote filled with an assortment of things.  We might send those out on our mobile pantry trucks, usually just one tote per truck of that sort of thing.

There was an agency one time that was doing a mobile pantry distribution that had one of those.  Two women, who were helping, just happened to be assigned to the tote of miscellaneous drug store stuff, and they told me this story after the incident.  They were getting stuff out of the tote and putting it on the table for clients to be able to get at, when they came across two five pound bags of wild bird seed.

One of them made a joke about it of some sort, visualizing the clients just “peck peck peck” eating the wild bird food, or something, and somehow it hit the other one’s funny bone and they got to laughing.  The more they laughed, the funnier it got – to the point that they were almost rolling on the ground – and then they turned and saw a client, in this case an elderly woman, standing there looking at those bags of birdseed the two volunteers still had in their hands.  Her face conveyed yearning and incredulity, a pleading look.  She explained, “Back when Harry was alive, going out and feeding the wild birds was just one of our pleasures in life.  Since he died, I haven’t been able to do that. Is there any way that I could please have one of those bags of bird seed?”

The two volunteers were immediately totally ashamed of themselves for thinking that this was a silly item that they had come across.  They immediately told her, “Absolutely!”  In fact, she could not only have one bag, she could have both bags, and if she would hold on for a minute they would be more than happy to go through the tote further and see if there might possibly be any more.  And they did, and dug through in a frantic – and as it turns out futile – hope that there might be additional bags of this product that only moments before they had thought was utterly ridiculous.

Ten Pound Hershey Bars – Part II

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

A widespread practice in the charity food system is the preemptive filtering out of products that could potentially be offered to people in need, either for reasons of nutrition, or because we think that the people being served won’t want/need them. When instead we get out of the way and let food, even obscure or unhealthy food, find its way to the right hands, it often solves problems we never even imagined.

This story comes to us from the late John Arnold, who at the time was the Executive Director of Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank. Click here for Part I.

The other place I delighted in sending the ten pound Hershey bars was off to regular pantries with a plea that they make them available to women with children.  My rationale was that those women had probably had to bring their children shopping with them because they could not afford a babysitter generally.  It is likely that when they got up to the checkout lanes where all the candy is displayed right at a child’s eye level, that those mothers were asked by their children, “Mama, could we have some candy?” and she probably has had to say no pretty much every time.

But then she’d gone to the church and she’d come home with the biggest candy anybody has ever seen, and undoubtedly children from all up and down the street would hear about it and they would come over and they would all stand and marvel at this candy, and they would all get to have as big a piece as they wanted, and probably a bigger one than they could actually eat, and some of them might even get sick from it, but for a time, in that household, there would be laughter and there would be fun, and there would be a sense of being very special.

Ten Pound Hershey Bars – Part I

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

A widespread practice in the charity food system is the preemptive filtering out of products that could potentially be offered to people in need, either for reasons of nutrition, or because we think that the people being served won’t want/need them. When instead we get out of the way and let food, even obscure or unhealthy food, find its way to the right hands, it often solves problems we never even imagined.

This story comes to us from the late John Arnold, who at the time was the Executive Director of Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank.

One of the strangest donations of product our Food Bank ever received was a holiday novelty item: Hershey bars that weighed ten pounds.  They were just like the little ones, but they were about three feet long and a foot and a half wide and weighed about ten pounds.  Obviously no one on earth technically “needs” a ten pound Hershey bar, and even I would hesitate to characterize a ten pound Hershey bar as “nutritious.”  However, back in my Legal Aid days in Illinois I helped with the creation of the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence and so was somewhat familiar with the dynamics of domestic violence and what kind of situations domestic violence shelters have to help clients come to grips with and move beyond.

I insisted that all of our domestic violence shelters take at least one of those ten pound candy bars, and they all did so, albeit a little mystified by my insistence that they do so.  Several of them reported that when they had gotten them back to their shelter and shown them to the current residents, a number of women and children who were clients there at the shelters – who had emotionally shut down as a result of the trauma they had suffered – burst out laughing upon seeing these totally ridiculous candy bars.  That turned out to be the beginning of their healing process.

Chocolate Donuts for the Soul

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

A widespread practice in the charity food system is the preemptive filtering out of products that could potentially be offered to people in need, either for reasons of nutrition, or because we think that the people being served won’t want/need them. When instead we get out of the way and let food, even obscure or unhealthy food, find its way to the right hands, it often solves problems we never even imagined.

This story comes to us from the late John Arnold, who at the time was the Executive Director of Feeding America West Michigan Food Bank.

One time I was visiting a pantry – I believe down in Texas – during one of my expeditions to present at a Food Bank’s agency conferences.  I was walking up and down the aisles of the store-like pantry that was entirely along our Waste Not Want Not model.  When I turned a corner, here was a young woman pushing her shopping cart and shopping as clients were allowed to do at that pantry.

She had apparently just come upon a display of packages of chocolate donuts, and as I rounded the corner, she was in the process of hugging one of those packages of chocolate donuts.  Upon seeing me, she was obviously embarrassed to have been caught in such a display of affection for so silly a thing, and insisted on explaining herself to me, which I just as promptly assured her she certainly did not need to do.

But she wanted to, and so she explained: She had gotten pregnant while still a teenager and had dropped out of school and had had that baby and then two more children by the same father before he disappeared.  He took their car and whatever money they had with him, leaving her without a high school diploma, without a car, and with three small children to try to feed and take care of.

She said that her life was so hard, that it was so difficult to cobble together all the things that it takes to feed and house and clothe children, that to preserve her sanity she had developed little tricks and games that she played with herself.  One of them was that when she finally got those kids tucked in at night and they had all lived through another day, she would reward herself with a chocolate donut.  There were some days that knowing that that donut was waiting for her was all that got her through the day.

She concluded that, given her fairly ample figure, “Sometimes your soul needs things that maybe your body ideally doesn’t.”