On Nutrition: Godiva Chocolates

With all the talk about nutrition that goes on these days, it is important to remind ourselves from time to time that food is more than just fuel for the body – it also plays a social and emotional role in life, the importance and value of which cannot be overstressed. This story comes to us from John Arnold, then the executive director of Feeding America West Michigan.

When the Feeding America way of allocating out food to its member food banks went entirely online, with the twice a day auction where food banks like ours bid credits that we have been assigned based on the poverty population of our service area, I was originally the person who did the bidding at our food bank.  That lasted until a most unfortunate incident involving 5 trailer loads of wintergreen breath mints, but we won’t talk about that situation right now.  In any case, while I was still doing our food bank’s bidding, I went onto the system one morning and saw that there were three trailer loads of Godiva chocolates available from out in Pennsylvania someplace.  I was interested, but I checked on our inventory and found that we already had quite a bit of chocolate candy and so did not really need any of those three loads, but I felt a little bad about not bidding on them because Godiva chocolates certainly are among the best in the world. Continue reading “On Nutrition: Godiva Chocolates”

Ten Pound Hershey Bars – Part II

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

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.