Nutrition

Study Snacks

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

When considering what might or might not be appropriate to offer to the people we serve, it is important to keep in that food is much more than just its nutritional label, a truth perfectly illustrated by this story that came to us from the Food Bank in Spokane, Washington, as told by then-Director Al Brislain:

We were interviewing clients in Spokane at a monthly supplemental distribution program we operated.  We asked one woman a question about the benefit of receiving the food.  She started talking about how her son’s grades had improved dramatically since they had started receiving the food.  The immediate assumption of the interviewer was that the improvement was because the boy was now receiving good nutrition, etc.

The mother said, ‘No,’ that it was because of the snack food they had received.  After seeing the perplexed look on the interviewer’s face, she explained: for years her son had been ashamed to invite his friends over to study with him because there were no snacks in the house because they couldn’t afford them.  Now the son invited friends over to study regularly, causing the improvement in his grades.

A response to “Why Can’t America Solve the Hunger Problem?”

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

The below was written in response to an interview of author Andy Fisher by Steve Holt for Citylab, which can be found here.

Like Janet Poppendieck in Sweet Charity, Andy Fisher raises some good points, but mistakes common poor practices within the charitable food system (over reliance on food drives, providing a 3-day standardized box of food once a month, insufficient attention paid to the dignity of people seeking help, etc.) for justification of a broad indictment of the system itself.

Over 50% of the households in this country are not well positioned to cope with unexpected expenses, and even more are only a missed paycheck or two away from a real financial crisis. The charitable food system, run properly, is an outstanding means of providing families that run into bumps on the road of life (unexpected car repairs, medical expenses, etc.) with an emergency injection of resources that can help prevent a temporary situation from turning into a financial death spiral, thus speeding a return to self sufficiency. (In such situations, it is more of a trampoline than a safety net!)

Even when providing long-term assistance, the charitable food system (again, run properly) produces a multiplier effect in terms of community impact per dollar that most other programs can only dream about. Including the operating expenses of our regional Feeding America food bank, the organization I run provides more than $5 of food assistance to people in need for every $1 of community resources spent in the process. In comparison to that 5:1 ratio, even the best cash or cash-equivalent programs like SNAP operate at less than 1:1 due to administrative costs.

I also strongly object to the idea that the charitable food system (or SNAP) should be in the business of paternalistically deciding what foods are “acceptable”. We should certainly encourage and empower people to make healthy choices – and indeed over 2/3 of the food my organization handles is fresh produce – but to claim that we shouldn’t also offer people in need the opportunity to have things like birthday cakes is to deny the emotional, social, and cultural role that food plays in all of our lives, and is fundamentally hostile to the basic human dignity about which Mr. Fisher professes to be so concerned. (More on that subject here.)

Hunger is a foundational problem. If we want the economically struggling people in this country to be active in bringing about long-term positive change at any level (personal, community, national), we must do more to address hunger in the near term, not less. As a wise man once said: “A person who knows where their next meal is coming from can have many problems, a person who does not has only one.”

Anyone interested in learning more about how the charitable food system can (and should) work to adequately address the acute problem of hunger in America, and thereby create space in which long-term solutions can plausibly be enacted, can learn more here.

On Nutrition: Godiva Chocolates

Posted on by Jeff Thomas

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

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.”