The Food Bags
What do broke people eat?
I’ve been working through a post about the ways our income has changed this year and it’s a bit complex. To write about your personal finances you have to think deeply about money and values and behavior, and that can be a long process. When you think you’ve gotten to the bottom of a motivation or fully explained something in a way that makes sense, you read a draft and realize you aren’t quite there yet. I was prepared to start another draft of that post tonight when a sign was delivered to me. Specifically a sign sent my daughter’s elementary school in the form of two plastic bags.
My daughter qualifies for free lunch through the National School Lunch program, so we’re on some kind of email list maintained by the school liaison, whose job it is to support broke and/or poor families. (I’ve said this before, but it’s always good to clarify: we’re broke, not poor, because if an absolute dire emergency happened we have enough family that we wouldn’t have to worry about being homeless or starving. That’s a privilege that many poor families don’t have.)
At the beginning of September I received a form letter from the school liaison asking if we wanted a Friday food bag. My son, who is enrolled in the district but at a different school, was also eligible for one. The email said they would contain an average of five meals: breakfast and lunch for Saturday and Sunday, 1 dinner item, and 3 to 4 snacks. The bags would be delivered discretely at the end of the school day, which was my biggest hangup. I really like my daughter’s teacher and I know that asking for help isn’t shameful, I know that, but I didn’t want her to know.
The program that delivers the bags to the school is part of our local food bank and they’re assembled by volunteers. I’m assuming it’s donated food, because when I opened up the bags I saw some usual suspects: Top Ramen. Canned chili with beans. Malt O’Meal. Nothing I’d necessarily want to feed to my children, but I figured I could at least eat the Ramen in a sort of midnight snack situation.
The snacks seemed promising! Dole fruit cups, Costco granola bars. I started unpacking them and realized that the fruit cups expired on the first of the month. Oh, no! Someone made a tiny whoopsie. I moved to the boxes of milk. They expired in July. Okay, not ideal for shelf-stable milk. But… The oatmeal? Best by November 2021. The granola bars? Use by August 2021. Over a year ago.
I know that finding shelf-stable food to donate can be difficult. I know that you can get more food for your dollar if you buy heavily processed items. I know that we are incredibly lucky to have a school with a person whose entire job is to help low-income families. I know beggars can’t be choosers. I do know these things.
But it is insulting to put expired food in my daughter’s backpack and have her bring it home to us. It’s insulting to give us food that we have to throw away. It’s insulting to donate food that you wouldn’t eat yourself. And of all the people who worked together to make the bags—the people who donated the food, the people who assembled the bags, the people who drove the bags to the school, the people who delivered the bags to the classroom and then my daughter’s backpack—no one either noticed or cared.
Anyway! On a lighter note, I’ll leave you with this Paul F. Tompkins bit that I will forever associate with food banks.
For what it’s worth- I don’t have financial issues and can afford to toss food- though obviously i should try not to be wasteful- but in the pandemic I started to eat expired food because I learned the expiration dates are all bull anyway. NPR’s planet money podcast did an episode on food expiration dates and the nytimes ran articles. So I guess I’d eat the food is all I’m saying. My mother’s become the same. And pre-pandemic we would refuse to eat yogurt if it was a day before the expiry.