Feeding Your Family At A Food Bank Means Confronting Your Poverty Every Day
There are a lot of misconceptions about food banks. I’ve heard it all, from ”they eat better than I do,” to ”everyone there was driving a brand new car!” This has never been my experience in the 2 and a half years that I’ve been visiting my city’s food banks off and on.
The bank I visit frequently runs on Saturday. They open their doors at 8 o’clock in the morning, and they fill up fast. I’ve shown up at 8:05 and been number seventy-three in line. People will start queuing up at 7 in the morning to get into the food bank. The host church doesn’t really like this, and recently they actually had to hire security to shoo people away.
Parking is a nightmare. The lot is full of people sitting in their cars waiting to go in. I’ve gotten there and had to park down the street at the mall and walk back to the church. I think a big part of this is because there was just so much anticipated need that happened. My city has been one of the hardest hit in my state. Once inside, we’re issued numbers, and we fill out a card with our name, age, address, number of people in our household, and a declaration of need. At every food bank I’ve been to, you sign a declaration of need. It’s a humiliating experience to say repeatedly that you need help.
We sit at tables in the basement of the church. Often there are too many people for the seats, so people stand against the walls or down on the floor. Sometimes fights break out over ”cutting” and ”saving places” even though there is only one number per household, and there is no way to steal someone’s paper once filled out. Yet another reason that security is needed.
Numbers are called in groups of three. You go up to some volunteers who compare your ID to the address on your paper. This prevents people from double-dipping, or two people from the same address coming and getting food.
You go to a room to select a bread item. It’s not a loaf of white or wheat, it is donated bread from different bakeries. So you can get like, a loaf of French bread or herb and cheese bread. And while this sounds really great and delicious, they aren’t breads with which you can make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Also, they tend to go moldy within a day, so you’d better make sure you’re ready to use it.
Next, we pick a dessert. This is probably my favorite part. The desserts are donated bakery items — muffins, brownies, things like that. Once I even scored a birthday cake. I don’t know why you didn’t want your 50th birthday cake, Russell, but I appreciate it!
There is a meat item. Most of the time, it’s between two cans of tuna or two cans of shredded chicken. I’ve never gotten ground beef, or chicken thighs, or anything like that. Sometimes they have gizzards, or maybe a tube of venison, or you might get a pot roast. But I’ve never been that lucky. They usually do have some ground pork you could get, if you happen to be really early.
As for cereal, you can pick a bag of oatmeal, or a plastic bag of cornflakes or Raisin Bran. The bags always weird me out a little bit. They aren’t the plastic bag generic kind you get at the store — they’re plastic bags from inside the box. I don’t know if we can’t get the box because of the donation, but it always feels kind of strange. Then there are choices of a bag of pasta, a bag of rice, a box of Hamburger Helper/Tuna Helper, or Rice a Roni. You quite often get two, because these are donated a lot. It’s always lasagna flavored, and cheesy tuna. I don’t know why people seem to hate those flavors so much.
When choosing from canned items, you get one fruit and two veggies. Tomato sauce counts as a veggie. Canned fruit was typically apricots, but you might be able to find a cocktail in there somewhere. Almost all of it is in heavy syrup. When this was the only kind of fruit I was getting for a while, I craved fresh fruit so bad. I missed it. I missed cheese, too.
We get to pick our treat at the end. It could be M&Ms, or chocolatey cereal, or Nutri Grain bars. I’m always excited to pick out the treat. It almost makes waiting for two hours just to get my two bags of food worth it.
Most people try to get in early so they could maybe go to another food bank. Many in my town are open on Saturday, so if you’re trying to get food, you have to get there early and hope the line moves fast. Especially when you’re piling it all on your bike and pedaling from place to place, like most people are. You have to go to bank to bank because one bank is not going to give you enough food to last a week, or maybe even make a real meal, depending on what they have available to you. The food banks are a help, but they certainly don’t give you bags and bags of groceries. No one is filling up their trunk. No one is surviving very well, and in no small part because most of this isn’t that healthy. There’s sodium and heavy syrup as far as the eye can see.
No one I knew was driving up in a brand new car and filling up the trunk and then speeding off into the sunset, cackling at their good fortune. No one there wants to be there, no one is choosing to be there. We’re there because we’re choosing not to go hungry or let our kids go to bed hungry.
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