The poor you will always have with you

-Matthew 26:11

I finally volunteered at the local food back this weekend. Shame on me for taking so long. Food is a kind of charity I feel good about. I’ve been a customer and then a volunteer of foodbanks in my life.

I can think of two outstanding books about struggling with basic sustenance:

Charles Dickens Little Dorrit is a story about a Victorian era young woman born in a prison for men who didn’t pay their debts. She was born in debtors prison and lived there until her adulthood allowed her to get a job outside to pay for her family’s food. We have a modern system of bankruptcy now, which seems an improvement.

George Orwell Down and out in Paris and London is Orwell’s story of a time when he found himself in a period of no income. He had to find a way to scratch together enough to keep body and soul together until he started his next job.

My teenager was feeling sympathetic towards the homeless people we saw on the streets around us. I love her kind heart. And I figured if she could see how the charity systems work for the poor around us, it would ease her heart. Our life with her has included relying on charity.

When I was her age, my family was well acquainted with the systems that fed those who couldn’t. I wrote the story of butchering a road kill moose here. Alaska used that system to share food with those in need.

Later, I got become a cook for a YMCA day care, and had to feed 70 people (mostly little kids) breakfast lunch and snack every day. The food came from the local foodbank. That’s when I first learned about the lifecycle of the food industrial complex. Grocery stores take in huge amounts of product, fresh and processed and do their best to sell it all.

A percentage is left over, and that gets passed on to the tail end of consumers. As a cook for a charity institution, I ransacked these misfit items and turned them into food. There were some weird items to get through.

At the food bank this weekend, these institutional over flows were distributed to the individual consumer. The baked goods, meat, boxes of crackers and other random things were available for distribution.

We had 250 banana boxes and we stuffed them with similar items so each box had a hearty assortment. This was not the sort of thing that could be automated. It was a by-feel kind of thing. Each box had items I would have been glad to have. The recipients signed up for their box. They drove through in their cars, present a number to get their box.

At the end were a few folks without cars. A smaller box with the extra items that didn’t make it into the 250 were put into the hands of the walk-ups. They’d been waiting under a tree for their turn.

Clearly the Saturday was a culmination or a week of accumulating the food for distribution. And the food being stuffed into the boxes was the result of a lot of connections with merchants so that these extras could be gathered and given to people who wanted them.

My daughter enjoyed the productivity and obvious benefit of what we did.

There will always be a reason for a person to need food. Healthy fruit trees will make more than is easily harvested, and this is an example of how generosity is built into the world.

Different times and places did it differently. I got to see again how sharing and generosity is done in my time and place.