The poor you will always have with you<\/p>\n\n\n\n
-Matthew 26:11<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019ve been a customer and then a volunteer of foodbanks in my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can think of two outstanding books about struggling with basic sustenance:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Charles Dickens Little Dorrit <\/a>is a story about a Victorian era young woman born in a prison for men who didn\u2019t 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\u2019s food. We have a modern system of bankruptcy now, which seems an improvement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n George Orwell Down and out in Paris and London<\/a> is Orwell\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I was her age, my family was well acquainted with the systems that fed those who couldn\u2019t. I wrote the story of butchering a road kill moose here<\/a>. Alaska used that system to share food with those in need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end were a few folks without cars. A smaller box with the extra items that didn\u2019t make it into the 250 were put into the hands of the walk-ups. They\u2019d been waiting under a tree for their turn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My daughter enjoyed the productivity and obvious benefit of what we did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Different times and places did it differently. I got to see again how sharing and generosity is done in my time and place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019ve been a … Continue reading