Food pantries are our major clients. Food by the ton goes from the Second Harvest Food Bank warehouse to these food assistance programs in Madison, Delaware, Grant, Henry, Blackford, Jay, Randolph and Wabash counties. We depend on the staff and volunteers at these predominantly faith-based programs to feed the hungry.
A number of years ago we decided to embrace a concept of food distribution that was new to the pantries. John Arnold and his crew of anti-hunger advocates up in Grand Rapids, Mich., did a study and came up with a “waste not, want not” program that connected to the revolutionary idea that clients would do better picking out the food their families could use rather than have a pre-packed box handed to them.
Up until then, we here in east central Indiana had promoted the pre-packed box idea and pantries had happily and conscientiously been giving them out for decades. They selected food from Second Harvest Food Bank, conducted food drives and purchased food keeping in mind how many boxes and cans of what they needed per size of family. Even if they didn’t have all the components, they would put together boxes of food to hand to clients who needed assistance. Clients rarely, if ever, saw the food the pantry had on hand.
An observation that came out of the Grand Rapids study was that pre-packed food was vulnerable to becoming wasted food. If a family could not use flour, the flour might be left in the trash behind the pantry. If members were diabetic and got fruit in heavy syrup, they were not able to eat it. Families, poor and rich alike, have cultural and personal preferences and situational needs. Client Choice emerged as a way to cut the waste and to give families the power to choose food items that best suited their needs. In most pantries in our region today, clients see the full array of food and select from that inventory.
John’s study also revealed that each person in poverty needed 4.5 pounds of food a week in addition to what they could get through their own resources and government assistance to be free from hunger. That doesn’t sound like much until you multiply those 4.5 pounds by 49,000 people living in poverty in east central Indiana times 52 weeks. Then you find that we need to make nearly 11.5 million pounds of food a year available in food assistance to meet the need.
Our challenge in east central Indiana is to help pantries build the capacity to handle this volume of distribution. Can they do it? We are a little over a third there. Tripling the amount of food they are distributing could be difficult. It would take more volunteers, more hours open, and perhaps more space. Food would not be as difficult a problem.
Waste-not, want-not promotes full use of the regional food bank. It is easy to see why. If a pantry buys a case of vegetable beef soup at the store, they will get 24 cans for about $11. If they spend $11 in shared maintenance fees at Second Harvest Food Bank, they get 89 cans of product. Just as pantries were able to see the wisdom in allowing clients choice of product, it is important for them to see how greatly they can increase the volume of food for their clients by leaning exclusively on donated food for their inventories.
We have several model pantries in the region that have pulled it all together. They spend their limited budgets accessing large quantities of food from Second Harvest Food Bank that they make available for choice by their clients. Clients choose what their families can use and then fill in the gaps with food stamp purchases and household dollars set aside for food. Nothing is wasted and fewer families are left wanting.
Lois Rockhill is executive director of Second Harvest Food Bank of East Central Indiana. She can be reached at lrockhill@curehunger.org.
