#Food Pantry

[rosalind2013]

I say this as someone who works at a nonprofit: the attitude “someone who has nothing will be grateful for anything” is harmful and dehumanizing when it’s used to justify donating something ripped, stained, or expired to someone less fortunate.

Homeless people deserve clothing with good structural integrity. Victims of house fires deserve linens that are free of stains. No one should have to eat expired food. It’s disrespectful to give people scraps when they’re already hurting.

Please, out of respect for your fellow humans, check the dates on your food donations before you drop them off.

[gardening-guy]

was going to go to bed but instead ended up deciding to make a big slow cooker soup to donate to the local community fridge tomorrow

i'm making homemade veggie stock overnight with the scraps of 3 potatoes, 3 carrots, 1 onion, and some bits of garlic peel. i chopped up all those veggies too to refrigerate overnight until the morning. in the morning, i shall strain the veggie stock, add in the chopped veggies to slow cook, boil some rotini noodles (or whatever else we have), and add some shredded chicken once everything is together and cooked :)

soup for da community <3 🍲

[soft-homestyle]

Stay cozy.

@soft-homestyle

[chronicallycouchbound]

I successfully convinced a toddler at the food bank that my rollator is a racecar so today is a win

[dismalpizza2]

I messed up budgeting this month, while I'm not completely broke there wasn't anything left for fresh fruit or veggies. I live in a community with Jewish food pantry that serves neighbors from all walks of life (Jewish or not) including kosher clients. I'm blown away by how much good fresh food they gave me and how friendly everyone was. They didn't bat an eye at knowing what I could actually cook since I have only a Dairy kitchen. They even had special Rosh Hashanah bags with apples, honey, frozen challah, and candles! If you're genuinely struggling to afford the holidays check with your local Jewish Federation/JCC/Shul/JCFS and see if they can point you to a food pantry that can help.

[robertpallesen]

Free Pantry, Portland, OR © Robert Pallesen

[newyorkthegoldenage]

The Reverend Raymond Brown and others hand out bread and milk to unemployed people outside St. Peter's Mission, around January 23, 1931.

Photo: Associated Press

[bumblebeeappletree]

The community cupboard for sharing food, sited on a Brunswick footpath, offers a good clue for what lies in the Seeds Community Garden behind the fence: inclusion, generosity and community.

Seeds is a garden where people living with a disability can connect with the local residents over a shared love of gardening, plants…and a cuppa.

Garden manager Jo Townsend says the garden was a bare patch of lawn nine years ago. Milparinka wanted to turn the space into something more substantial that would enrich the lives of people the service supports.

Garden club runs twice a week for people to garden together and then share food and a drink afterwards.

The garden is run along no-dig and permaculture principles. The goal is for every plant introduced to have multiple uses.

Harvests are recorded for everything that’s picked and in most years a tonne of food is grown here. The harvest is shared among the gardeners but also with the wider community, via food relief organizations and the community cupboard on the footpath.

A soup festival is held every year, which started with wanting to share a few pumpkins and has grown to hosting more than 1,000 visitors.

An exciting new addition is a food-waste dehydrator; a machine that turns vegie scraps into ready-to-go fertiliser over an 8-10 hour cycle. Already 2,000 kg of food has already been diverted from landfill since it was installed. Food waste is collected from local businesses, while the end result is delivered to schools and other community organisations.

Filmed on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country in Brunswick, Vic.

Featured plants:

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum)

[voluptuarian]

How to Eat From the Food Bank/Food Pantry

I've seen a number of posts recently encouraging people to utilize their local food banks if they're struggling financially, as well as providing some basics on how one would go about doing that. I've been relying on the food bank myself for about six months now, and it's been very helpful. However, as somebody who was pretty new to cooking and was mostly using pre-made dishes when I did, when I first started going I found the food I was getting completely antithetical to how I cooked and ate and struggled to figure out how to utilize what I was getting. I'm sure I'm not the only person in this position, so I thought I would share the strategies I've learned for making the most of food bank offerings, and the best and most affordable dishes I've found to make with them!

What To Expect/What You'll Need

Food banks tend to cater to families, assume you know how to cook, and expect you to own kitchenware and have pantry space. So if you don't have them already, go to goodwill and get like a 13x9 cake pan, basic soup and frying pan, a stock pot, and a decent size mixing bowl for your own good. (You can get them like one per paycheck if you need to, or even ask friends and family if they have extras, but you Will need them.) You'll also want some cooking utensils, like ladles, spatulas, and decent knives. And God help you if you don't have much pantry space, because every flat surface in your house is now going to be covered in food cans and your crisper drawer will not be enough to hold all the fruit and veg you'll be inundated with. (Sadly, at least where I am, they don't give out milk and that's like a basic ingredient for a lot of the food they're actually giving you, so idk what's up with that.) They usually also assume you have a car, and if you're like me and don't, absolutely bring your own bags because they probably will not have any, reusable shopping bags are perfect for this. Bring more of them than you think you'll need.

Foods you will likely get at a food bank

produce (I frequently get potatoes, onions, oranges, carrots, squash, melons, lettuce, cabbage, green onions, salad mixes, tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and so. many. apples. It's especially abundant during the summer and fall, when people will donate extra produce from their gardens and fruit trees. Good luck finding places to store all that, though.)

boxed macaroni and cheese

dried beans

dried pasta

bagged nuts

bagged rice

canned food (canned spaghetti/ravioli, applesauce, various canned vegetables, and many varieties of beans-- I've most frequently gotten pinto, kidney, navy, and black beans.)

a protein option (at my local one they usually offer a choice between eggs or an egg substitute and some kind of frozen meat, like fish sticks or breaded chicken.)

Foods I recommend you regularly buy yourself if they're not providing (most of which will be used in at least one of these recipes)

cheese (esp shredded)

milk

salt, pepper, and dried spices/herbs (these are not too expensive generally, if you buy them like a week at a time you can get a nice collection in not too long, and if it comes to that they are very easy to steal, but sometimes food banks will give them away as well.)

butter

cooking oil (olive oil is used in multiple recipes I'm sharing here, so that's what I'd recommend-- sadly it is spendy.)

garlic (it makes everything better, honestly, and it will last a long time in your cupboard, too.)

marinara/spaghetti sauce or other pasta sauces (now most these place are already giving out cans of sauce, so why bother buying any? Because they exclusively provide only the blandest, most watery, most worthless canned marinara/tomato sauces known to man. Do not bother trying to use these on pasta-- you can use them for other things, though, which I'll get to. But you'll need something to put on all that boxed spaghetti.)

Go-To Dishes for Food Bank Ingredients:

7 Can Soup - I am not exaggerating when I say this is now the staple food in my diet. Thankfully it is tasty, extremely easy to make, makes enough to last for days, gets better the longer it sits in the fridge, and can often be made with just what you get from the food bank. (Also great for popping in a tupperware for a comforting work lunch.) And you can buy the needed ingredients for less than $6 typically, so even if it's a bad week and they don't give you anything you need, this is still a very cheap dish to make. The basic recipe included here uses pinto, kidney, and black beans, plain diced tomatoes and diced tomatoes with chilies, corn, beanless chili, and a cheese of your choice, but you can easily change it up or add ingredients as well.

My way: I add dried spices, usually a little garlic salt, pepper, and a dash of paprika; as for cheese, shredded Mexican blend is my favorite for its smoothness but pepper jack is great too, and I often mix different kinds. I also play around with the beans I use depending on what I get, but also to taste-- using ranch beans instead of one of the standards is especially nice, and gives a richer flavor. (I haven't tried it with dried beans, but if you have bagged and not canned, I'd assume you could get away with substituting one of the the canned options for a dried one, but not more than that or the flavor will be too weak.) If you prefer a brothy-er soup throw one of those aforementioned tasteless-ass canned marinara sauces in with the beans, it adds more liquid without watering anything down. You can easily add a cooked meat in as well, I love throwing sliced kielbasa in when I can get it. And I usually wait until an old batch is getting low, throw a little water into the pot to soften the leftovers up, and then drop a whole new batch of ingredients in with it, it adds the more intense flavors of the older soup into the new batch (and means I don't have to wash the pot out in between.)

Rumbledethumps (Vers. 1, Vers. 2)

This is a baked Scottish comfort food with a great name. I regularly get given cabbage when I go to the food bank and for a long time was like, what can I possibly do with this? I also frequently end up with a lot of potatoes, more than I need. This dish uses up both of those, only requires a few additional ingredients, and is pretty easy to make even if you don't cook. (Also cabbage, onions, and potatoes are pretty inexpensive, too, so if you're missing one that's not prohibitive.) I've included two recipes as examples, but there are lots of variations you can make, and upping or lowering the amount of cheese, throwing in garlic or spices, or adding or forgoing meat makes it easy to still reliably make regardless of what ingredients you have or how much you have to spend on extras. (I would say, if you can add more cheese, do it, but then I am a cheese-loving gal.)

Briam (Vers. 1, Vers. 2)

This Greek dish is just designed to use up produce and I LOVE her for that. Early on I was absolutely bewildered by all the produce I was getting, and constantly struggling to use it up before it went bad, and briam solved all those problems. And it tastes and smells Divine. I even made it for Thanksgiving this year. Cooking know-how needed is minimal, and the prep is the most labor intensive part, then you just throw it all in a cake pan and put it in the stove. In a typical week you will probably get most of the vegetables you need to make this, and may need to buy a couple squash or tomatoes at most, as well as a few fresh herbs, so it's very affordable. And not only decadent, but a really nice break from a lot of the more processed dishes you'll get-- also vegan!

I've included 2 versions, one is a written recipe with photos, the other is a video of someone prepping briam (the first dish in the video), and while it doesn't provided measurements for everything, includes a lot of ingredients that the written recipe doesn't. My own method combines both of these recipes, so I wanted to share both, but also having a video example is nice sometimes, too.

My way: I've prepared dozens of different versions of this since I started making it depending on what veggies I have while generally falling somewhere between both versions, and it's always delicious. The key is to make sure you balance out starchy and watery vegetables-- look at the suggestions in Vers. 1 and try to keep whatever substitutes you make to the same proportions. (Also if you use carrots, wait until they've gotten a little soft and bendy; fresh, hard carrots will take longer to bake than all the other vegetables and won't cook soft in time otherwise.) For flavoring ingredients I rely on garlic, dried thyme, green onion, Italian parsley, fresh dill, and rosemary, preferably fresh if I can afford it. Sadly herbs are expensive, so if you have to pare it down, garlic, parsley, green onion, and fresh dill are all you really need (I can't skip the dill, it's So Important for me.) and use dried herbs to fill it out. I also like to chop up half a regular yellow onion (or several smaller ones) into fairly small pieces as additional flavor layer, then I use a whole red onion diced into big pieces as part of the regular ingredients. I use twice as much salt as the recipe suggests and only about 2.5 1/4 cups olive oil instead of 3, and skip the tomato paste (you won't need it.) I roughly peel my potatoes as well as any cucumber or zucchini (I tend to find it a bit bitter if I don't). I also like to cut up all my large veggies and throw them in a large mixing bowl, then dice up all my fresh herbs into a smaller bowl, where I combine them with the salt, garlic, and dried herbs, and 1/4 cup of olive oil; then I pour the herb bowl into the veggies, mix them well so everything is evenly covered with flavorings and oil, then dump that into the baking pan, and then add the rest of the oil and water. (I like to get the last of the herbs and spices out by pouring one of the 1/4 cups of water into the little bowl first to rinse it, and then dumping that into the cake pan.)

Adasi (Persian Lentil Soup)

Haven't made this yet because I still haven't bought mint or turmeric, but it looks easy and delicious, plus it's not uncommon to get bags of dried lentils from the food bank, they last a long time, and they're not that expensive to buy either. It's also another vegan option! Also this is one of the few lentil soup recipes (and soup recipes period) that didn't involve blending it afterwards-- I do not have a blender or a food processor, as many people don't I'm sure, and certainly don't have the funds to buy one just to make soup with, so this recipe was a treasure! (Also the instructions say to soak the lentils overnight, but that's not actually necessary-- and you could get away with skipping the parsley or lemon juice, if you needed to.) I feel like this would make a great topping for rice, too.

Hopefully this well help anybody using the food bank to maximize what you're getting, as well as making the jump into real cooking less intimidating for those just starting out. Happy eating!

[sometimes-men-need-help-too]

[callmemossbrain]

babe new date idea let's go to a food pantry together and show the statistics that the recourses are being used and will continue to fund them, all while spreading the word about how valuable using food pantries are to the community, and eat on the couch with a comfort movie on.

[arctic-hands]

Lol governments and charities really don't conceptualize disabled people at all

Caved in after waiting three months for my SNAP to go back to the previous two hundred thirty that was slashed to one-oh-eight dollars over summer with no reason given other than that I was under "redetermination" during that time despite my having emailed the papers needed over back in May. So that was four months of going hungry because I couldn't afford much in the way of hypoallergenic foods, and pretty much living off of white rice the entire time, only to be told last week I'm finally getting my SNAP increased again...by twelve whole dollars. Fuck. Gf bread is 7 dollars for a third of the amount so that's right out, same with pasta and even ramen, what little meat I've been eating is the fattiest slabs of ground beef that leave half a cup of grease when drained and maybe turkey bacon since it was on sale, I couldn't afford oat milk when I last ordered groceries, and today I had my first fresh fruit in weeks solely because of a new program in my city alone that gives us thirty bucks of SNAP for fresh produce.

So I caved and contacted 211, the government hotline that's supposed to hook you up with various help like charities, housing, and food pantries, pleading my case that I, a disabled person with no car, no ability to carry things more than five pounds, and no ability to walk very far, with only a corner store and amazon delivery for food and no food pantry within my severely limited walking distance, and even should I be able to hobble to a distant pantry and somehow don't wreck my back carrying a box of food home, there's no guarantee I'd even be able to eat what they gave me.

So I plead my case and desperate circumstances and this is the email I got back from them.

[Image Described: a screenshot of an email that says "Good afternoon, I am responding to your request for food assistance. While we do not offer a program her [sic] that specifically meets your needs, I will email over severeal resources in your area that may be able to assist you during this time. In terms of transportation, we" it cuts off. End I.D]

And then they send me a list of the closest pantries, all out of walking distance even before I had a bum knee and a cane and probably give out breadish food, and they say they have a "special lyft program" I can use a full TWO times a month, but that still leaves me unable to carry a box to and from the lyft.

lol rip me I guess 🥲

[gardening-guy]

i'm doing so much cooking lately

today i'm making friendsgiving turkey, sautéed kale with fried green tomatoes from the garden, and a lovely lil quiche with fresh dill, fresh green onions, and other fillings not from the garden.

yesterday i made homemade chicken noodle soup in the slow cooker, and i'm donating the leftovers in reusable containers to my local community fridge!

[rainydaypaperback]

Food Drive time

I'm a regular year round drop off point for our local food pantry as I have much longer hours. I've done this for years, so am very familiar with what things we need and rarely receive.

as we get to the season where everyone seems to have a food drive, here's what you should give them

MONEY

money pays the utilities & lets them purchase stuff in bulk for clients. Also pays for gas to pick up large donations from places. Give them money.

That is likely not what your local school/workplace/whatever decided to do though, so expect you to bring in things.

Follow your local pantry's wishlist if they gave you one! If they gave you a wishlist with non-food items on it.... give them those first! Those items are NOT covered by SNAP or WIC, so are harder for people to obtain. Not every pantry has space for stuff like toilet paper but if they asked for it... give them the non-food items over food ones.

If they did not give you a specific list, donate these items:

SPICES

rice & beans suck without spices. even salt and pepper is good! sugar too! Just the most basic spices will do! Got the giant horde of takeout individual packets? Food pantry would love them. Stick them in a ziploc bag before donating, just in case any pop.

FLOUR, CORNMEAL, & MASA HARINA

for baking, thickener, tortillas. If you're doing a drive where you want to show off how many pounds were donated, grab flour.

CEREAL & OATMEAL

Easy meal for folks that may not have access to a kitchen or for kids not up to prepping a meal by themselves yet. Shelf stable milk or milk powder is a nice combo with this, but often turns up as a UDSA commodity, so don't worry about where they'll get it. Bulkier cereals like cheerios are best cause they also double as finger food for toddlers! Got a variety pack of instant oatmeal and didn't like some flavors? Food pantry will take those too, so long as they're individually labelled.

INSTANT MASHED POTATOES

Instant bulk for a meal, very easy prep. Another one that doubles as easy food for little kids. This is also easy and filling for seniors or anyone with dental issues!

BAKING SODA

used for baking and cleaning! Double duty! Get small boxes.

[elijones94]

🇵🇷 This morning, me, my mom, and Elizabeth, a relative of my dad, worked at the food pantry in support of Second Union Church. It was said as we all worked that 500 boxes were to be filled with food ranging from rice to pasta and canned foods. Tomorrow, we will be in Hormigueros leading a youth camp in anticipation for Easter Sunday. 🥫🍚

[flamingpen18]

UGH

Our situation is terrible and it only seems to be getting worse.

We rely heavily on the local soup kitchen that gives out meals every evening except on weekends. Lately, the meals have included rotting produce, moldy bread, and bad meat. At first, I thought I was the only one noticing something was wrong. It turns out that @helly-watermelonsmellinfellon has also noticed an issue with the food.

It's difficult because you want to be thankful for what they do, but it's hard when you repeatedly get rotten food. In the last few months, things have taken a significant turn for the worst at the soup kitchen. Whoever is now in charge, is not doing a good job.

I'm going to put this out to the universe. Just because someone is homeless does not mean they don't deserve to be treated with dignity or be able to eat fresh (not rotten) food. Being homeless is a hell I wouldn't even wish on my abusive ex-husband. But to be made to feel like we should just be happy we have a moldy PB&J to eat is incredibly unkind. If you do not genuinely desire to help those less fortunate, please do not get involved. We already feel like we aren't worth the air we breathe. Being treated like we aren't important hurts. Everyone can tell when someone doesn't give a damn.