Food banks

I'm not one for gambling really. Never seen the fun in it.

In our office though there are a few opportunities to have a 'little flutter', including the 'scratch off syndicate': about twelve staff members pay a pound, buy scratch cards with the money and split any winnings.

They decided last week that if they had a medium sized win they'd split the profits between themselves and the local food bank.

They ended up with £10 spend on food items, and I volunteered to help choose what to buy. Partly because I thought that was the right thing to do, but mostly because I had nagged them into thinking about people less fortunate than themselves, which led to a long debate about the fairness of society (all of which is too boring to go into now).

So, anyway, we chose Aldi as the store to spend the money in, because it's pretty inexpensive so obviously the cash goes further. Or does it?

You see, it seems like a simple job: spend a tenner on food; put it in the foodbank; job done.

But it's not that simple.

First of all you have to think about what people need.  This bit is helped along by the foodbank giving a list of items that they're running low on.  This week it was sponge puddings and instant mash.

But then there's the quantity vs quality debate.  You can buy quite a lot of budget instant mash with £10.  But I wouldn't give it to my dog -- seriously, the stuff looks like it has the nutritional value of wallpaper paste, and that's not good for anyone, much.

We bought the instant mash on this occasion because it was specifically requested by the foodbank, but we decided never to buy it again, instead we'd go with something better.  Even tinned potatoes would be preferable to the stuff we bought.

And the next factor to be considered is ethics: take tuna as an example.

Should you buy cheap tuna, knowing that it is probably net-caught, which is a practice that endangers other aquatic life, including the dolphin?

Source: Observer.com

Or, should you spend that little bit extra on pole-caught tuna, which is considerably more environmentally friendly?

Well, we agonised about it in the shop.  (Seriously, we discussed it for about 10 minutes). Finally we went with the ethical option, knowing that people eating it couldn't care less because they're hungry, but also knowing that we could care less.

The conclusion for me was a long time coming, but actually quite simple: people are hungry and will eat whatever they're given; the cheap stuff is nutritionally substandard; the expensive stuff is preferable; therefore, if you're gonna add to foodbank stocks, spend more money.

In the end, a tenner wasn't enough to buy what we set out to get, and to meet our own standards, so we spent about £12, and that felt right.

In future, when I buy anything for the foodbank, I'll be setting myself some standards:

1. There has to be enough stuff to feed a family of four for a full meal
2. If I wouldn't buy it for my own family, then I won't buy it for someone else's
3. If I think it might hurt our world to buy something, then I won't do it.

Anything else is like a grasshopper: it's just not cricket.