{"id":16080,"date":"2016-12-14T12:43:36","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T17:43:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=16080"},"modified":"2016-12-14T12:43:36","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T17:43:36","slug":"brocks-banter-time-to-talk-about-food-donations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/brocks-banter-time-to-talk-about-food-donations\/","title":{"rendered":"BROCK’S BANTER: Time to talk about food donations"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

The hibernation mode is settling in.
\nAs the weather gets colder and the days get shorter and shorter minutes at a time up until next Wednesday, a strange feeling descends. It\u2019s never a lack of energy \u2013 well, rarely \u2013 but an insatiable need to curl up and tackle my stack of unread books that has grown steadily over the last eleven months.
\nThis feeling is exacerbated by the snowfall, which so many of us awoke to early on Monday to dig out.
\nGrumbling about it?
\nSure, I heard a few, but as midnight came onto the horizon on Sunday night, I was all too eager to get a head-start on my digging. Regular readers of this column will know all too well \u2013 perhaps to their dismay \u2013 that I am an ardent fan of the winter. There is nothing better than the feeling of snow crunching underfoot or the first second or two after you leave your warm house into the frigid outdoor air to have the inside of your nose freeze ever so slightly the briefest of moments.
\nSo, when the sky was glowing with illuminated snowflakes, I couldn\u2019t resist a good shovel.
\nAs I began the cleanup, I kept considering an article I read earlier in the day in the context of the week that had just ended.
\nDespite our (my?) feeling of onset hibernation, the reality is few people have time to give into those urges at this time of year. If we\u2019re not Christmas shopping, we\u2019re getting ready for the holiday in other ways, or making the rounds every variety of Christmas\/Holiday\/Festive Cheer soiree thrown our way.
\nThat was certainly how things were rolling in my case, but this was coupled, as you will see in this week\u2019s Auroran, with covering a number of initiatives going on in our community to make sure this Festive Cheer is spread as far and wide as possible, whether it is a donated Christmas tree, the collection of gift cards and toys, or random acts of kindness.
\nAs such, my eye was drawn to an opinion piece by Tristin Hopper and published throughout Postmedia with the evocative title: \u201cFor the love of God, stop donating canned goods to the food bank.\u201d
\nIn the piece, Hopper highlights the myriad ways Canadians give to their local food banks, from large scale food drives to the odd buy-in at the annual office Christmas party.
\n\u201cNow, don\u2019t get me wrong,\u201d writes Hopper. \u201cDonating to charity is a good thing, particularly during the holidays when many charities budget for yuletide donations. But, the simple rules of economics are begging you: give money to food banks, rather than food.
\n\u201cCanned goods have a particularly low rate of charitable return. They\u2019re heavy, they\u2019re awkward, and they can be difficult to fit into the family\u2019s meal plan. Worst of all, the average consumer is buying those canned goods at four to five times the rock-bottom bulk price that can be obtained by the food bank itself.
\n\u201cPut yourself in the place of a food bank that has just accepted an anarchic 40-pound box of random food from an office fundraiser. It\u2019s got pie filling, Kraft Dinner, beans, pumpkin and chick peas. All those items need to be sorted, stored, inventoried, and then shoehorned into the food bank\u2019s distribution schedule. It\u2019s bad form to have low-income families eat nothing but creamed corn until the stocks run dry, so some items move faster than others.
\n\u201cConsider the herculean plight of the food bank warehouse manager, and it\u2019s easy to imagine how a particularly unhelpful box of food could end up doing nothing but wasting a bunch of people\u2019s time before it ends up shunted into a dumpster.\u201d
\nThese problems have been identified for years, Hopper writes, before speculating on the reasons why such donations persist. Among the conclusions are charities being \u201cextremely leery\u201d about telling people how to donate, and \u201cpeople don\u2019t trust charities,\u201d meaning they would rather make a tangible donation than make a bank transfer or a throw a gift card into a box. Then, of course, there was the feeling of dogoodery one feels when throwing a can of soup or a box of pasta into a box compared to gift card.
\nAt first I thought the article was something of a humbug at this time of year. The points made, of course, were all sound and logical, but I thought there was one missing element to it: the awareness that can be generated in just about any forum from a traditional food drive.
\nYear in and year out, whenever a charity is highlighted in our municipality, we always hear the same thing, \u201cI always thought Aurora was such an affluent community.\u201d In the grand scheme of things, that is obviously a true statement, but drives such as these serve to highlight it is not universal.
\nMulling these thoughts over the weekend, I reached out to the executive directors of both the Aurora Food Pantry and the York Region Food Network, both based in Aurora, both tackling the issue of hunger in very different ways. Joan Stonehocker of the York Region Food Network, said there are many reasons why money is better for food banks as food drives around Christmas and Thanksgiving are so successful they are often \u201chard pressed to sort and store all the donated food\u201d even with a team of volunteers
\n\u201cI receive calls from social service workers and individuals who are without food and looking for grocery cards because food banks can be difficult to access (limited hours, transportation issues, highly processed food),\u201d responded Ms. Stonehocker. \u201cWe need to be moving from the charitable food bank model to sustainable, systemic solutions.
\n\u201cAlthough food bank staff and volunteers might be \u2018good shoppers\u2019 they are still often buying non-perishable, processed foods to restock shelves. Imagine, if we gave people that are forced to access food banks grocery cards so that they can purchase food in the grocery store like everyone else. The health benefits of being able to choose your own food would likely far outweigh the bargain the food bank got on the can of tuna.
\n\u201cIt is time we move from this \u2018emergency\u2019 short term response, second tier food system which provides benefits to volunteers and comfort to those who are able to contribute, but does little to support those forced to use the services.
\n\u201cThe article says that people like to give tins of food to charities because they distrust that the charities will use funds wisely. I think the bigger problem is that people don\u2019t trust \u2018the poor\u2019 to use funds wisely. Research on the social determinants of health shows that there are greater benefits to your health from being socially connected rather than quitting smoking. Empowerment and choice are also healthful tonics.
\n\u201cFood Banks Canada Hunger Reports do not talk about food donations as a solution to the problem \u2013 it\u2019s time to shift the conversation and our actions away from emergency, short term responses.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir The hibernation mode is settling in. As the weather gets colder and the days get shorter and shorter minutes at a time up until next Wednesday, a strange feeling descends. It\u2019s never a lack of energy \u2013 well, rarely \u2013 but an insatiable need to curl up and tackle my stack of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-opinion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-4bm","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 23:21:25","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}