Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Janet Poppendieck is a professor of sociology at Hunter College of the City University of New York and Assistant Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression.

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Sweet Charity?

Penguin Books

Chapter One

Charity for All

"ALL WEEK LONG I have been hearing about how they are going to gofrom door to door and that they hope lots of people give lots of foodso they can collect. They are very much into it." Marge, the mother oftwo Cub Scouts, is filling me in on the home front side of the BoyScouts' Scouting for Food canned goods drive as we sort and packdonated foods at sturdy tables set up in the parking lot of the Ciba-Geigycompany cafeteria. It is warm and sunny, extraordinarily pleasantweather for New Jersey in November, so I have opted for theoutdoor operation, but most of the packing is taking place inside thecafeteria, a long, low building on Ciba-Geigy's corporate campus inToms River, New Jersey. Toms River is also home to the Jersey ShoreCouncil of the Boy Scouts of America, which covers Ocean, Atlantic,and parts of Burlington and Cape May Counties. Each Novembersince 1988, the Jersey Shore Council has sponsored one of thenation's most successful drives. The Scouts distribute empty bags,preprinted with an explanation and a list of needed food items, door-to-dooron a Saturday in early November and pick up the filled bagsand bring them to central collection points a week later. Marge hasbrought three of her children to help with the sorting and repacking.There are two sons who are Webelos, the last stage of Cub scoutingbefore they become full-fledged Boy Scouts, and her daughter, agedseven, who, according to her mom, "is just packing her little heartaway."

    "This is their fifth year doing it," she explains. "I think they lookforward to it. As an incentive, Great Adventure [a nearby amusementpark] has a big rally where they give them a day at the park forfree.... It gets them geared up for it." Six Flags Great Adventure notonly hosts the pep rally; for the remainder of the season, it offers half-pricetickets to anyone donating a can. This year the weather hasbeen unusually sunny and warm and business has been good; thehaul from Great Adventure is larger than usual. The food collectedwill go to food pantries and prepared-meal programs throughout thefour counties.

    I ask Marge if her children understand where the food is going."I think so," she replies. "They hear very often on TV about thehomeless. This brings it more to light. They realize that people are inneed, especially for the baby food. My son asked me about all thisbaby food. `Don't the mamas have money?' and I had to explain tohim that `no, not everybody is as fortunate as we are, to give theirchildren the things they need.'" She goes on to articulate a feelingthat I have heard from other parents who make special efforts toinvolve their children in emergency food projects, the hope for anantidote to the selfishness that sometimes seems built into their children'slives: "I think it is unfortunate that it is all give-me, give-me,give-me, and this gives them a sense of perspective. A lot of more fortunatekids, they have money and everything they ask for is suddenlygiven to them." The Scouting for Food drive, she feels, gives them achance to give something back.

    The 20,000 pounds from Great Adventure are just the tip of theiceberg. The logistics of this particular drive are impressive, to say theleast. Ten thousand scouts and nearly three thousand adult leaders inmore than two hundred scouting units are involved. Ten collectionpoints around the four-county area are equipped with truck trailers,loaned for the occasion by a local hardware company that also suppliesthree rigs and drivers to haul the filled containers to the centralcollection point at Ciba-Geigy. A communications company lendscellular phones so that volunteers can alert a dispatcher when a particularcontainer is nearing capacity, and a rig can be detailed to bringit in, dropping off an empty replacement where the volume warrants.Meanwhile, Scout troops and Cub packs located near the Ciba-Geigycampus can take their collections directly to the company cafeteria. Auniformed Scout directs station wagons, minivans, and pickup trucksto one side of the cafeteria parking lot; the other is reserved for theeighteen-wheelers.

    There is only one loading dock for the cafeteria building, so aCiba-Geigy executive has designed an ingenious system for unloadingthe large trucks. A forklift equipped with a platform lifts severalScouts with empty shopping carts, loaned for the weekend by asupermarket chain whose president is the drive's honorary chairperson,to the level of the truck. The boys empty the bags into theshopping carts; when the carts are full, the forklift operator lowersthe platform to ground level, and the boys and their companions hustlethe filled carts into the cafeteria while a new team of Scouts beginsemptying bags into a new set of shopping carts. Special rampshave been provided by a moving company to ease the carts down thethree or four widely spaced steps between the parking lot and thecafeteria entrance.

    Inside the cafeteria, a growing pandemonium drowns out thebackground music. Many of the people who come by to drop off foodstay to help with the packing. At long tables pushed end to end,volunteers sort the goods into predetermined categories: "Veggiesand Soups," "Fruits and Juices" and "Meat/Fish/Prepared Foods,"and pack them into boxes, assembled and labeled early that morningand stacked in precarious towers around the edges of the room.The plan calls for culling out any products in less durable containers--rice,pasta, and the glass jars that show up every year despite therequests to the contrary--and any baby foods or other specializeditems, for separate packing. The atmosphere is festive, with an undertoneof controlled chaos. Shouts of "We need more boxes," and"Where does tomato paste go?" surface among the general din ofshopping carts clanking, misplaced children crying, and a pile ofboxes collapsing as a very short Scout pulls ones from the bottom. "Itis kind of overwhelming," one volunteer suggests. "There is just somuch work going on, so many people in a room which is probably toosmall for all the goings-on, but then to see that there are this manypeople willing to donate their time and do stuff, it makes you feel thatthere are still some good people left." By midmorning, the good peoplenumber in the hundreds, not only Boy Scouts, but grandparents,parents, siblings, whole families, and unaffiliated helpers as well. TheScouts conduct the drive, but the packing is obviously a communityaffair. Ciba-Geigy is providing refreshments for all comers, and as themorning progresses, the smell of burgers and franks begins to overwhelmthat of coffee and doughnuts.

    Once the cans are sorted and boxed by category, pallets, eachcontaining about two dozen boxes of a single type of food, are assembled,covered with shrink-wrap, and transferred to a warehouse, alsoon the Ciba-Geigy campus, where they will be stored and distributedas needed to area food pantries and meal programs. Local pantrieswill come to the warehouse to pick up food when they need it, take itback to their own headquarters, unpack it, sort it into their own categories,and repack it into pantry bags for needy families to take home.I plan to leave Ciba-Geigy at sunset, but I understand that the packingfest often continues until nearly midnight and sometimes resumesthe next day. "Last year we came around the same time," afather told me at midmorning, "as soon as our immediate food drivewas done.... We were here until eight or nine o'clock that night.Every time we were getting ready to leave, another tractor trailerwould come in, so they would ask those who could to stay. So we did.My son had a blast. He thought it was a lot of fun and he felt he washelping people and he wanted to come back this year."

    The Jersey Shore Council's Scouting for Food drive has all the ingredientsfor success. It has committed, experienced leaders with afinely tuned understanding of the project's complex logistics. It hashighly visible corporate sponsors that lend credibility among potentialdonors as well as necessary material support. It has the active participationof the local media for the essential publicity. It asks theScouts to do something that is well within their capability, and providesthem with the ingredients they need--preprinted flyers andbags and adult transportation--to do it. It has the cooperation ofother civic organizations and the good will of the populace. Further,it has roles for the minimally involved donor and the casual volunteer.People who simply fill up their bags and get them to their doorstepsby 9:00 A.M. can share in the sense of community solidarity, andsomeone who wakes up on the morning of the second Saturday inNovember with the urge to help can wander over to Ciba-Geigy andlend a hand--no advance commitment necessary. An estimated threehundred community volunteers helped with the sorting and packing,adding their efforts to those of the nearly thirteen thousand Scoutsand Scout leaders who participated in various phases of the project.Beginning with the pep rally at Great Adventure and continuingthrough the music and refreshments at Ciba-Geigy, it creates an upbeat,festive atmosphere that makes good deeds fun. And it is thequintessential good cause: food for the hungry. The drive nettedmore than 280,000 pounds of donated food.

A National Pastime

Fighting hunger has become a national pastime. Millions of Americansare involved. Early in 1992, a polling firm hired by Kraft GeneralFoods, on behalf of the sponsors of the Medford Declaration toEnd Hunger in America, conducted a survey of 1,000 randomly selectedvoters to assess public attitudes toward hunger in the UnitedStates. The results were clear: three-fifths of those surveyed thoughtthat hunger was a "very serious" problem in the United States, and 90percent agreed that "there are significant numbers of people in theUnited States who are hungry and don't have enough to eat." Thestudy's clients welcomed the overall findings, which included not onlythe widespread perception that hunger is a serious problem but alsothe belief that it is solvable, and the willingness to pay additional taxesin order to eliminate it. Possibly the most significant finding, however,was one that drew only limited attention: 79 percent of thoseinterviewed answered "yes" to a question that asked "Have you, personally,done anything to help those people who don't have enough toeat in your community such as being a volunteer at a soup kitchen,contributing food to a distribution center and so forth?"

    This is a remarkable finding, whether we believe it or not. Eitheran extraordinarily high percentage of registered voters in this countryhas contributed something to the support of a local food program, oran extraordinarily high percentage of respondents felt sufficientlystrongly that they ought to have done so that they were willing to lieto an anonymous pollster on the telephone. We have known for along time that Americans contribute a great deal of time and moneyto voluntary-sector activities, but for nearly four-fifths of respondentsto indicate that they had tried to do something about one particularproblem seemed, well, incredible.

    When we begin to consider the myriad opportunities to contribute,however, the credibility quotient goes up. All our respondenthas to have done, after all, is contribute to a food drive--by leaving abag on the doorstep for the Boy Scouts in the fall, or the letter carriersin the spring, or by dropping a can in a convenient barrel outsidethe grocery store. Or perhaps our respondent has "rounded up forhunger" at the supermarket checkout counter--rounded up her billto the next nearest dollar with the change going to help an anti-hungerorganization--or "checked out hunger" at a supermarket ofanother denomination. Maybe the respondent's child has asked for acan or two to contribute to a collection at school or Sunday school. Ora neighbor's teenager has walked in a hunger walkathon and our respondenthas agreed to be a sponsor. Perhaps there was a drive at theoffice in conjunction with a holiday party. Or maybe the respondentjust used her American Express card between Thanksgiving andChristmas, automatically joining the Charge Against Hunger, whethershe meant to or not. Giving to food charities has been made so easy,so convenient, that it is probable that a very large number of Americanshas contributed in some way. As an American Express advertisementput it just after Christmas, "You may have helped and not evenknow it."

    You may even have had fun doing it. Like the Boy Scouts' trip toGreat Adventure, elements of recreation have been added to manyanti-hunger projects. Bikers can pedal against hunger, film buffs canattend a Canned Film Festival, concertgoers can secure reduced-priceadmission by bringing a can, and gourmets can Dine Out toHelp Out. In more than a hundred communities across the country,you can help the hungry by attending a Taste of the Nation buffet, atwhich top-ranked chefs offer samples of their work; the chefs donatetheir time and food, and the price of admission goes to Share OurStrength (SOS) which raises and dispenses funds for anti-hunger activityon a national--in fact, an international--scale. In 1994, Taste ofthe Nation raised $3.7 million for hunger relief. A spin-off calledTaste of the NFL invites people attending the Super Bowl to samplethe fare of the chefs of the host city, again for a hefty contribution;players participate by doing promotions, and both chefs and fans jointhe long list of food program supporters. Last year's Taste of the NFLraised $400,000. If your recreations are more literary, another SOSproduction, Writer's Harvest, sponsors readings by well-known authorsin communities and on college campuses across the country.Writers are not yet as popular as chefs: last year's harvest raised$40,000 in 150 cities and towns. This list could continue at greatlength, because fund-raising for hunger has elicited the talents ofsome exceptionally creative people. They have made it extraordinarilyeasy and rewarding to do something about hunger in America.

    Not all participants opt for the easy or glamorous roles, of course.Some of the people who answered "yes" to the pollster's survey mayhave been among the million or more Americans who actively volunteeredin a soup kitchen or food pantry. The emergency food systemis dependent upon volunteer labor. A recent survey in New York City,for example, found that more than four-fifths of the people workingin soup kitchens and food pantries were volunteers, who accountedfor just over two-thirds of the hours worked. The median pantry inthe Second Harvest National Research Study conducted in 1993 hadtwelve volunteers during the year, who gave an average of a bit overfifty-two hours each. Soup kitchens are more labor intensive thanpantries, and the kitchens in the survey had a median of forty volunteersover the course of the year, who reported an average of abouttwenty-five hours apiece. Such averages, of course, reflect not onlythe regulars who come week after week and month after month, butalso the casual volunteer who helps out once a year to serve Thanksgivingdinner or put up new shelves in the pantry. But casual volunteers,like occasional donors, contribute to the overall size of thephenomenon and its capacity to touch the life of the larger society.

    The significance of all this giving and volunteering extends far beyondthe generic celebration of voluntarism and compassion to whichpoliticians so frequently give voice. It is this widespread diffusion ofinvolvement, however limited, that allows the emergency food phenomenonto function as a "moral safety valve," to relieve the discomfortthat people feel when confronted with evidence of privation andsuffering amid the general comfort and abundance, thus reducing thepressure for more fundamental action. The sheer magnitude of communityanti-hunger activity, and the widespread publicity essential tosuch efforts, create images of food drives and fund-raisers, ofkitchens and pantries and food banks and food rescue programs, thatpermeate the culture. These images reassure us that no one willstarve in our community, that the problem is being addressed. Few ofus stop to assess the size of the problem or measure the sufficiency ofthe response; the illusion of effective community action lingers, longafter the canned goods are depleted. The specific dynamics of pervasiveinvolvement merit explanation and help to illuminate the safetyvalve process. Why has the emergency food phenomenon been sosuccessful in eliciting the effort and contributions of so many Americans?Why do so many volunteer?

Something for Everyone

The pastor of a church in Maine explained how his food pantry obtainedits supplies from the food bank, which was located severalhours away. A regional supermarket chain, Shop and Save, picks upsupplies for area pantries at the Good Shepherd Food-Bank inLewiston and brings them to the local store, and "as soon as the foodgets there they give us a call and we blast over there with old menand pickup trucks and load it and bring it back over here. That's agreat phenomenon--the old men with pickup trucks." It is a scenariothat is repeated, with endless local variations, all over the nation,every day. The newspaper image of an emergency food volunteer depictsa person preparing food or dishing it up in a soup kitchen orpacking bags in a food pantry, but the emergency food system offersmany others avenues of participation as well. Food must beprocured--or even produced--and transported as well as preparedand served, and the space in which 'all this occurs must be equippedand maintained. Funds must be raised, bills must be paid, and othervolunteers must be coordinated. As one volunteer at a soup kitchenin Immokalee, Florida, put it, "There is something for everybody."And kitchens and pantries, food banks and food rescue programshave an extraordinary capacity to absorb and put to use whatever avolunteer has to offer. You may start out by washing the dishes andend up doing the books. As Ken Hecht, a food policy advocate inCalifornia, recounted:

I am a lawyer, and I spent twenty-five years litigating cases in a number of different poverty areas.... Then I went to work in a foundation and was there for three or four years. When I left there I wanted to do something that was exactly the opposite of working in a foundation where you were working behind somebody who was working behind somebody who was several layers removed from anybody who looked like he needed any help, and a friend of mine suggested that I walk down the hill from my house and go to a soup kitchen. And about a month after I left the foundation I walked down the hill and went to a soup kitchen and did onions. So I'm now good at onions. It absolutely satisfied everything I wanted to do at that moment, and as time went on I became more and more involved in the work in the soup kitchen and obviously had some experience that could be useful to them in terms of stabilizing, organizing their work, so I became just as involved in the administration and fund-raising parts of the program as well, and still am.

    Hecht's experience illustrates several of the factors that help tomake soup kitchens and food pantries such magnets for participation.In the first place, there are few barriers to entry. You do not need alengthy training course to become a volunteer in a soup kitchen orfood pantry, and in many places, you don't need an appointment, either.A prospective volunteer can just walk down the hill and startdoing onions, or drop by Ciba-Geigy and help sort the donations.Everything you need to know, you learned in kindergarten: carryingchairs, pouring juice, setting the table, peeling carrots. Since littletraining or orientation is needed, a volunteer can easily try it out onan experimental basis. "Word of mouth is our best advertisement.People who come here and enjoy it tell somebody else. And theycome and see what it's like and then they'll stay," Joyce Hoeschen,one of the founders of the Bath Area Food Bank Soup Kitchen, describedher volunteer recruitment to me. Her husband and cofounderchimed in: "They might be a little skittish to begin with, butby the end of the day, they say `I'm hooked! Can't I come moreoften?'"

    For those who find the experience rewarding, there are alwaysnew tasks and new opportunities to contribute. Hecht's work in theHaight-Ashbury Kitchen led to the idea of forming the San FranciscoAnti-Hunger Coalition, for which he helped to prepare first a conceptpaper and then a grant application. You don't have to be a lawyer,however, or a foundation insider, to put your cumulative workexperience and life history to work on behalf of an emergency foodprogram. One of the biggest boosts to Hecht's efforts to initiate acoalition was an idea from a seafood purveyor, convicted of dealing illegallyin abalone, who was doing his "community service" sentenceat the Haight-Ashbury Kitchen. Noting the kitchen's constant searchfor sources of protein, he told the director that there was always left-overfish at the piers at the end of the week. Often, the market valueof frozen seafood did not justify the cost of freezing the fish, and itcould not be kept over the weekend as a fresh product, so it wasdumped. Hecht and his colleagues began collecting the leftoverseafood and distributing it to other kitchens; for Hecht, it was an organizingtool:

The other thing we did that stimulated the coalition's coming into existence was to take advantage of a supply of excess fish that was coming into the piers. We've been using that in our program, expanding the pick-up of fish, and started using the fish all over town, demonstrating without having to say it that there's a lot of advantage to working together. I have no doubt that that was, and remains, an inducement to working together.

When some of the kitchens proved reluctant to accept the freeseafood because their volunteer cooks were unaccustomed to preparingfish in quantity, Hecht and his associate, Ed Bolen, recruitedseafood chefs from some of San Francisco's leading hotels and restaurantsto demonstrate the art of large-volume seafood preparation.Chowder has become a staple on the San Francisco soup kitchen circuit,and seafood purveyors, fishing boat captains, and seafood chefshave become part of the network of donation and participation thatsustains emergency food in San Francisco.

A Network of Supply

San Francisco may be unique, but it is not alone. Nearly everykitchen and pantry, and absolutely every food bank and food rescueprogram, is the focal point of a web of participation, with its own networkof suppliers, supporters, contributors, and volunteers. The supplyend of the emergency food chain provides an enormous variety ofopportunities for volunteer work and donation. Some people literallyproduce food for soup kitchens and food pantries--children's gardeningprograms in or outside schools, gardens tended by the inmatesof correctional facilities, community gardens, camp gardens,church gardens. The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts runs a63-acre organic farm with the help of volunteers and members of itsCommunity Supported Agriculture project. The American GardenWriters Association, a professional organization of journalists withan estimated combined audience of 78 million people, has recentlyundertaken a campaign called Plant a Row for the Hungry, and hasenlisted a seed company to offer a free packet of vegetable seedsto each participating gardener. In Mount Carmel, Connecticut, BillLiddell grows 49,000 pounds of vegetables each year on the three-quarter-acreplot that he farms intensively, assisted by donated seedsand volunteer labor, specifically for the purpose of supplying food forthe hungry of Connecticut.

    More typical, however, are donations of food that was originallyintended for other purposes--for the market, for home consumption,even for decoration. Gleaners in Miami harvest citrus from treesplanted at race tracks and golf courses for Miami's Daily Bread FoodBank, and many gleaning groups will bring ladders and buckets andharvest the fruit in your backyard if you invite them. By the end ofthe eighties, Project Glean in Concord, California, was harvesting aquarter of a million pounds annually of vegetables, including onions,eggplants, tomatoes, and corn, and fruits, including plums, oranges,tangerines, lemons, limes, grapefruits, nectarines, and pomegranates.A core group of thirty regular volunteers was supplemented bythe efforts of Scout troops, church youth groups, mother-daughterteams from the National Charity League, senior citizens organizations,people from drug rehabilitation centers, and offenders doingcourt-ordered community service. Beth Coulter is a slim, energeticwoman who volunteers as a cook at the soup kitchen run by the BathArea Food Bank in Bath, Maine. The food bank is actually a pantry,established before the terminology sorted itself out; the soup kitchenis a subsidiary project and is run on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridaysat the Knights of Columbus Hall. Ms. Coulter was cooking theday I visited, but she took the time to tell me about her experiencewith gleaning because she was so excited about the outcome:

Last summer I contacted a couple of farmers in the area ... after they had picked their crops, we asked if we could go in and glean the fields... it's a domino theory. It looks like we're taking leftovers and pretty soon the farmer's saying "Could you use a couple of bushels of tomatoes? Could you use a bushel of cucumbers?" We went up to get a few tomatoes and ended up with fourteen kinds of produce from one farm. We went to other farms and, when it was time for frost to set in, they said "Come and dig all the carrots you want." We ended up with eighteen bushels of carrots.

I asked how they could handle so many, and learned that one form ofparticipation can elicit another.

We move it because we've got great ladies... one lady made pickles; I made pickled beets. We froze carrots; we blanched and froze, we canned, we did all kinds of things. Peeling the carrots and cleaning them was a major chore. It was the end of September or the beginning of October and we brought them to an elementary school and the fifth grade took it on as a project to wash the carrots and peel them for us. It was incredible.... We often talk about the poor people and the hungry and homeless, and we burden a lot of children with this kind of information, and what can they do about it, except be sad. But this was a hands-on thing the children could do.

Old and Young and Everything in Between

Hands-on things that children can do, the availability of work that entirefamilies can do together or that school and religious groups canundertake, is another factor that helps to account for the tremendousappeal of emergency food programs. Ginna Lockie was coordinatingthe volunteers on behalf of the North Naples United MethodistChurch on one of the days that I visited the kitchen at Immokalee;"my kids ... have actually all been out here to the soup kitchen ondays when they don't have school," she reported. "They really enjoyit. They are learning, at a very early age, that we need to help otherfolks outside our home." For individual families, as well as for organizedgroups like the Boy Scouts, emergency food programs createopportunities for teaching compassion.

    Of course the same characteristics that make the work suitableto newcomers and children might also tend to make it, eventually,boring--not in a once-a-year event like the Boy Scouts drive, but on aregular basis. Even the simplest and most routine tasks, however, canbe made enjoyable by social interaction, and this is a common characteristicof almost all of the emergency food volunteer work I observed.Packing bags in a food pantry or preparing a soup kitchenmeal or labeling boxes at Ciba-Geigy provides a fine opportunity tocatch up on local news, to discuss sports, to talk a little politics, or alittle theology. The more repetitious the task, the more conducive itseems to be to humor, banter, teasing.

    The sociability factor is also a characteristic of much of the volunteerwork available one notch up the emergency food ladder, at thefood bank. A significant portion of the food that is donated to foodbanks is what food bankers and grocers call "salvage": dented cans,products with some cosmetic problem on the packaging, productsthat have been slightly crushed or torn. The new scanning technologypermits grocers to obtain credit for such unsalable products by cullingthem from the shelves and sending them to a reclamation center,where their bar codes are scanned and credit is assigned to retailersfrom the manufacturers. At the reclamation centers, leaking containersare generally pulled out, but the rest is simply boxed, and if themanufacturer designates, shipped to a food bank, where it must ofcourse be further sorted to remove any hazardous items. Sorting salvageis one of the primary tasks to which food bank volunteers areset. The sorting process does require some training, and it lacks thevariety characteristic of work at the kitchen or pantry level, but itmakes up for that in camaraderie. It is also the sort of activity forwhich whole groups from schools, churches, or businesses can be recruited.Bill Bolling is the founder and director of the. Atlanta CommunityFood Bank, one of the oldest and most respected in thenation; he described the volunteers who come to the bank to helpwith sorting as well as with warehouse and office tasks:

Old, young and everything in between. We use students, we use senior citizens and retirees during the day, because everybody else is working, we use professionals in the evening--at least four nights a week we have groups till nine at night. We have people come in their BMWs and three-piece suits and come in and change clothes into their blue jeans and work a two-hour shift, three-hour shift after work. And they mostly come as groups, not individuals. We use a lot of church and synagogue religious communities on weekends and for specialized kinds of food drives. We're seeing now, and this is real precedent-setting in Atlanta, we're seeing companies send employees on company time down as a group with their department managers, and they come down and volunteer.

The organized group participation phenomenon is visible in thefund-raising and food procurement aspects of the emergency foodsystem as well as in the sorting and packing and processing. A pantrythat can enlist the support of a civic organization, youth program,school, church, or business is likely to obtain far more than it wouldfrom simply deploying collection barrels, however strategically placed.In tiny Benson, Arizona, a town of a few thousand not far fromTombstone, the food pantry, which goes by the name of the BensonFood Bank, has nurtured all of these relationships, The vice presidentof the organization, Jan Olsen, explains her strategy:

In November, I go to the mayor and I ask him to declare November "Food Bank Month," which he does. We've got the certificate up on the wall. I divide the month into separate categories, like one week will be church collections, one week will be civic collections, another one will be the Scouts, the other one will be the school children. And I target in on those and make special arrangements for those people to have special collections during that month... food and/or money.

The schools have proven especially responsive; the local elementaryschool sponsors a contest among classrooms to see which room canbring in the most food. The contest is a big hit with the kids, eventhough the principal has ruled that they may not collect prizes fortheir winning efforts: "We want them to give from their hearts, notfor an award," Olsen told me. One of the biggest sources in tiny Bensoncame as a surprise to the food pantry board. The local branch ofArizona Electric Power Company called up one day to see if thepantry could send someone to pick up "a few items." The utility hadheld a contest among its departments and produced three station-wagonloads of food; "That was three station wagons ... filled right tothe roof."

Facilities and Equipment

Soup kitchens, food pantries, and food banks all require facilities andequipment, and the creation and maintenance of space offers anotherwhole arena for participation. Hawley Botchford, the directorof the Harry Chapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida, succeeded ineliciting thousands of dollars' worth of donated plumbing, carpentry,and the like from skilled craftspeople, and thousands of dollars' worthof equipment and supplies from local businesses when the food bankrehabilitated an old building to serve as its office and warehouse. Hisstory of how the building came to be painted is typical of his experience.He had canvassed the local paint distributors for a paint donationwith no success, but he had succeeded in talking a representativeof Sherwin-Williams into "just coming over to see if our numberswere right on what we thought we were going to need to paint thebuilding." Meanwhile, Sherwin-Williams had the contract to supplypaint for a church that was being refurbished nearby. As Botchfordrecounts:

Well, we firmly believe, being good Presbyterians, that while the guys were mixing the paint, God smacked one of their hands and they dumped too much of one color into the mix and the church refused it because it was not the color they had picked. All of a sudden, Sherwin-Williams had fifty-five gallons of exterior premium paint, and they called and said, "Are you fussy about what color the outside of your building's going to be?" and I said, "Not a bit." So they said, "All right, we've got your exterior paint," and we had the audacity to say "What about the inside?" And, sure enough, they came through. Now we've got the paint and I figured we could get. volunteers to paint the inside, the outside's a little trickier. So we went over to where they were painting the church ... and started talking to them. We said, "Look--your equipment--and the color's so close you wouldn't even have to wash it out, just pour our paint into it and do our building." And they did it. They came over and started here one day and they were finished by lunch. And they primed it and painted the entire building--it was a painting contractor--no charge for that.

    Botchford's ability to corral contributions of labor and materials isprobably exceptional, but all over the country emergency food programshave been the beneficiaries of building materials, refrigerationand storage capacity, kitchen equipment, and the like. Soup kitchensand food pantries, after all, are unlikely to be choosy about the appearanceof their equipment. Have almond and avocado gone out ofstyle for appliances, replaced by black and chrome? It doesn't mattermuch in the church basement. And since donations of equipmentoften come with the skilled time and effort required to install them,they draw another group of people into the web of participation andcreate another group with a sense of ownership in the project, anothergroup of people who could have answered "yes" to the pollster'ssurvey.

    We will probably never know just how much has been given tothe emergency food system when time and talent and the use of specializedskills and tools are factored into the equation. We have difficultyeven with gifts of food. If you are a large corporation donating atruckload of breakfast cereals to a food bank, you may find it wellworth the trouble to record the donation and file for a tax deduction,and the food bank will happily provide you with all the verificationyou need. If you are a backyard gardener who has responded to theAmerican Garden Writers Association's plea to Plant a Row for theHungry, or simply an amateur who has nurtured an overabundance ofzucchini, you may or may not think it appropriate and worthwhile toseek a record of your donation for tax purposes. Certainly, few of themillions of people who Check Out Hunger at the local supermarketor contribute canned goods to the Boy Scouts drive itemize thesecontributions in their tax returns. IRS data, therefore, are not a verygood source of information about donations to emergency food programs.Neither are the surveys of giving, most of which do not collectmuch information on gifts in kind. Nor are the programs themselves,many of which are small-scale, grassroots, low-budget operations thatcan barely get the dishes washed and the head counts turned in to thefood bank. Since the vast majority of these programs are affiliatedwith religious institutions, they are exempt from the reporting requirementswith which many other nonprofits must comply; they arenot required to file the Form 990s from which much of the data inthe National Taxonomy of Tax Exempt Organizations is derived. Likemany nonprofit organizations, they may provide donors who requestthem with blank receipt forms to be filled in with the donors' estimateof the value of goods contributed, but they are unlikely to keepextensive records of their own. Clearly, we do not know how muchhas been given to these organizations in the form of money, food,supplies, and time, but we know it is a lot.

Cash versus Food

Cash donations are more likely to be recorded than gifts in kind, andcash has other advantages as well. After all, cash replaced barter preciselybecause cash conferred vastly increased flexibility. You canreadily convert cash into other inputs you might need--electricity,for example, or the services of an accountant or an exterminator--butyou cannot readily convert donated foods into such services. Andeven when the donor specifies that the gift be used for food, donatingcash may be a more productive strategy. Joyce Jacobs at the HarryChapin Food Bank of Southwest Florida in Fort Myers has a set ofglossy photos that show what you could purchase for donation to afood program with ten dollars spent at the grocery store, and whatthe same ten dollars, spent at the food bank, could provide. The secondpicture is much, much larger than the first, because the food inthe food bank is essentially free, except for the handling fee, generallycalled "shared maintenance." At a shared maintenance rateof fourteen cents a pound, the food bank can provide more thanseventy-one pounds of food for a ten-dollar donation. For one dollar,which would buy the average panhandler two cups of coffee on thestreets of New York, a donor can expect somewhere between sevenand ten pounds of food from the food bank for a recipient kitchen orpantry. Cash is giving canned goods a good run for the money.

    If convenience and efficiency were the only operant principles,cash would certainly have the edge over canned goods, but these areclearly not the only considerations. Donations of actual food haveseveral advantages over collections of money. In the first place, theyserve symbolic functions. Offerings of "first fruits" are traditional inmany religions, and they are laden with deep ritual significance. It isnot uncommon for offerings of canned goods to be brought to the altarin congregations that support pantries or kitchens. Some churchescollect for the month or so before Thanksgiving and then decoratethe chancel with a display of donated food. This is precisely the sortof historically and emotionally significant activity in which congregantsof all ages can participate with understanding. The medium isthe message.

    The same characteristic helps to explain the attraction of emergencyfood activities for youth-serving organizations and civic groups.Donations of money may be easier to handle and more efficient, butcanned food drives provide a visceral connection between the generalabundance of the society and the needs of poor families. Theyeducate as they collect. "We are very interested in getting the foodcollected because there are people out there, kids and older peopleparticularly, and whole families that are going hungry.... Beyondthat, we are in the business of training youth. One of our goals is,through this project, to make youth aware that hunger is a problem inthe community and then to give them an outlet to help do somethingabout hunger," explained Jere Williams, the executive director of theJersey Shore Council of the Boy Scouts of America. The BSOA couldsend its troops out to collect money door-to-door, but it just wouldn'thave the same educational impact on the Scouts.

    They probably wouldn't get as much, either. Some people prefergiving cans to giving cash. Giving food assures the donor that food iswhat the recipient will receive. Many people who are generous withtheir time and treasure on behalf of emergency food programs arehighly skeptical of the motivations and skills of the beneficiaries oftheir largesse. By giving food, they believe that they are making surethat the gift will enhance nutrition and well-being, not end up as apint of Night Train or a pair of trendy sneakers. Further, they canmake sure that the gift is a nutrient-dense commodity such as peanutbutter or beans, not a frivolous snack. "We watch for nutrition," thedirector of the Willcox, Arizona, food pantry told me. "We want tomake sure that they get balance in their bodies. Sure, we've got cakemix in there, cookies, candy. Sure, those are all things they can have,that you should have, but they've also got the basics. Everybody getsa bag of beans."

    It is not just a lack of faith in the culinary skills or spending prioritiesof recipients, however, that explains the heavy reliance on fooddonations in the emergency food system. Emergency food programsdo not see--or portray--themselves as solutions to the problem ofpoverty. They are, very specifically, responses to hunger. Many feelthey have done their job if they relieve urgent hunger, and they inviteothers to join them in that specific and manageable task by contributingfood. Critics of the food drive approach recognize this as well. "Ihate canned food drives," Hawley Botchford told me. "I really do, becauseit lets people off the hook. It gives them a warm, fuzzy feelingto give you a little bag of cans which, in the whole scope of the things,is meaningless. It's an easy way out. I don't want people to have theeasy way out. I want them to look at the whole problem and what arewe really dealing with .... I want to know why people are in need,and why they continue to be in need." Botchford went on to lay outone of the persistent dilemmas of the emergency food project, thetension between pursuing more fundamental solutions to povertyand meeting the immediate need. "In the meantime, we've got littlekids that are growing up and, if they are going to reach their potential,if they're going to learn, if they're going to become productiveparts of the system, they need to be fed, they need decent diets...and when we throw away as much as we do, then we're missing theboat there."

[CHAPTER ONE CONTINUES ...]

Continues...

Excerpted from Sweet Charity?by Janet Poppendieck Copyright © 1999 by Janet Poppendieck. Excerpted by permission.
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