Hunger Is Not a Disease

The Food Coming to Our Pantry from the Food Bank Has Been Diverted From a Landfill

There’s absolutely no excuse for anyone in our great country to go hungry.

 The third category was Donated Food.  This was usually canned or boxed food in really good condition which manufacturers couldn’t sell or supermarkets had overstocked.

All the cans had labels in good condition and none of the cans were dented.

Popular donated items included Barilla Pasta, Breyer’s Ice Cream, Cheez-It Crackers, Chobani Yogurt, Hellman’s Mayonnaise, Hunt’s Products, Kellogg’s Cereals, Lipton Teas, Nestea, Pepsi products, Progresso Soup, Suave Shampoos, Tide soap, Triscuit Crackers, V-8 Juices.

Co-op was the fourth category.  The food in this category was offered at more or less grocery store prices.  Coop food supplements the donated food inventory.  The Coop food enables the Food Bank to have an inventory which meets the needs of the agencies.  Except for toilet paper and eggs, I rarely bought from this category because our pantry simply couldn’t afford the costs.  Even so, the eggs were a few cents cheaper than anywhere else and the toilet paper was important to the households with no funds.

Eggs were always a challenge.  They’re only available through the pantry in the Co-op section of the catalogue.  They were rarely in the refrigerator case at the Food Bank when we went for produce and dairy products weekly.  Purchasing the eggs locally was hard because we needed about 150-200 dozen eggs at a time.  My main source when we couldn’t connect with the food bank was Aldi.  They were about the only store that really didn’t care how many dozen eggs we bought.  Price Chopper in Saugerties was a real lifesaver a couple of times also.

One winter I was having a really tough time getting soup.   Then, Progresso donated a large load of soup to the Food Bank.   Hurrah!  After hurricane Sandy, ConAgra sent a generous load of canned goods to the food bank.  To this day, two favorite words in my vocabulary are Progresso and ConAgra.

Thanks for reading these Food Bank posts.  I hope they’re answering questions for you.  Tomorrow’s post will begin with a discussion of dumpster diving and months when we had almost nothing.

Peace and food for all.

Thurman Greco

Woodstock, NY