Imagine walking into a store, picking out all your groceries for the week and not having to worry about facing an expensive bill at the checkout.
For clients of the Regina Food Bank, that will soon be a reality.
Since the pandemic, there has been a spike in food bank users across the country, up 25 per cent in Regina alone. One in eight families — and one in four children — are now food insecure in the city. Of the 16,000 monthly clients, 44 per cent are kids.
The new Regina Food Bank Community Food Hub, modelled after a traditional grocery store, is set to open this summer in the former government liquor store location downtown.
I wonder if letting people pick their own items really reduces waste more than the hamper system? What happens to items left on the shelf that no one takes? That’s probably the same stuff that would be ignored from a hamper? I’m admittedly pretty ignorant of food banks generally, but I would think that the hamper system would be trying to encourage people to eat whatever they get, to both reduce waste by making sure all items get out there from the bank, and to ensure there’s enough of everything coming in to go around evenly? I can see this maybe resulting in the better items going first, and a bunch of less desirable items always being left behind to rot. Does that tend to happen in this type of system or not?
Here’s the thing conservatives generally can’t get through their thick skulls… if you respect most people they’ll respect you and take a modest amount - those folks that will hoard are generally not worth policing more than the minimum amount… it’s cheaper to just account for their greed than hire security personnel.
I don’t give a damn if some people are taking advantage. I’d rather a small proportion of people exploit the system than folks who need it be denied.
Boom.
It’s not that easy. If you don’t police at all then it only takes one person to ruin things for everyone. This is the tragedy of the commons. On the other hand, you can spend exponentially more and more on policing you get diminishing returns and increased corruption and waste.
At the end of the day, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!
I can answer this. The stuff that nobody takes off the shelf eventually gets thrown out too. But if you put brown rice and rice pasta in a hamper for someone that won’t eat them, and white bread and white pasta in someone’s hamper that won’t eat them, 100% of those staples go to waste.
This is anecdotal so take it or leave it but some of the best dumpster diving I’ve ever done was behind food banks in some regions because things like quinoa and apple cider vinegar and brown rice pasta are the last to go while white bread and Kraft dinner and instant rice are hot sellers.
I’m happy to stock up on the stuff other people find too weird to eat. If those things end up in hampers they get chucked anyhow. Letting people choose is a far more efficient system.
Lots of banks for instance will give you more veggie options if you don’t eat meat. Or more eggs if you don’t want meat. Or more frozen foods if you don’t want canned or instant meals. Etc etc.
The hamper system tries to shoot the middle. Nobody “eats what they get” if they literally can’t stomach the stuff “they get” and frankly expecting poor people to choke down calories that someone else picks out for them and expecting them to be grateful for it is kinda a sick way to look at it. Beggars can’t be choosers and all this… In a culture that throws away roughly fifty percent of the food grown and processed on this continent in the name of profit? Idk. Why not let people take what they’ll use and leave the rest?
If you actually understand how much food goes into the landfill vs what gets diverted to food banks the entire concept of food scarcity falls apart anyhow.
All good points. There’s definitely no perfect or even close to perfect solution.
Any unwanted item forced upon a family will go uneaten and become 100% waste. An item that most people don’t want that sits on the shelf at least stands a chance of being taken by someone who will eat it.
Food banks regularly communicate their needs to donors so that the most commonly needed staples will have abundant stock. In the hamper model where you’re just forcing people to take stuff then you don’t actually know what’s being used, what’s most commonly needed, and what you can mostly ignore.
Yeah that’s a good point. If you can’t see what people are leaving behind, you can’t know what to stop taking more of. I guess you need to generate some short-term waste in order to properly tune things as needed, to hopefully reach a point where you’re reducing waste as much as possible in the longer term.
Besides what’s already been said, even if there is food waste from things left on the shelves, at least this allows us to know that certain items are undesirable for everyone and to avoid acquiring more of them. If you hand out a bit to everyone and they all end up in different trash bins, you’ll never know about it and you’ll never fix the problem.
Yeah that’s probably the strongest point in favour of letting people pick what they want. But I guess a potential downside of that could be if people start stocking up mostly on only a few select items that everyone else also wants., leaving nothing behind for them. But I guess that’s mitigated by seeing that happen a few times then specifically trying to get even more of those select items going forward.