Food Banks: The Stigma

Bringing up the fact that you regularly visit food banks for sustenance can be a great way to passive-aggressively shame your boss for the wages he/she pays you. But it inevitably gives rise to a slew of other conversations.

Mostly, people mention that they had thought about going to a food bank (but never had), and they end up asking for advice on which food banks you’d recommend. A couple of coworkers even went so far as to compliment me for dropping my pride and humbling myself to the point of visiting a food bank. And occasionally someone may mention that they feel like there are “others who are more needy” – suggesting that there may be something altogether unethical about utilizing a food bank.

On the latter point, I will say emphatically that everyone –– everyone –– should visit a food bank, at least once. This includes billionaires and the wealthiest among us, as it might be good for them to hobnob with the lower class and see how actual people are living today. But more practically, the food at food banks tends to be either non-perishable or near the point of being useless: vegetables often have a shelf life (er, refrigerator life) of a mere 2-3 days, and the bread may start to mold quickly if not frozen.

This food is the excess produced by a capitalist system that commodifies necessities like food, water, housing, energy, etc. I’ve visited food banks where the people running it would beg us to take just a little more, because they knew that the food would simply go rotten if it went un-grabbed. Much of this food includes prepared dishes (sandwiches, wraps, noodles, etc.) that are past their “sell-by” dates and are thus discarded by grocery stores (or, in the case of food banks, donated for a tax write-off).

And on just a purely human level, no one should ever feel guilty for taking free food, unless they are literally taking it from the mouth of someone more needy. Every visit to a food bank is one less day that you need to work to afford groceries, one more day you can spend with your family, one more day that you can devote to a hobby, or one more day that you can use watching The Office for the twelfth time. Hey, we deserve downtime.

If you do decide to visit one of your local food banks, it’s natural to feel a bit … ashamed … as society will tend to make us feel. Simply check your pride and ego at the door, and take part in the bounty of our wasteful food economy. And if someone, for whatever reason, stigmatizes you for using a food bank to get free groceries, just make them our beautiful Banana Bread Carrot Cake with Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting, using the ingredients you get from the food bank. That should shut them up.