Ethics question
In my life, I've gone from dirt poor, to normal poor, to middle class, now on the cusp of upper middle class. When I was dirt poor I went to the food bank. When I was normal poor I still went to the food bank, but I also donated to them sometimes. The thing is the scale of food banks means they can get food ridiculously cheap. My local food bank boasts that they can provide a healthy meal for $0.50. They have fresh vegetables, frozen meats, lots of good stuff. My ethics question is this. If one were to donate $20 a week to a food bank, it would provide 40 meals. But if that same person then used the food bank, getting 21 meals a week from it…the cost would be way cheaper than groceries, and the food bank would still be coming out ahead. So is it ethical to "buy" groceries from a food bank just to save money, even though you COULD buy them from a store?
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I agree with Jonathan, but the question points to something interesting. Groceries have gotten expensive. I have increased my grocery budget multiple times in the last two years, and I've started limiting luxury foods. What if there was a way to pool resources to get better prices on groceries? Does this exist already?
I'm a single person, and it bums me out not being able to utilize economies of scale. I can only eat so much before it goes bad, so I have to buy 2 potatoes for $2 instead of the bag of 15 potatoes for $6.
Can you buy with a friend and split? Or a group of friends?
Maybe. It's kind of a logistical problem. One of us has to buy the food and then distribute, everyone else has to pay them back, we have to agree on what foods, etc. All my friends are very busy with work.
Could you do it on a Saturday or Sunday? Group trip to Costco or whatever? Then pay each other back using Venmo? I agree this isn't easy but I think you could do it and over time the process would refine itself. Hope you succeed!
Consider cooking in batches and freezing portioned meals. I'm also a single person and that's my approach. I buy the bag of 15 potatoes, make a big pot of whatever and freeze meals in 2-cup containers.
There's zero food waste this way, you get the economy of scale you're after and as a bonus you don't need to cook as often. If you do this as a regular routine, you can have a few different meal options frozen away so you don't need to eat the same thing for a week.
I've tried that, and I think I'm just not very good at preparing food or reheating food in a way that…tastes good? I will sometimes make big batches, but sometimes when I defrost it and reheat it, it's either bleh or actually bad. And if it's so bad I don't want to eat it, then it's wastage.
My main strategy right now is to kind of do that in reverse - I buy flash frozen food in big portions, and then cook a single meal at a time. I probably need to practice more with properly preparing big batches of frozen food.
My freezer is my meal-planning friend! I make big batches of rice and freeze it in individual portions. I buy bags of onions and celery, chop them all, freeze them on cookie sheets, and keep big containers in the freezer so I can pull out what I need. Soups freeze very well, as do things like spaghetti sauce, tomato paste, baked goods.
You might figure out which of your meals freeze/reheat well, and which freeze better as components.
There are lots of meal prep videos on YouTube that can help you learn what freezes well and what doesn't! I consider myself a pretty good cook now, but I learned through practice and watching lots and lots of recipe videos!
Am also cooking for one. One way to freeze potatoes is to par boil them before freezing, then fininish cooking when you are ready to eat. I do this by cutting up and cutting to shape I will use in the future - either steak fry size, or cut into large dice for eventual mashed potatoes. Then boil til almost soft, but not quite, dry and freeze in individual portions. For the steak fries, I defrost and coat with olive salt and pepper and bake on a tray at 400-450 til browned. For diced, I either finish cooking in water then drain and either mash or just add a bit of oil salt and pepper to eat as is.
If you want to dive down a rabbit hole, food storage and emergency preparedness have a lot of solutions to the problem of "I have bulk fresh and can't consume by when it goes bad", especially for root vegetables. Like potatoes can store for up to 6-8 months in the right environment. Fresh onions can store for longer. But you can't store onions and potatoes together, or they spoil each other. Non-root vegetables will need to be frozen or stored creatively to last longer than a few weeks, but you can extend the normal storage life by controlling humidity and air flow.
If you REALLY want to deep dive on it, it will lead to a path of canning, freeze drying, etc. Just ask my wife lol…
There are two of us. I just bought the ten pound bag of potatoes at Aldi for $2.99. Even if half of them go bad, and they won't, that is still five pounds for $2.99 versus $1 per pound if purchased individually. They will last a few weeks if you refrigerate a few. You don't need to chill the whole bag. If you chill half of them, that half will last longer as you use up the room temp ones.
We make fries in the air fryer a couple times per week with fresh potatoes. Last night my wife roasted a few to have with Greek chicken pitas. I also like them with breakfast. If they start sprouting, I'll bake some up or boil some and make potato salad. Alternatively, we could mash some and freeze them.
You might want to research proper potato storage as my Irish ancestors stored potatoes for 6+ months each year. I only eat them once a week in the form of McDonald's french fries so haven't bought them myself in years.
Buying bulk dry goods saves money though not all stores have a bulk section. A Farm CSA for fresh fruit and veggies is cheaper than buying individually. You might look into membership stores like CostCo or Sam's Club.
Oh man thanks for the reminder! I looked into CSAs a while ago for environmental reasons but I dropped it. I should dig back into that.
In my area Farm CSA and local farmer's markets are the most expensive way to purchase vegetables. The grocery stores sell vegetables for less; often from the same farm. It's crazy. Buying direct from the local farmer is more expensive than several layers of distribution.
I've noticed my town's farmers' market is same price as the grocery store that's on the next block 😂. The FM probably has fresher goods, so I guess that's the benefit.
That's crazy the CSA is more expensive. The whole point of a CSA is to incentivize shoppers to buy the farm's surplus. What is the farm thinking?
I live in a somewhat fancy area (Mount Pleasant, SC, outside Charleston) and people will pay, so they charge. Who can blame them.
Our Farmer's Market sells Kombucha for $5 a can and breakfast sausage for $15-17 per lb. Vegetables are sometimes 2x the grocery store price. Many of the farmers don't put the per lb price on anything and one needs to ask about every item. It isn't a great experience. Last time I went (last August), I got small basket of peaches for $20 and half of them were not good. We have a couple of those $5 cans of kombucha in the fridge from last year as well.
We go to a local U-Pick strawberry farm a couple times per season and they get $25 per gallon for strawberries and sell out. They are organic and they are nice people, so we go once or twice.
CSA is not easy to find around here either. When a place starts offering it, it fills up/sells out quickly.
After college I volunteered with Americorps for a year in southern CO- 3 days a week at the local homeless shelter and 2 days a week at the food bank. Our food bank supplied the satellite food banks around the greater valley, so the food we received wasn't just to serve the folks in our town, it was everyone in the larger region.
I say all of this because the food bank never had more food than we could give away. The demand was always more than we could handle. I can only imagine this will continue to tick up as we see prices continue to rise, not just on food but on other necessities (like gas). I think your question/thought is creative, but I wonder if there is a different way to look at it. You came from a place of needing that service, and now you are in a place of being able to give back to the place that once helped you. This is rare and so amazing- if I were you I'd feel incredibly proud, and then incredibly excited to be able to give back in this way.
Eh, the need is basically endless. It's hard for me to be excited about that. I could have a trillion dollars and donate the whole amount and there will still be people in need.
Less of an opportunity, more of a duty/obligation, in my mind. Basic requirement to be a decent person when you make the kind of money I do.
What gets me excited is fixing problems, but you can't really fix poverty.
The food bank may have a surplus of money in your example, but their capacity to provide boxes of groceries is limited by other resources like grocery store stock, number of volunteers and time. If the person above receives a box of groceries, it's likely another person doesn't get a box.
Good question. We have a Food for Kids program that provides lunch during the summer months. I donate to them and every once in awhile let my kid get a lunch from them. They set up at the parks we play at. There is a social aspect to it. Some of my friends say we shouldn’t take a lunch because we can afford to buy our own. I asked the volunteers and they said it is for all kids and it lessens the stigma if all kids take a lunch, not just needy kids.
If enough people started exploiting food banks that didn't truly need it, food manufacturers and grocery stores would start to be more reluctant to donate to them because they would directly be competing with themselves for business. For that reason alone you shouldn't do it.
That $0.50/meal is being subsidized by someone because grocery store profit margins are like less than 3%
Just ask the food bank what they think
Just contact the food bank
I have volunteered for mobile food banks and there is always excess food at the end. Could you do something like this to feel like it’s more a barter economy and less taking from those who truly need it? Transportation is also a barrier for people in poverty -could you pick up your meals + a few others and deliver to people with mobility challenges? My local. Foodbank also has gleaning opportunities where farms basically donate their excess food but you would provide the labor of picking the potatoes or apples or whatever the crop is.
To tackle this from a different perspective, did you know that agriculture and the food supply chain generates over a quarter of the worlds GHG emissions? And in the US, nearly half of that comes from food waste. So anything we can do to eat/ distribute/ manage food waste at any stage of the production/ processing/ consumption phase feels ethical to me.
Like Josh said, food prep is a rabbit hole but one worth learning for so many reasons. Zig Ziglar said anything worth learning is worth doing poorly in the beginning. There are as many ways to go about it as there are people doing it and teaching it. YouTube has been my friend in this area. LifeWithMikeG (formerly ProHomeCook) has some videos on using Souper Cubes for portioning and freezing and his cooking videos are simple and easy. Homesteading videos go a lot into building pantries and such but as mentioned before a lot of that does utilize canning and other preservation methods. Homesteading Family and Little Mountain Ranch are quality channels for that.
Dehydrating and freeze drying (since you have money) are two methods that are fairly easy to learn and fairly safe methods for long-term storage but the learning curve is learning how to use the end products. Purposeful Pantry is a good channel for dehydrating and Homesteading Family has a good amount of videos on freeze drying (Carolyn Thomas has also written a comprehensive how-to book for freeze drying).
Good luck with your adventure in food storage, it is knowledge worth having.
Less foodbank related but buying food related - when we want to eat out or have a pastry or soemthing novel we use the TooGoodTooGo app! Our one bakery uses it and sometimes we get 3 loaves of their fresh made bread for $6 and just feeeze them!
To me it feels unethical, I understand that you’re proposing a hypothetical. But if there’s any chance that someone that needs food isn’t able to get it using this pathway because the supply demand curve has suddenly shifted because someone figured out a loophole… I wouldn’t do it
Good point with the supply/demand curve. If everyone treats the food bank as a grocery store, then the food bank probably won't be able to get food so cheaply.
I think it's more that the food bank would simply run out if even people who didn't need it used it. The limited resources of food banks should go to those who are actually in need.
I don't think so. They're getting more resources than they're giving in the hypothetical (spending $10.50 a week on food for the person, but getting $20). I think Jonathan's worry is that if enough people do this, it will get more expensive to procure food.
I think your resource math is the main point here - we should assume the alternative is that the food bank gets $0 from OP since he/she will spend that on groceries. This is a net win for the food bank, and IMO is ethically supportable if OP truly knows that to be true
The supply/demand curve is a bad slippery slope argument. That won't happen with $20 or $2,000. If the entire community joins in, then maybe, but hey, that's starting to sound like a co-op and that model works too.
There's also an argument to be made that food banks receive monetary donations to help keep costs low to the people who need it. If the food bank operated like a coop where everyone paid in. covered the coop's costs, did all of the supply chain work to source the food at the cheapest prices possible, and everyone got a benefit, then you have a coop model. There's a lot more to a coop than just everyone pays in and everyone reaps the benefit. You have to remember the costs of overhead and sourcing.
Sourcing also becomes an issue on the food bank side: are the stores donating mostly close to expiration food and that's why they're willing to discount it, i.e. better to sell it for $.50 than be unable to sell it at $1 and throw it out? If so, there's a limited supply of that food and we're back to the argument of resource scarcity leading to potentially not enough for everyone else.
You also have to consider that part of the reason food banks may be able to keep their costs down is that people will purchase non-perishable items and donate them from their own money to the food bank. The local food banks I've seen often hold these sorts of food drives. Those donations could be part of the reason the food bank is able to keep their costs to $.50 a pound for food. They're not actually paying anything for some of the food and maybe using donations for the rest that they're buying at a mild discount. That number then is an average, not an actual agreed upon price that the food bank is go to a store and purchase food at. Under those conditions, you'd be straight up stealing from the people donating in my view. Those dollars were not intended to provide the food bank's services to someone fully capable of purchasing from the grocery store themselves. Sure, the food bank is getting more than it cost them but you're also diluting the value of those donations.
There's a lot of questions that have to be answered to make purchasing from the food bank ethically ok when you have the means to source it from the normal avenues that compete in the free market. The food bank is intended to help those people who can't compete in the free market for whatever reason. Donors may also start demanding screening to sus out people who are taking advantage of the food bank's cheaper prices which ultimately just hurts the people who actually need it.
There's all sorts of ways to look at this problem but I would stay away from these sorts of methods because there are people who need these sorts of services and unless you find yourself in a situation where you need the help, you shouldn't be utlizing an already over-worked and under-funded organization, ESPECIALLY when there are better ways to accomplish getting better prices on groceries available to you like buying in bulk when sales hit and storing it for later.