Food Pantry Donations

The Half at The Hamptons race organizers have asked all runners to bring a food donation to help support local food pantries.

Food Pantries supported: The First Baptist Church, The First Congregational Church, The Methodist Church, St. Vincent De Paul at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Church, the Salvation Army and the Town of Hampton Pantry

In exchange for your generosity –

FREE RUNNING SOCKS: LOCO will be donating running socks to everyone that brings in a contribution and commit to contributing whatever is needed to fill the pantries!

All of us probably have a few of these items sitting in cupboards in our kitchens or in a pantry closet. Take a few minutes and dig to the back of your cupboards or pantry. You may find items that your family no longer likes or the kid who ate this food is now off at college.

Grab a bag, you may find quite a few items that you can donate.

I went through our pantry closet and found a number of items. My oldest daughter is a vegetarian so we had several cans of vegetarian #B&M Baked Beans. She is off to college so these are not going to be eaten anytime soon. When she comes home the weather will be warm and she wont want to eat them.

A few of the cans were past or close to their expiration dates. I was going to toss them because I don’t feel right giving away expired food. Before I tossed them I did a quick Google search to find out what the expiration dates really mean and is the food any good after that date.

Still Tasty after all these years

I quickly found stilltasty.com. This fascinating site allows you to look up foods by category and find out “How long will your favorite food or beverage stay safe and tasty?”. The search tool allows you to search for a food name or select from one of the categories they have lower on the page.

I tried to search for B&M Baked Beans but I could only find “baked beans”. Have you ever wondered how long that open bottle of pasta sauce will stay good in your refrigerator? Search for “pasta sauce” and #stilltasty will tell you how long a properly stored open or sealed jar will last, even past the expiration date.

Here are their results for “baked beans” unopened –

So if you are looking through your shelves for food to donate, don’t toss an item just because the date on the package has past. Check it before you chuck it, and help feed a family.

Food waste in America

I have heard the number “40%” quoted often as the amount of food that is wasted in America. A report on endhunger.org says it could be as high as 50%! This includes food left in the fields to rot for a variety of reasons, food tossed by supermarkets, bakeries, restaurants etc because it is not perfect looking or has hit the expiration date.

On average, American households toss 14% of the food they buy every year. We drive around town looking to save a few pennies on a gallon of gas and then go home and throw away $10 worth of left over meat that we failed to cook before it spoiled. Crazy.

We could feed our families better if we paid more attention to what was in the fridge. We could afford to buy better cuts of meat if we stopped tossing 14% of the meat that we buy in the trash. We could afford to give 5% of our grocery purchases to charity if we did not waste 14% of what we brought home every week.

My rant

I’m just “Joe Pair of Sneakers” here, but this is my soap box. If we were able to harvest more of the food that goes to waste in the fields and the orchards we could provide free breakfast and lunch in all of our schools in America.

Farmers would get some revenue from what is now going to waste. If families knew that their children were going to be fed two nutritious meals five days a week, I bet that school attendance would go up. Relieving poor families of the burden of 10 meals per week per child would help them provide better and more food for dinner and on weekends.

Incentivizing parents to get their kids to school every day could have huge social impact. Well fed children get sick less and perform better in school. Better educated children will be more successful in life and make a greater contribution to our society.

Middle Class and wealthy families do not need this incentive, but knowing that breakfast was waiting at school would relieve part of the morning stress of getting their kids out the door in the morning. Imagine not having to make breakfast and lunch before 6:30AM every week day? We could all use a little less stress in our lives.

For poor families a program like this would also alleviate that part of their morning stress. Maybe instead of making breakfast and lunch, they would have 10 minutes to sit down and read a book to their child. Children from poor families would get 10 healthy meals per week and they would be more likely to attend school knowing that a good breakfast was waiting for them.

There is free food rotting in the field as you read this. It could be feeding our kids.

There is food on your shelf that you are going to toss some day also. Go dig it out and take it to the race or drop it off at your local food pantry.

Run well my friends!

Andy