Inefficiency

On Wednesday, I wrote about Janet Poppendieck's book, Sweet Charity, and specifically the chapter, "The Seven Deadly In's of Emergency Food."  Yesterday I expanded a bit on "Insufficiency."  Today, let's tackle "Inefficiency."

If you're a regular supporter / follower of Foodshare, you know that we talk a lot about the organization's efficiency - with just $30, we can provide enough food for a person for a month - so you might naturally wonder why I want to talk about inefficiency!

The book's main point is not about the food bank model, where we save food that would otherwise be discarded, often by the tractor-trailer load, and get it out to organizations that serve people in need.  Rather it's about food drives, both the local ones run by schools and faith groups and the big regional or national ones run by organizations like postal workers or scouts.

This graphic that Foodshare uses tells part of the story:

But it's not the whole story.  Let's dig a little deeper...

With these drives, the donor pays full retail price.  Then it costs more money and labor to sort, pack, transport, store and distribute the food.  Although some of these services may be donated, they still cost someone money!  The end result is that it can cost as much as the value of the food to get the food from that original donor to the person who needs it.  We'd do much better to just give the low-income family the cash that the original donor was going to spend in the grocery store and let them go to the store with it themselves!  Which is just one of the reasons SNAP is a better way to get food to people in need!