Giving Leftovers to the Food Drive

Each year our kids' school does a food drive connected to the Super Bowl.  It's fun for them as they compete against another school, there's a traveling trophy involved, the class with the most amount of cans wins a pizza party, and it obviously goes to a good cause in supporting our local food pantry.

But if people give to this like I give to this, then I suspect the food pantry might be in some trouble.

You see, whether it's this food drive, the one the Scouts do, the one where I get my wife some discounted roses, or the one the postal worker does, I give away the stuff I haven't used.   A can of Pumpkin pie filling.  A can of chicken gumbo soup.  A can of tomato paste.  You know- stock items you've never gotten around to using.

And the thought hit me- I wonder how many cans of pumpkin pie filling are lining the shelves at the food pantry?  And then I wondered about an under-resourced family coming to the Food Pantry and being oh so excited because they could claim one of those cans of pumpkin pie filling?!

I know- excuse my sarcasm- it's not that the under-resourced family using the Food Pantry couldn't use the pumpkin pie filling to make a pumpkin pie with.  It's that compared to say Campbell's Chunky Soup or Chef Boyardee or a can of veggies, the pumpkin pie filling is about as useful to an under-resourced family as it is to me.

Which isn't much.