Donations to the UAA food banks always welcome

When my children were little, my husband and I struggled on his single income. I was a stay-at-home-mom. There were quite a few times in our early years that we utilized food banks.

Fast forward a few years and we got more stable, but there were periods when my pantry would suddenly become sparse. I had nine children and I felt like sometimes things just disappeared. One evening over dinner I asked where all the food in the pantry was going. One of my high schoolers said, “We are having food drives at school. There are some kids who are homeless or who just don’t have enough because parents can’t afford much with gas prices being so high. I grabbed a couple of things.” My children in elementary school eagerly added that they were doing the same thing. Multiply everyone taking a few cans and packages by nine and yes, that explained the locust effect in my pantry!

I told the kids that I had plenty of cans of beans and vegetables, why were they taking my big jars of applesauce, cans of mandarin oranges, packages of Little Debbie’s Brownies, and cake mixes? My son Kyril said, “I liked those best when we were using the food bank.”

Wait– we? My kids were not supposed to know. I had painstakingly removed stickers indicating that the items were from the food bank, and rebagged them before going home.

With our family being so big, I wasn’t ashamed that at times we struggled on my husband’s lone paycheck. I just didn’t want the kids knowing that we needed to use it because children talk: I didn’t want them telling their friends about it, because other children can be unmerciless jerks with that kind of information. I also didn’t want well-intentioned, assertive parents offering me help at PTA meetings, either.

Our children did not talk– not to their friends and not to me or their dad, and when we were doing better and they had nonperishable food drives at school, they simply took from our pantry and gave what they felt other people would like.

When I was interviewing for my food articles for this TNL issue, I asked Breeayne Dinius at the UAA Food Pantry about what people tended to like best. I noticed a drawer for kitchen tools, like can openers, and utensils, like serving spoons and whisks, which she said are always needed. She told me that it was a little bit different in the UAA pantry because they don’t have a refrigerator or freezer, so in that way the food offered was limited compared to what it would be in someplace like the Food Bank of Alaska. For our UAA pantry, where people can look around and pick what they want, she said that salsas, pickles, and breakfast items tend to go fastest. I was surprised, “Pickles?” She invited me to look up uses for pickle juice and ways to use pickles. Taste of Home highlights Cuban Sliders made with King’s Hawaian rolls and Swiss cheese, among many recipes, and Serious Eats has a list of what to do with pickle juice, which includes drinking the juice to replace electrolytes after a workout and reusing the brine to flavor more vegetables.

If you are interested in helping, you can donate money directly to the Emergency Food Cache or the Seawolf Food Pantry. If you prefer to do some shopping on your own and be like my children and buy what you enjoy and want to share, check out the list posted at the food pantry for specific items. Please remember the need for unopened toiletries, as well.