美国国家公共电台 NPR When Food Banks Say No To Sugary Junk, Schools Offer A Solution

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When Food Banks Say No To Sugary Junk, Schools Offer A Solution

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The holidays can feel like the time to donate to a food bank. You want to help, of course. But here's the reality - some food pantries don't want the foods people are giving. Here's NPR's Allison Aubrey

ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE²: Every Saturday morning at 9:30 a.m., Therese Dyer-Caplan opens the doors of the McLean Baptist Church in Fairfax County, Va., and welcomes in a line of hungry people. The bright sun shone through the stained glass that lit up the sanctuary³. Therese ushered⁴ us down a flight of stairs into the food pantry.

THERESE DYER-CAPLAN: We're just like a little mini grocery store. When you come in, these are very nice quality items. And, of course, everything here is donated.

AUBREY: There's a spread of fresh fruits, meats, cheeses, yogurts and a whole table filled with loaves of whole grain bread.

DYER-CAPLAN: And they're fresh. I mean, if you feel them, they're perfectly⁵ fresh.

AUBREY: Now, it hasn't always been this way. Food pantries used to be thought of as a repository for things nobody else wanted. So when grocery stores had a glut⁶ of sweets they could not sell they'd call Dyer-Caplan to take it.

DYER-CAPLAN: We've gotten calls from grocery stores saying, we have 100 cupcakes and sheet cakes; will you take them? The answer is no.

AUBREY: Dyer-Caplan says she realized several years ago that if she filled the whole food pantry with these kinds of empty calories full of sugar nobody needs, it would be a disservice, especially given the shift she's seen over the years in the families who come here.

DYER-CAPLAN: Well, you can see it firsthand. You can see that children are heavier. They're hungry, but they're heavy.

AUBREY: With this in mind, Dyer-Caplan started looking for new kinds of donations. Who had nutritious⁷ foods they'd be willing to donate? It turns out the answer was almost staring her in the face. Right across the street at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School, lots of perfectly good food was being tossed out.

DAVID DUGGAL: We have, like, bananas, yogurt, apple, one milk carton, a peanut butter sandwich and a cheese stick.

AUBREY: That's sixth grader David Duggal listing all of the foods that the kids at his lunch table leave on their trays and don't eat.

NICOLA HOPPER: All of it got thrown in the trash.

LEXI RETTY: So it honestly all just got piled up in a garbage dump.