i think a lot of ppl assume food pantries are for if you're completely destitute and have no food in your house at all.
just so you know if you forego certain foods because you can't afford them or you can't "justify" spending the money, you might be able to get that food at a pantry.
i was living in a super wealthy area once where the only grocery store within a 40 minute drive was all fancy upcharged local organic and i literally pretty much stopped eating fresh produce because i couldn't afford it. i went months without eating a carrot or greens or anything that didn't come from a can. sometimes i got frozen veggies.
so sure, i was eating. i wasn't starving. i was getting nutrition. but it was nuts that as an animal on earth where plants grow in abundance, i didn't get to eat any of them fresh. people deserve fresh produce!
one day i was lamenting it and my friend was like, "oh yeah i get all of my produce every week at the food pantry."
i was surprised bc she made the same paycheck as me and i wouldn't have thought of either of us as someone who 'qualified' for food assistance. i went to the food pantry and found out because the median income in our town was so high, i did qualify. more than that, they asked for no proof of income, it was more of a 'if you think you need help, we don't make you prove it,' situation.
for like 8 months i got all of my produce (and eggs!) there every week. and yes if i had made sacrifices elsewhere in my life i probably could have afforded some produce at the local grocery store. i could have, i don't know, skipped seeing the one movie i saw at a move theater once every couple of months and spent the $8 on spinach one time instead of the ticket and had spinach once every couple of months.
but the point is the food pantry had more than enough to go around. if i hadn't taken some of their produce, it would have gone bad. the resource was available to me, and there was no reason for me to crawl on my hands and knees to qualify for it.
resources like food assistance are not available everywhere and they can be very limited and hard to come by. they won't be given out just for fun to anyone. if you ask for assistance and are offered assistance in reply, you need to believe that the assistance is available for you.
if a food assistance program doesn't have resources to help you, it'll say so. there is no harm in asking! you will be told 'yes' or 'no.' but you won't know until you ask.
stop convincing yourself that you don't deserve assistance, that everyone else needs it more than you, that you're taking it from someone else, that you should have nothing at all in order to deserve anything.
you deserve to not only eat but to eat well. if there's assistance for you to access better foods than what you have, understand how fortunate you are, and stop denying yourself that resource!
accessing food assistance at pantries is also a great way to help yr community, because you can spread the word and help normalize receiving food assistance in yr community. you can even become a volunteer and be part of the team providing to you and others (i did that and it rocked)!
my point is, yes, there is always someone who needs something 'more' than others. i have been completely destitute and it sucks. but when i went to the food pantry never once did i think, 'nobody better be here if they have more than me.' i was grateful that we all had support.
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