Housing, Street People's Bank, Food Bank, Book Fair http://www.dcm.org.nz In a bid to highlight the limited nutritional value of food parcels available at the food bank, Downtown Community Ministry staff have decided to spend a week eating from a food bank parcel.
So, starting Monday, several DCM staff will receive a food parcel and eat from it for the week.
Director Stephanie McIntyre says she expects to find out just how boring and poorly balanced a food bank diet is.
As the week goes on I know that my regular diet will take a knock and I'll be challenged by the lack of enjoyable foods presented to me.
We'll only be doing this for a week but I imagine we'll soon see the foods people on low incomes are missing out on. We're doing it to educate ourselves and improve the food bank. In no way are we pretending that this brief experience will show us what it's really like to eat regularly from the food bank.
We were prompted to this action after meeting Les Crozier at the Salvation Army who began working at the Hope Centre recently. He has been doing a similar experiment with his family to find out first hand the type of foods served up in a food parcel.
Like Les, we realise we don't walk in the same shoes as people using the food bank, but having an experience such as this may provide us with new insights into the types of food parcels we offer, the food we request from donors and the time we expect a food parcel to last for.
Over the next week we'll talk more with food bank users about their food parcels and the foods they'd like to see included in them. http://www.standrews.org.nz/dcm//bulletin/2008/bulletin07-08-08.html