Food for Thought

I'm so lucky to have such a great group of people to support me in my adventures. Now that I'm back in Canada, my adventures may slow down, but I thought I'd try to keep the blog going.

I wanted to share with you a story about a friend (soon to be neighbour) of mine.

A few weeks ago, as she was passing a drug store, she saw a sales clerk throwing away a cart full of bagged milk. She stopped to ask if it had gone bad and was told that the expiry date was the following day so it had to be thrown out. Instead of walking away from this situation, this friend asked the sales guy to load the milk in to her car. She then brought it to the Mission, a homeless shelter, where they did not have the funds to buy even powdered milk, let alone real milk. The Mission was very appreciative and the drug store didn't know the difference. As this friend delved deeper in to the situation of waste from this particular drug store she did not get the results she'd hoped for. The manager suggested he would be locking his dumpsters from now on, instead of providing it to the needy, due to a bad experience he'd had. At this my determined friend went home and called the head office to find out about the store policy. She had researched other groups and found out through Second Harvest in Toronto that stores are protected from being liable when donating food in good faith. So why is it that we still have food being thrown out when people rely so heavily on food banks? How can we be so quick to throw out food, before it's even expired, when other people are hungry? Imagine if every store donated their near expiration food to organizations that could use it quickly?

When she shared this story with me, I was inspired. She's still working on the situation and should be receiving a copy of their store policy soon. She saw something wrong and took a few minutes of her time to make an important contribution to other people's well being.

Sometimes we recognize helping people as charity work done in other countries. Sometimes we justify our inaction to our location or time constraints. What we have to remember, as part of the global community, is that the actions and decisions we take in our own local communities are just as influential as any work being done overseas. We all have the power to make change, it's just a matter of standing up for what is fair.