Donating canned goods to food pantries is like donating needles and syringes to a cancer research organization

Yeah, it's early and my brain didn't even register "cancer research org". When I first read the title I thought you were equating people's need to eat with drug abuse.

It definitely had "all poor people are addicts" connotations

No worries, friend-o! I gotcha now. Cash is a better donation for both types of organization, I agree.

You didn't say anything about cash in your post. You compared supplies. Cash works exactly the same for both of them, so there's no need for comparison in the first place.

Are you assuming that nobody donates goods and services to research teams? If so, that's an incorrect assumption. It isn't usually individuals doing so, but they get basic supplies donated on occasion.

Also, I said damn near the best. Cash is more versatile for sure, but a lot of cash donations go to running the charity rather than feeding people directly. You need both to make a food bank work, even when it's something like a church based program where most of the work is donated as well. You have rent or other storage costs, power, organization for bigger programs, and other overhead depending on where/when/who the program is involved with.

And, even then, canned goods would be way more useful for a food bank (or other food charity) than syringes would be for more lab based research. For lab work, you'd have different single-use items that would be used daily; syringes are only really useful once you start testing on live subjects.

You do a food bank, canned goods can be stored longer than fresh foods, and a lot of food banks have limited availability times, so you sometimes end up with food that isn't leaving the door. Anything you can't store until the next day/week spoils and is wasted.

Now, something like a "soup kitchen" kind of program, fresh goods are great, since they tend to have refrigerators for things that would spoil. But canned goods still have as much or more value because they're canned. Being canned reduces prep time. You open a can of beans, they're ready to put in the pot. You get the same amount of fresh beans, they need more prep before you can even cook them at all. Dried beans need soaking.

Tomatoes? Canned are better across the board for cooking anyway. Carrots, you want to use those, they need cutting. Potatoes, the same.

When you've got maybe ten people trying to feed a hundred, and the ten are doing the work in their off time, you may only have the full team at it for a few hours at a time, so the less prep needed, the more time you can spend setting up, feeding the people, then the inevitable cleanup.

You aren't going to get monetary donations to that kind of program to consistently pay people to do it as a job, but even if you could, that's still more expense that isn't going to food. But canned food? You can get that stuff left and right compared to damn near anything else.

Example: our local food bank is run by three churches. So there's no extra overhead specifically for the storage and distribution space, there's no paid workers even at the organization/administration level. But you still need to be able to store the food. One of the farms closest to town regularly donates fresh food in season, out of the stuff they grow for themselves, but anything that doesn't get taken is waste, since there's just not enough man-hours available to be open every day. Canned and dried foods are preferred for donations by individuals, specifically.

Now, our town isn't big enough to merit a "soup kitchen", which is in quotes because most of them aren't limited to soups and stews. But the city I lived in for a while has a couple. The one I spent time in, they definitely loved fresh food donations, and cash. Cash kept the doors open. Fresh food though, most individuals can't donate enough to serve a hundred + people per meal. That has to come from a business that gets food in bulk. If the kitchen had to buy the fresh food, they'd end up spending more on it than they would for canned goods, so it's an inefficient use of funds.

But, you can get individuals to donate a few cans here and there. It isn't always great stuff, but it doesn't matter because you can shelf it and wait until there's a use for it. The person that's willing to grab a can out of their own cabinet is easier to find than someone that's willing to drop five bucks.

No bullshit, I got involved with that kitchen through my job as a bouncer. The guy that owned the clubs and bars would have Wednesday no cover nights if you brought in two cans, and you could donate if you wanted to. Plenty brought cans, donations were rare. We'd do drives where he just let the people running that kitchen use one of his places for donors to have a place close to work to donate. Plenty of cans, even boxes of cans and dried foods (rice, beans, and pasta), but someone bringing cash money was unusual.

When individuals look at a can of food, it's something they usually already have, they don't need to spend money to give it away. But to hand over a check or cash, they're spending. So those one time donors, the ones that aren't willing to be a regular part of things, they pretty much never give money, even for the tax break.

Obviously, that's a fairly limited location, I never did anything in other cities, other towns. But it serves as an example of the value canned goods have to a food based charity. They would all want more funding, absolutely.

But you can't rely on individual donations the way you can with actual food. Monetary donations that are stable come from businesses or people that have the ability to pledge monthly funds, or large donations. And you need stability of cash flow, you can't rely on enough individuals donating money the way you can with food. It takes both kinds of donations to make things work well.

A research lab? If you wanted to compare something they'd use at the same level, you'd be looking more at things like growth media, or chemicals, not syringes. Syringes just aren't that useful. Which, when it comes down to it, supplying medical research is so different from a food bank that any comparison is difficult. Research programs don't accept random individual donations at all. You can't just roll up to a lab and hand them a jar full of glutamine; they can't use it at all. But that's a much closer comparison between things. You can't grow cancer cells to study without the nutrients to keep them alive (that's what glutamine is used for), just like you can't feed people without the actual food.

You get where I'm coming from? I know this whole thing is a lot for a shower thought, but it isn't something most people ever see behind the scenes of.