Have you ever given the food bank something that the poor really want?

No telling. What we give the food bank is “non perishable.” Unless you are literally starving to death, that’s just boring old, nutritional food.

I have done my best to give interesting stuff. Canned chili, tuna fish, different pastas, different pasta sauces.

I bought two bagfulls of cake mixes. Who doesn’t like cake?

Money.

I guess the question is what do the poor really want?

What do the poor want?

People who are starving really don’t care how “interesting” the food is. Jesus. Just give them FOOD.

Give them meat or a gift certificate for chicken etc
Food banks don’t give meat I don’t think, unless its canned?
Eggs would help them as well. of gift certificate for such?

When I was in need. I hoped for fresh fruit and fruit juice , bacon and eggs, milk and butter, and veggies. Canned foods, like chilli, tuna and salmon, were welcome too. Bread and peanut butter and jam were wonderful.

My MIL gets two boxes of food a month and they contain mostly food donated by grocery stores close to expiration, or overstock. They include frozen chicken, frozen ground beef, every kind of canned food you can imagine, jugs of juices, plus packaged rice, beans, and various pastas, breads,rolls, cakes and pies. There is usually a large amount of fresh fruits.

When our post office has a food drive, I donate all manner of canned and packaged food.

Gluten free anything. People with gluten sensitivity have a difficult time at food banks. Also anyone on a low carbohydrate diet have big problems. Both times my friends were recommended these diets by doctors, but if the food isn’t available there’s nothing you can do. Some states harvest the meat from fresh roadkill to feed the hungry.

In high school I volunteered to work our school’s food drive a couple years in a row; we had a list of items that were most requested by the families we delivered to, built up over years. So when we’d ask people to donate we’d give them the list and hopefully they’d give items from it (things liked canned beans, pasta, tuna). But this also involves handing the list to people walking into local grocery stores so they’d buy the items new rather than raiding the unwanted items in their pantry.

I always give what they ask for, which is usually things like canned chicken and tuna, chili, canned vegetables, dried pasta, canned pasta sauce, and canned soup.

I don’t think food banks can accept perishable goods…can they?

The food banks here specifically ask for non-perishable foods, and they don’t want anything in glass jars, or anything homemade. They mostly want/need staples.

No glass jars? Aren’t glass jars about as preserved as canned foods? At least, those that come from the grocery store are.
I wouldn’t trust homemade canning.

The glass jars can break. All of the food that gets donated to food banks gets manhandled, from the initial donation, to the sorting, to the transport, and to the taking home by the recipients. They don’t want anything that will get broken.