Food bank

Enjoyed writing those mammoth posts yesterday but I wore myself out a bit, this one will be written in the time it takes the bath to fill!

I've been volunteering at a food bank in Forest Hill for a little over a year now - I signed up the day Thatcher died. Sort of as a gesture of surrender. I've always avoided volunteering because I was worried that I'd end up enjoying it and that it would "make me a better person". My gut instinct was that charity work should be incredibly tedious and humiliating - I can't justify this, it's just personal, maybe I can't trust myself, maybe it's something to do with the example of Jesus, drummed into me in school. But I had time on my hands and this seemed like such an unbelievably boring task that I couldn't possibly find it "fulfilling".

It was really boring the first few weeks and is still pretty boring (especially since Jess got a Friday shift in a shop and can't join me anymore), but I've really grown to like all of the middle-aged / elderly Christians who volunteer there. I talk to them about trains and cricket and shit like that, it's great. I'm pretty much the only non-Christian and the youngest there by about 20 years.

I'm part of the backroom staff, I don't actually deal with clients except when bringing out bags. It's a Trussell Trust food bank so it's all pretty well organised. Orders come in from the front, based on a fixed list. One person calls out the order item by item, the rest of us pick the items off the shelf, then it's bagged and weighed. My favourite ever job was light warehouse work so this is a bit like that.

The process is always far more slow and chaotic that it needs to be. The shelves are arranged in a horseshoe pattern, with the items arranged so as to correspond with the order of the list - i.e. top to bottom list = right to left on shelves. There are almost always more volunteers than we actually need so the back room is crowded. It seems obvious to me that a zonal marking system would make the most sense, with each volunteer stationed next to one shelf, feeding items into the centre. I was able to briefly introduce this early on, during a particularly busy day, but it fell apart and we soon reverted to the old system of bumping into each other and constantly being in each other's way. But of course I came to see that this inefficiency is part of the point - we're volunteering our time, so we don't need to be bound to imperatives of efficiency, we can just bumble around, fuck you capitalism and liberal rationality, Jesus looks kindly on us.

I also like how many of the volunteers have developed a "thing", some kind of self-appointed duty. One woman always makes sure that, if there are young children on an order, that we give full-fat milk not skimmed (clients can pick up three X three-day parcels a year - nine days of sustenance out of 365, probably not nutritionally significant.) Another guy is constantly fiddling with the items on the shelves, making sure the expiry dates are in right to left order. I'm trying to carve out a thing of discreetly checking the ethnicities of clients (it's given on the referral sheet) and using my deeply cosmopolitan Guardianista knowledge to give them culturally-appropriate food. It just passes the time.

People drop off some funny items too. Some are just amusingly posh, like pricey pates and terrines, fancy loose leaf teas etc. The other good one is when people very generously give us enormous 5kg bags of rice, or catering-sized gigantic tins of beans, that we then can't give away because they are too big. The current winner, however, is a box of bikini wax.

We've had one break-in but the biggest issue is mice - not only to they shit on the pasta, but they nibble into the milk cartons and then the milk spills out and gets all funky. I've been called in for mouse shit / gross milk cleaning detail twice now, which seems unfair because I'm not even going to Heaven.

Since I started going, food banks have been in the news a lot. It's really amusing how people seem very keen to have an opinion about them. They get under people's skin somehow, it's funny.