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........Seriously hard to understand food banks having trouble getting rid of produce........... Though I remember back in days of govt commodities, .........
Veering off the OP's original topic: when I volunteered at the food banks ( I was occasionally at 4 different locations) Myself and a couple of other volunteers would take multiple shopping bags of lettuce and other greens home to feed to our chickens. The clients wouldn't take it and it can't be sent back to the distribution center so it would go into the garbage if we didn't take it for the chickens.
We also took home bread, apples, bananas, but never any cakes or boxes of mac and cheese.
Back in the days of government commodities, my father owned a laundromat and had a dumpster out back. On commodity day, that dumpster would get filled up with bags of government flour, corn meal, beans, canned meat, anything else that was handed out free, except for the cheese.
I had a friend who was getting commodities and she was throwing everything out, so I took it. I made a lot of bread and corn bread with government flour and the canned meat made a nice barbecue sandwich. I asked her why she didn't just turn down everything but the cheese, when all she used was the cheese, and her answer was basically that she took it because they gave it to her.
People will take free food when they aren't hungry enough to eat it.
My sister's MIL does something similar. Her favorite pastime for the past 10 years is shopping with her friend at thrift stores. (FYI, I know the MIL well through various sources) She buys stuff for my sister and her husband and daughter. They don't need this stuff, they are well off, own home, a rental home and vacation home. She has asked MIL nicely, not nicely, has now given up on asking and just says thank you puts stuff in a pile then donates it. Funny thing is the MIL complains to my sister her house is too cluttered, she just can't win either way. She is resigned to just accept the stuff.
Make a secret mark on the food you take back to the church and see if they give it back to your MIL and she brings it back to you.
That block of cheese could be like the holiday fruitcake that makes the rounds among family members. Have some fun with it! Great memories and a story to share when the 93-year-old MIL is gone, which will be soon enough. In the meantime, humor her.
LOL, used to cook them lot in years past. At most an hour and half on stovetop at steady simmer. When they are soft, they are edible. 3hr should turned them into pure mush, they were still HARD. In pressure cooker take around 45minutes. Crockpot IMHO gives stuff bit of an off taste, much prefer pressure cooker. But sure everybody has their preferences. And to be fair probably pretty easy to get a used crockpot cheap in thrift store and not as big of a learning curve as pressure cooker.
If you want quick cooking times, the smaller beans cook much faster. OLD beans take much longer cooking times than fresh crop. These IMHO were ancient, probably left over from WWII or something in some govt warehouse.
And no I didnt try soaking them over night. That would probably made them cook closer to normal. Though as old and petrified as they must have been, not sure how easily they would soak up water.
Expecting poor people to cook something in excess of 3hr seems well beyond reasonable. Now personally I highly recommend thrift store stove top pressure cooker. But again there is a learning curve if you didnt grow up around one and doubt most younger people have any experience except maybe with the instapot electronic kind. Not as high pressure or as quick cooking times. And lot more fragile.
They don't mean anything by it. It's almost an instinctive behavior, like yelling "wear your sweater" when they see an adult child going outside. It's just what they do.
You have to take a moment to consider where they're coming from. These women grew up in an era when almost all young couples struggled financially for many years while first starting out, and the most important lesson many young married women had to learn was how to stretch every dollar until you could see through it, in order to feed her children. Many of them often went to bed at night worrying that their children were hungry. The lessons they learned during those hard times are hardwired into their minds, and you are not going to rewire them.
My own Chinese mother-in-law tries to send us checks for $1000 every single month just because she assumes everyone must be struggling these days, and we can no more convince her we don't need it than we can persuade her that the sky is green. We've just decided to not cash them and hope she doesn't notice; my father-in-law is the one who mostly manages the finances, and he's sort of in on it with us, so I think we're going to get away with it.
Thank them graciously, throw away the rotten food, donate the edible food back to wherever, and just try to be glad this is the worst gripe you have about your family. There are many people who would give anything to be able to say that.
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