Redistribution of food is a responsibility of us all.

There is a box in the entrance of our local church, for food bank donations.

It is a green plastic tub.

It does not have a Facebook account, and to my knowledge has never posted an Instagram story.

We visit it once a week when we can. Over the Spring and Summer, it was a fun part of an afternoon, to head over there as our assigned exercise window of the day and play a few games on the way.

We throw a few tins from our store cupboard in the box, when we can. If we’re at a local store we hunt out some of the staples that suit food bank regular needs. It was part of a change we made a while back, and is one that we are very proud to have been able to keep up with a large degree of consistency.

One afternoon was even the fabled day that we left the house for the 100 yard trip in bright sunshine, only to be caught in a massive hailstorm on the way back.

It was Leo’s first experience of a hailstorm. He was genuinely traumatised for several hours by the belief that despite being able to see our garden gate, we would never get home. It is a memory that makes me smile every time I walk past the tree that we sheltered under.

Thankfully, the trauma passed and it also makes him smile too.

Months passed, and at the time I wrote this journal, it was Christmas time. I’d visited the green plastic tub, and it was a bit more full than usual, which filled me with joy.

Our increased desire for good, in the run up to Christmas, is a wonderful thing. I have to also admit that I felt a bit of self-congratulation. Maybe even a bit smug that it’s something we’ve been doing all year.

Not proud. Smug.

What right do I have to feel like that?

I made me wonder about motivation. Our contribution to the food bank is small, we don’t keep track but let’s say less than £5 per week.

In some ways the trip to the food bank began as a transaction in self-interest, because it got us out of the house for a little while and provided an hour of distraction for a 4-year-old in a pandemic. It is making a difference for sure, but tossing a few items in a collection is the easy bit.

It got me wondering about how much I do in my life, that I believe is selfless and good, but is done with a self-interested bias. And how much do we do in life, because we know what’s in it for us? When did it only start counting, when it was on display?

If a tree falls outside of social media, does it make a sound?

Would I have visited the food bank as much if we were not locked down, and I didn’t have five-hours of unexpected childcare in the afternoon?

Do I give a thought to the bigger picture, when making the donation? Or does it make me feel good and give a bit of moral salve to feel like the kind of person who donates to food banks? Was I tempted to post my participation in a donation on social media, to prove I was ‘winning Christmas’?

Is even referring to it as a ‘food bank’ placing an automatic saviour complex on what I am doing? That by calling it that, I am suggesting that somehow this is the deposit into an account that is controlled by the rich and distributed to the poor? Should it not just be a food co-operative?

Plus. The ones who are doing the real good, the selfless good, are those that leave no trace of self-congratulation. The people who thought about putting the tub there in the first place.

Those who regularly drive it the five miles to the nearest collection point, and bring it back empty. Those at the collection point, who volunteer to organise and distribute the donations.

Those who give up their time, without a transaction of emotional or economic gain in mind. But instead the desire to nourish their soul by knowing they have toiled on behalf of others.

There are individuals doing good like this, every day.

I wonder if there is more we can do, to shine a light on good. To do it with generosity and without self-interest. That we can go out, and see people who are doing good things. Really see them.

For this journal, I will try to begin to see the good.

It also does not mean finding the good in selfless individuals, it means everywhere.

It means finding good where we are told there is bad. And especially finding good where it is not expected.

To explain what I mean, here is a food bank related riff on supermarkets.

Supermarkets have especially have become one of the go-to villains of our consumption society. By supermarkets I also mean large chain stores as a generalisation.

It is a broad term, and so let me be more specific. I am referring to the familiar stores we see on our high streets and out-of-town sites. Those operated by shareholders and through corporate structures, rather than independent stores or those who operate with disruptive models.

The outrage levelled at supermarkets, include sourcing practices, packaging, marketing, pricing, waste, and the relentless march of consumerism and commoditisation.

I have personally written about food waste and food commoditisation. I have levelled an amount of criticism in this direction. I have worked in the past with supermarkets as part of my job. I use supermarkets, although since around around 1998, I have actively boycotted one particular large supermarket chain. I did this not as an activist but as someone who objected to their treatment of suppliers.

So whilst I do not disagree that large corporations need to lead change rather than resist or ignore it, I also have a suspicion that when we lambast supermarkets, that we forget they consist of individuals, like us.

And that we somehow ignore this important fact because we get caught in the trap of believing the generalisation. The generalisation that all supermarkets from top to bottom are wasteful, are greedy, or are downright evil.

That is the trouble with generalisations. The longer we use a generalisation as a shortcut, the more likely we are likely to ignore or fill in the blanks and it becomes a narrative. And then the longer it remains a narrative, the more likely it is to be seen as an absolute fact.

So instead of thinking of them as faceless wholes, I’ve stated thinking about them as dysfunctional families instead. Flawed, eccentric, complicated, contradictory, and at times confused of their true identity. Generous and selfish. Purposeful and soulless.

And supermarkets, just like dysfunctional families, are not entirely evil. And if you are looking for good in supermarkets, then you can look no further than the work that many supermarkets carry out in the redistribution of food.

I am sure there are a thousand arguments about how this pales into insignificance against the other crimes that supermarkets commit. But remember, this is a dysfunctional family, and so it doesn’t matter what Auntie Pat is doing somewhere else, or what Cousin Steve did yesterday.

In the moment, right now, supermarkets are doing a lot of good and offer a lot of help for us to redistribute food. They do this directly through schemes such as Fareshare, but also in ways which we can recognise and way we can participate in.

But instead of me offering further opinion, let me instead practice what I have promised, and pass along some good.

If you are interested in finding out the nearest food bank to you, the majority of our UK network can be found by entering your postcode into the Trussell Trust or the Independent Food Aid Network sites. It is likely the same kind of system where you live, if you are not in the UK.

But if your life does not allow the time to visit a separate location, then it my be able to fit into your day, or your week, via the supermarket.

There are hundreds of collection points, in supermarkets, all over the country. There are points in store, ways to donate, and even in some chains staff will pack a separate bag on your behalf, and drop it and others at the nearest food bank.

This is something we can all do right now, or we can wait and do it because it is Christmas. But it would be better if it wasn’t an annual tradition. The pressure on food does not go away after Christmas.

Long after many of us might have returned to some kind of normality, many will not.

Redistributing food needs to become an ‘and’ in our lives. We need to donate now, and in the future. We need to audit our cupboards now, and every month or few months. We need to keep dropping an extra item in our shopping baskets now, and continue to do it when we can.

If you are not convinced by my support of supermarkets then let me widen it a bit more, and bring it back to generalisations, and to the dysfunctional family.

If we can accept that all corporations, empires, conglomerates, are made up of individuals, then it gives us hope. And it gives us opportunity. Because, the one thing that individuals can do, is change.

It takes feedback, proof, and new habits. But they can change.

But they will not change, if we keep finding the bad all the time.

They will not change if all that happens is that the good is written off in the generalisations of the bad. It is not as simple as that, and it is debilitating for individuals who are within these organisations and who are doing good to only hear the bad.

It does not make those who are doing good, believe they are being heard. We instead need to show we are on the side of good, wherever it can be found.

Finding good, is a practice that can also make us pause for a moment before we do something. And ask ourselves why we are doing it?

We cannot also truly make change, if we only do it because there is something in it for us. We need to always ask ourselves if we are doing something to be on display, and be honest with ourselves about this. Think whether our posture is to do good, or because it looks good.

We all know that things that look good, don’t always last.

But things that are good, including our actions, can leave an imprint forever.