When I was young and my dad was out of work, we used to receive food assistance from the Mormon church. As payback, my father had to keep the grounds at the stake center in Pasadena, CA, where Howard Hunter was president. We received inconveniently large tins of Deseret brand canned goods. There was no way to seal them, so our fridge was full of opened tins of green beans and sliced peaches.

After my parents' deaths in the mid-1960s, I moved in with an LDS foster family. Their lives consisted of a string of bad financial decisions, so they were always poor and always on church assistance. It was the same situation. My so-called foster "father" cleaned the church, and I was his assistant. He taught me how to run the giant floor buffer, and I had to buff the gym and hallways (pre-carpet days, when the churches had shiny green linoleum floor tiles). As a return for all the buffing and toilet cleaning, we got the giant tins of Deseret foodstuffs (I think it was all in tins, right?) --flour, bad cereal, oats, sugar, peaches, beans, and their favorite--honey. My foster "father" was hooked on honey, and we always had a large tin of Deseret honey on the counter. It would granulate around the edges and on the surface. A few times a day he would take a serving spoon and scoop out a bunch of honey and slurp it down. God, it was disgusting. To this day I don't use honey because I can't stand the smell. I know it's wrong; honey is good. But I can't stand it. The smells bring back a day that I'd sooner forget, and memories of a man with disgusting habits.

I guess mostly I'm wondering if the church still distributes that stuff.

is horrible, but I received it for about 2 years 12 years ago. We liked most of what we got. We loved the cheese, spaghetti sauce, picante sauce. We had roasts, hams, turkey roasts. Every time the R.S. president came by, she told me I didn't order enough, so I'd order more. I had enough of some of the stuff for another year after I quit receiving the food.

They had a lot of other stuff, too, like toilet paper and brooms.

It was a real lifesaver for me. One less thing to worry about.

My ex always went to get the food for me. I didn't want to accept the food, but the bishop wanted me to have it.

I told other single mothers to go ask for help and all of them were turned down.

cl2 Wrote:
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>
> I told other single mothers to go ask for help and
> all of them were turned down.


why were they turned down??

From what I've seen, they don't give out help very often. I do believe I got help because the bishop was very aware of my situation and knew my ex well. He actually sent him a letter calling him to repentance and my ex was fine with that. I wasn't. I was pissed. But he turned out to be really good to me. We had lived here a long time before I ended up getting help.

The single mothers I worked with who I told to ask for help from their bishops were new in their wards.

Yes. We received it briefly in So. CA when there was a huge lay off of engineers and I was PG and couldn't work. Most of it was ok to good. Some of the veggies were old and unusable. I could not find a way to use a whole box of turnips!

My mother received it for awhile. She couldn't use a lot of it as she was diabetic, so she gave us some of the items that she could not eat, a few times.

I've also helped with deliveries.

Fortunately, I didn't have a RS Pres that insisted on looking through my cupboards and my garage to see if I was lying about what food I had on hand like others did. DISGUSTING.

I almost forgot. We had to do some job in the church to "work" for the food. I couldn't do much as I was due to have a baby in a couple of months, so I did some typing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2017 01:27AM by SusieQ#1.

They always told me to order more stuff.

Actually, I found it interesting, given I was inactive, that the 2 R.S. presidents that I had come for my lists would tell me all their problems in their own lives. They were rather shocking. I had a lot of the lds women in this ward coming by to tell me their problems for a long time. But it seemed those R.S. presidents saw me as someone who they could vent to and it wouldn't get around.

cl2 Wrote:
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I think you may have been the exception! I rarely heard any good gossip!

I was so severely depressed that, despite my best efforts, I kept making mistakes on my job, and was probably a hair's width away from being fired. I would have been on the street. (Maybe not, but I believed it at the time.)

I was so overwhelmed with my job, I asked for a downgrade, believing that it would be easier and I wouldn't make so many mistakes. It probably kept me from being fired, but the loss of $500/month salary was devastating. Bills that had been no problem before suddenly became the wolf at the door. I didn't have a spare penny.

I'm not joking when I say that if I heard my car making an odd noise, I just turned up the radio, because I couldn't afford repairs. It was terrifying.

I once came home to a dark house, as my utilities had been cut off for late payment. (Actually, I had just been paid that day, so I called the utility company, explained that I had just been paid, and could I hand-carry a check to their office?) To my surprise, they were very nice about it. Even though I was calling after-hours, they had somebody on duty for just such emergencies, and since I had a heretofore spotless payment record, they allowed me to drive to their office and slip an envelope with the payment check in it through a slot in the door. My lights were on when I got back home. I cried with relief and gratitude.

I had a couple of cats at the time, and I had to get Iams food for them, because they would not eat Friskies. Of course, the cats came first.

I bought bread at the baked goods thrift store, and made a paste out of cooked lentils, mashed up with seasoned salt and garlic powder, to make sandwiches. This was after I ran out of peanut butter.

It makes me angry now to think of it, but the church people knew that I was desperately poor, but nobody mentioned the welfare program. Yes, I had a good job, but my bills ate up most of my salary. It was the most terrifying situation I have ever been in.

Somebody at church told me to ask the RS prez about being allowed to get groceries through the storehouse. I don't remember what hoops I had to jump through, but as I recall (and this was back in the 80s, so I may not be recalling it correctly), I was allowed to shop in the storehouse. I don't recall having to submit an order. I think I would have been too overwhelmed with everything to provide a coherent order anyway.

I remember being weak-kneed at being allowed to buy groceries and maybe even soap and laundry detergent - for little or nothing. I know I had to do some kind of chores to pay them back, but I don't remember now what they were.

I eventually had to throw in the towel and file for bankruptcy. It was terribly humiliating. The first attorney I consulted about it said, condescendingly, "You're young, why can't you get a second job?" I couldn't believe that. I was barely able to hang on to the job I already had. I was chronically exhausted with depression and stark terror. The second attorney I went to saw the distress I was in, and he was very kind.

It was a huge relief, to have the phone quit ringing at all hours of the day and night, with bill collectors harassing me.

Enough years have gone by now, that the bankruptcy is no longer on my record, plus being remarried. My credit score is over 800, and I am proud of that.

Being able to shop at the storehouse helped me survive that dreadful period, and I will always be grateful to the church for stepping in when I needed help so desperately.

It is rather sad how LDS Bishops are often stingy with the food and other items in the Bishops Storehouse. Those that need it are denied and others are given more than they need.

I know a man who was a Bishop during a recession and anyone who came to him for help was sent to the Storehouse. The inspired Stake President who made him the bishop had him released for giving away too much food. The stats from the Storehouse made the Stake look bad and the Stake President who preached he was the Prophet for the Stake was trying to be promoted.

Does anyone remember the tin cans of peanut butter? They had oil floating on top you had to stir before you could eat it. Now it is in plastic jars kinda like Jiffy brand is. The LDS Peanut is oreally good. It is only made in Houston, Texas and shipped all over the world.

Interesting tidbit about the LDS Peanut Butter Plant - The plant is rented out by actual Food Banks and staffed by non LDS volunteers that make and give away more Peanut Butter than the LDS Cult does. Guess where the profit goes.

Di you know "Food Stamps" ("S.N.A.P." "EBT") is administered by the Department of Agriculture? It started in the 1950s, when the Government bought up huge surpluses to stabilize prices. Warehouses were stuffed with the stuff, so it made sense to give it away to the poor. At least, that was the government theory.

It was distributed in bulk boxes, like several of you have described. People took out what they wanted (flour, butter, hams, etc.) and heaved the rest (lima beans, soybeans, etc.) Most people heaved the unprocessed peanut butter, since it was not treated with sugar and salt (like Jiff), but packed like mud on the bottom with oil floating on the top.

So they figured, "Let people buy what they want!" and started issuing Food Stamps in booklets. But people sold them, 50% on the dollar, for cash. To "correct" that, they went to EBT debit-style cards.

Now people sell their EBT cards & passwords, 50% on the dollar. Millions are "lost" each month. Your tax dollars at work.

My tax dollars help feed millions of poor and desperate people in our increasingly unequal, unfair (to the poor) and economically stratified society through EBT, and I'd damned glad of it.

Sorry to respond to a political taunt in these tense times, but I hate it when well-to-do Americans of a certain economic persuasion, hold up some small minority of grifters in order to attack one of the relatively few government welfare programs in the United States, something that helps far more of their fellow Americans every day than private charity or "the churches" ever could, or will. EBT or "food stamps" in particular have been targeted for decades. They help a lot of people to eat, who used to be middle-class or almost; predictably such people often see their own benefits as justified while those OTHER people down the block don't deserve theirs, oh no.

Hey, that was my job!! I forgot that part. When I was a teen living in the foster home, I had two main duties: Number one job, I had to stir the oil into the peanut butter in one of those large tins, which took forever. Even today I find the smell of water mixed with peanut butter (like when you wash a knife or spoon that has peanut butter on it) particularly repugnant, a fact which confuses my wife. It doesn't bother her. But peanut butter was more than just a staple in my foster family's so-called "diet." The man put peanut butter on pancakes and waffles. When they ate ice cream, he'd take half the package, and mix in peanut butter, and eat it out of a salad bowl in front of the TV. Even though he's always been overweight, never worn a seat belt, even after being hospitalized more than once for his many car accidents, and has been to the emergency room as often as Tim The Tool Man Taylor, he is now over 75. He fancies himself a "man's man."

The other duty I had was to mix the baby formula for their newborn son. I don't know how he survived, baby formula being what it is, and me, a 15 year-old, mixing it for him. My job was to mix the formula and load all their many Playtex bottle-bags (there was a rack and equipment to do it), and keep the fridge stocked with the stuff. Using warm water made it dissolve better, and I used warm water from the tap, which is considered dangerous; it's full of metals like cadmium, etc. And yet he's still alive and is now 52.

The only time I went to the church for help, I was told I couldn't get help because I hadn't been paying my tithing. I was separated and didn't have a maintenance order in place yet. God forbid I was trying to take care of my family instead of buying my temple pass.

I know that hubby had beat me to the punch and let the bishop know that he was not the one who wanted a divorce. So I had that working against me too. I'd have given anything for some of that crappy food so I could spend my dollars on incidentals like car insurance (which I was driving without) and luxuries like that.

But it led to one of the big revelations for me, so looking back, I'm glad I saw the dark underbelly of the cult. Made it so much easier to accept the truth about doctrine and history when it was made known to me.

In this ward I know of one really worthy person receiving aid, a hard-working young woman with a special-needs child, who just cannot get ahead no matter how hard she works. DW (just released) did her best to make sure she got what this woman and her son needed. I recently helped deliver some of it. The other ward recipients, according to DW, are not the working poor, but three other people who have been bilking the system for years, none of them even attending church, let alone jumping through any of the usual hoops. But at least two bishops in a row were unable to bring themselves to cut them off. But they have apparently cut off far worthier cases from receiving aid. So there is no accounting for why a bishop will continue to fill the fridge of a healthy woman with healthy adult son who both refuse to work, and not help a recently divorced woman without piling on a heap of conditions they need to satisfy first.

Your description reminded me of the pails of honey my mother bought, all smelly, sticky and granulated. Yuck!

Yeah, what is it with Mormons' fascination with honey?