The chickpeas that tell me I’m lazy about giving
Ihad a nasty moment with a can of chickpeas the other week. It looked at me from atop my kitchen bench, where it sat in a grim huddle with some canned tuna, tinned tomatoes and a drooping sack of lentils, raised a salty eyebrow and said, ‘‘You’re lazy, Verity.’’ Ouch.
It’s December, which means that charity can drives are popping up all over the place faster than hipster bars serving cocktails in decorative pineapples. There was a can drive at work, and I was feeling holy, so I decided to throw some tins together and bring them in.
I dragged out some cans one night, threw them on the kitchen bench for work the next morning, and paused to admire the fruits of my virtuous labour.
That’s when the chickpeas confronted me. There they were on my bench, accompanied by some other soggy sad sacks, assembled together more miserably than a 90s girl-band reunion winery tour. Was this really, the peas protested, the best I could do?
Chickpeas I’d had since 1965? Tuna so unlovable I’d never even eaten it in a ‘‘day before payday’’ dinner? Those tinned tomatoes that no-one even buys but rather breed mysteriously at the back of your cupboard until you’ve got 16 generations of Wattie’s crushed Italian herbs style? Yep, there was no doubt, it was a collection of crap.
I know I’m not the only one guilty of uninspiring charity can offerings. Last year Jackie Clark, the unstoppable chief aunty of charitable organisation The Aunties, which helps women in domestic violence situations, caused a storm after asking people not to donate tinned tomatoes. Tomatoes, she argued, get donated all the time and sit unloved at the back of refuge cupboards all over the country.
The last thing women in this situation need to do, she said, is cook a meal from scratch. What they really need is comfort food to get them and their kids through traumatic times.
She’s right. When it comes to charity can drives, we often offer up the ugliest pickings from our kitchen cupboards. But why? We know that if we’re going through a rough time, all we do is come home and eat a can of whipped cream, three bags of Crunchie bars and wash it down with tablespoons of Milo straight from the can. And yet here I was with a box of tinned tomatoes again . .
The most obvious explanation was that I’d been lazy. And if you’re anything like me, you have been too. We’re lazy because we feel we should do something, but we can’t be bothered doing too much, so we just ‘‘shop’’ our cupboards. We take all the things we can spare – all the things we don’t like, don’t use, or don’t need – and put them in a box. Then we pat ourselves on the back at our own virtuousness.
We probably also carry traces of an insidious, dismissive attitude towards people in need. When the internet reacted badly to being told not to donate tinned toms, there were distinct mutterings that ‘‘they should be grateful for anything’’. Implying that these people should be happy we’re even helping at all.
But why should they be happy? I sure as hell wouldn’t be happy at a mate turning up to support me armed with three cans of tuna. And if we were homeless, struggling or had just left a violent relationship, we know we’d all want something to cheer us up.
And there’s nothing cheerful about chickpeas – they’ve got all the culinary charm of ball bearings. But clearly we don’t think about vulnerable people as though they were people like us. They’re people like ‘‘them’’.
Unsurprisingly, we don’t like being called out on these shoddy attitudes either.
The first time I read that we shouldn’t give tinned tomatoes, I was spitting. Me and my 99-cent cans were single-handedly saving people! But the more I thought about it, the more I realised I was really just palming off my unwanted items and passing it off as charity. And I was mad because I was embarrassed that I’d been called out on such grubby glory-grabbing.
Luckily, the solution’s pretty simple: we just need to be a bit more thoughtful when buying stuff. If it’s a box for struggling families, put in essentials like laundry powder. But also tea and biscuits, because not only is it human nature to hit the garibaldis when sad, it’s also something to invite people over for and chat over. They’re a shortcut to feeling better. It doesn’t have to be expensive: biscuits are $3 at Countdown.
The hard part about this process is accepting we’re being a bit lazy in the first place. But, hey, as soon as we do, we can start doing some real good this Christmas.
If we were homeless, struggling ... we know we’d all want something to cheer us up. And there’s nothing cheerful about chickpeas.