Stretching our food-drive dollars

Thanks to my artificial generosity generator (see also known as our charity fund, see "The Generosity Generator," posted Nov. 25), we now shop for food-drive items rather than simply scanning the pantry for cans of vegetables no one likes. It’s a liberating feeling we‘re still getting used to, and my daughter Rowan and I on a recent food-drive hunt found ourselves drawn to the antithesis of the dented and the dark: a sunny yellow box of Cheerios, a cheery package of Kraft mac’n cheese.

We kept our price-conscious lenses on -- we want to be good stewards of the charity fund, after all -- and in looking over other sale cereals at Walgreen’s that day we found
a bright yellow box of Golden Grahams that came with the possibility of a $5, $10 or even $20 cash card inside.

We were loving the idea of converting $2.50 into a fun food source that might then yield its own cash donation. It reminded me of the time we bought chicken dinner tickets to support our son’s baseball league, and then, not wanting to deal with all those yucky chicken bones, donated the tickets to a food bank.

Or pledging to public radio when there‘s a matching campaign going on. (Though because that‘s a normal feature of that type of fund-raising, it’s not nearly as satisfying as crafting your own charitable twofer.)