I’m the kind of husband who doesn’t ask questions—not even when six giant boxes of infant formula show up at our house on Halloween, even though we don’t have a kid. Without raising an eyebrow, she carried the bags inside and went back to making pretzels with dough.
If asked, I would have declared that I was done waiting for “someone” to do “something” about the government shutdown and the millions of people who were at risk of not getting the SNAP benefits they need in November because of it.
Elphaba mode activated.
The school our children attend has a large population of food insecure families. The local food bank sets up meals in the school parking lot once a month. When two federal judges ordered Trump to continue food assistance programs last Friday, we breathed a sigh of relief for our neighborhood.
Until I read on. Calls? Disturbances? Oh. This is not the good news we have been waiting for. Bureaucracy is fun like that.
The school resource officer immediately sent an email assuring families that the school would continue to provide breakfast and lunch each day for every student. All I could think was, But what about babies?
So I bought half a dozen giant boxes of formula and posted in all my local Facebook groups that anyone who needed them could find them on my front porch. Because food shortages can be embarrassing, I even gave them an alibi: “Come to my street, the cans will be at this number.”
Two days later, the formula was still there. I checked Facebook for comments on my posts and searched through my DMs – anything to indicate that someone in need had reached out. They weren’t. I checked the news every hour to see if the SNAP issue was resolved. It hadn’t been.
I was determined to find the family that needed this formula for their baby. I googled “free infant formula” and found a website that matched families who had extra formula with families who needed it. The closest match for the formula I bought was in Georgia. I’m in California. Shipping alone would take three days and cost more than the formula. I googled food banks where I could donate formula. They preferred to take monetary donations. Why was it so hard?
Then I remembered that I had broken the first rule of helping: I had decided what people needed instead of asking what they needed.
The worst part was that I knew better.
In 2006, on a disaster relief mission after Hurricane Katrina, my team’s mission was to send into a warehouse filled floor to ceiling with boxes of donated items that were mostly useless. In a particularly thoughtless black garbage bag, I found a single shoe and a moth-eaten sweater with dried food on it. Six months after the hurricane hit land, these donations were still sitting there, helping no one. Ironically, dealing with all this garbage took resources away to assist the survivors.
Ernesto Sirolli, who gave the famous TED talk “Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!” once said, “When we show up and tell people what they need, that’s not philanthropy. It’s imperialism.”
Embarrassingly, the only people who responded to my Facebook posts were other neighbors who didn’t need the formula, saying, “God bless you! You’re so good!” Trying to be Elphaba, I accidentally pulled a Glinda – even though I knew better. Why do we do this?
I think it goes like this. When many Americans see a problem, they take action. We want to help. But without enough context for how to help, we end up falling back on etiquette for the next closest thing: gifts. In gift tag, you are expected to predict what the recipient wants. Instead, the recipient is expected to be grateful, regardless of whether you got it right, because it’s the thought that counts.
Unfortunately, that’s why you sometimes hear people get angry when a homeless person refuses their generous offer of a food item or meal they don’t like. “If they were really hungry, they’d be grateful for anything. Plus, no one acknowledged my attention. Zero stars.”
Helping is not like a gift. When babies are hungry, it’s not the thought that counts.
After I finished slapping my forehead six times (one for each box of Parent’s Choice Advanced I had purchased), I returned the formula and sent the money to the local food bank like I should have done all along. They already serve families experiencing food insecurity and therefore know what items those families are asking for – AND the money goes further thanks to nonprofit rebates and matching grants.
When I returned the formula, the customer service person asked, “Was there something wrong with it?”
No, I’m too stupid to help. I’m getting better.
My husband still hasn’t asked what it was about.
Emma Fulenwider is a writer and self-proclaimed book addict. As such, he is a literary agent, contest judge for Writer’s Digest, reader for Black Fork Review, and founded the Birren Center anthology series. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from Ashland University and in 2024 released a satirical children’s book, The Very Busy Writer, which Kirkus called “a relatable read for writers.” Emma lives in California.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost in November 2025.
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