She eats. I’m her mother. I let my daughter eat. Last night she was hungry and we had some peppers.

[Daemonaquila]

34. It's been a long time, but...

Years ago I was on that edge, trying to make sometimes $10/week cover all my food needs. I didn't go to pantries, but in my college town I knew a couple restaurants that made sure to feed all their nightly leftovers to hungry locals after the close, and which co-ops and small groceries made old bread and produce, damaged canned goods, etc. available for free or nearly.

I definitely ran into the kinds of situations you're talking about. I felt bad taking a big bag of fruit or veg that was nearly bad, because I knew I would not be able to eat or process it all in time to avoid wasting it. Some things you can freeze easily, but cucumbers, cantaloupe, etc. don't work so well. I didn't have a lot of other food to cook whole soups or meals with en masse and freeze them, and I certainly didn't have a way to can things. Even affording baggies to freeze things in was a nice wish, a lot of the time.

One night I had only 2 heads of cabbage in my refrigerator, and was at wits' end to eat them before they went bad, and about crying at the thought of any of that going to waste. On one hand, you can boil a head of cabbage with salt and it tastes pretty good. However, 2 whole heads' worth with no other food... that's a whole ton of cabbage and a whole ton of stomach upset.

Some of what you're listing would definitely have been usable in short order, if you had some other food to work with. The onions? Chop and stew them down, freeze containers of them for later for soup, potato topping, etc. Awesome find! Huge carrots? As long as they're still edible at that size (some really aren't!), chop, cook, freeze... and if you have some of those onions, or even onions and honey or maple-flavored syrup if you're really lucky, you've got treats for a long time. 10 lbs of sweet potatoes? If that's all you've got to eat, you're set for 10 days even if you do get sick of them for a while. But I also was lucky because I had a stove and freezer. A lot of people don't, and that's where even those "easy to handle" large bounties would go to waste unless you had someone to barter with for less perishable items.