The Bronx will adapt. People will squeeze in even longer hours, adults will focus on buying food for the kids and forage themselves. Bagels at work? Better eat three and call it a day.

It's just another thing making it harder and no one deserves it.

These are the hardest working people I know on the damn planet. It's always one more THING.

Anyway I will take the cans down to the laundry room now.

@futurebird

Get you on the weird canned food, maybe you could leave a few gift cards for a grocery store (not sure if you have grocery stores in the Bronx like we do in the Midwest where you can get a gift card that is only good at the grocery store).

Alternatively period products or diapers, if people don't have to spend money on those they can spend more on food.

@futurebird
Thanks for bringing up money donations.

Our local food pantry sent out very good messaging in early October about: It's better to give money because the recipient knows better what they need.

I had to talk myself out of an "ingrained from a young age" mentality of:
But they might spend it on "bad" things!
(Heard lots of sermons about helping the less fortunate but usually only in a VERY controlled way.)

When I catch myself thinking in that crappy way I shake it off and do better

@futurebird snap is necessary for many people to get off the streets.

@kastope

Is it possible to sign up without an address though? I thought it wasn't.

@roytoo

Totally. Don't try to shop for other people. They might have allergies. They might have 20 pounds of potatoes at home but nothing to put on them so they need some freeze dried parsley. You don't know.

I do think that now is a nice time to clean out the pantry and see what you can give away that you won't use. But this is more about morale.

The $20 donation will do more. But how would it feel to throw out food at a time like this.

It would feel very bad.

Give it all away.

@roytoo

I went off on a tangent so I want to say the important part again:

Don't try to shop for people you don't know. Don't try to buy food for people. It's not helpful. You probably aren't even good at making good purchase decisions for yourself are you*?

Donate the money or give it to particular people who can use it directly.

*speaking from experience

@MCDuncanLab @futurebird Grocery store gift cards is an interesting idea, giving the flexibility to choose what they need most, without most of the risk that cash would have of someone stealing it to buy something frivolous.
My wife grew up with some food insecurity, so she picked out some items to donate that she knew her family would have preferred when she was younger, then we supplemented with a monetary donation to a local food pantry, considering that the pantry employees probably have a better idea of what's in high demand than we do.

@MCDuncanLab

Diapers are always needed and also cat food. Cat food isn't covered by snap but it always went FAST when we had it. People want to take better care of their pets.

Anyone who says poor people can't feed their cats can jump in the east river and I'd be happy to help them.

@ZahmbieND @MCDuncanLab

Gift cards are better than trying to buy food. But, they are also limiting. I might force someone to make an extra trip to an inconvenient location. And then there is the problem of there being like $2.42 cents on a card and nothing to buy that fits.

I promise you the worry that people are using money in a frivolous way is not worth worrying about. Free yourself from such thoughts.

Frivolous spending is its own punishment.

Money is freedom in this world.

@roytoo @futurebird

Giving money rather than food to food banks also lets them do bulk purchases at much lower cost than individuals paying retail, greatly increasing the amount of food they can get.

In terms of helping individual people on SNAP:

There are some legal restrictions on giving cash or gift cards rather than buying food for them.

On this I have learned from @mattbc , who has relied on SNAP themself as well as knowing the relevant law:

Just a moment...

(www.patreon.com)

@MCDuncanLab

This kind of thing pisses me off so much.

@michael_w_busch @roytoo @mattbc

Worth thinking about for regular donations.

@futurebird Your cat can be what's keeping you sane, able to dig yourself out of whatever hole you're in. Speaking from experience. @MCDuncanLab

@hakona @MCDuncanLab

It's easy to imagine other people, especially people that are often not talked about with much respect as if they are just frozen in amber. As if they aren't trying to do anything with their lives, build anything, make a better future.

It's a kind of mental trap.

And with the way the US does so little about poverty it would be much less upsetting if one could imagine most poor people as foolish and nothing like ourselves.

That couldn't ever be you, right?

@hakona @MCDuncanLab

I have an uncle who tells the same story from the 80s where he saw a woman from a family who he "knew" was on food stamps buying a bunch of steaks and ribs at the butcher. This story is so old that there still was a butcher in the little Pennsylvania small town.

"And I was standing there with my chicken." he'd go on all indignant.

Dude is on social security and a US steel pension and owns his house. A few years back I got sick of that story and said something.

@hakona @MCDuncanLab

So he hasn't told it around me anymore, but I think what can really bother people is there isn't much separating them at all from being in the same boat.

So you make up a story about how you are making good sensible choices and THAT's why you don't need to worry about SNAP, or the hours of the food pantry.

It's not just a mix of luck and circumstances. That would be terrifying wouldn't it?

@hakona @MCDuncanLab

Sometimes I think "that could never be me. My family could help me" but with the way things are going?

Imagine your whole support network is tapped out. You know you can't ask for help because they are dealing with similar problems to your own. Or you are the one who needs to help them. The strain spreads like hairline cracks until the whole foundation falls out.

Then someone looks at you sideways for having a coffee. "That's your problem, that fancy coffee."

@futurebird @hakona

Yeah so like this one time, he saw someone who was buying something he thought they didn't deserve.

I bet that one event is his entire moral justification for why the poor deserve to be poor. And he could have been wrong.

She might not have been on food stamps, someone might have given her some money and told her to treat her family to the steaks and ribs, she might have a stew recipe that stretches those steaks and ribs for a month.

@futurebird I checked in with my friends and discovered that most only receive like $10 or $24 in SNAP benefits per month. As a result, they rely heavily on the bigger food pantries that you drive through and they load up your car. They get weird stuff sometimes (like a huge bag of onions), though they'll take whatever is given.

Food banks and food pantries are going to be under tremendous stress. I hope that most states have discounted or free lunches for kids in schools, though I know many of those programs have been scaled back, especially breakfasts for school kids. Teachers don't get paid enough, but many are stocking snacks just so their hungry students can pay attention.

Some reluctant churches need to step up and live out their faith in action as well. The other faiths are pretty consistently doing this.