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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.
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.
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
When people talk about all the churches that have closed I think about the radio shacks that are no longer with us.
Tis the time to build the hacker space. We all need a place to worship. To nourish the soul.
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.
Is it possible to sign up without an address though? I thought it wasn't.
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.
Where I live in the Bronx about 40 percent of families use SNAP. But, people are very embarrassed about it.
Every person I know who uses SNAP works more hours than I do OR they are very old or sick.
We are setting up a pantry in the laundry room, but it's not the same. Nobody wants the strange canned food that I don't want. It's not the same as $40 you can spend on the food you really need.
If you are in the USA have you or anyone you know well (people you see every week or enough that they a part of your life) using SNAP benefits?
It's also English.
This might be a case of pillaging so many words that we didn't notice we stole the same one twice?
What is the difference between a "gallery" and a "galleria" ?
Between "gallerias" and "galleries" ?
What is the English language up to with these words? I feel like we've caught the language in the act with this one. We must either make these distinct words or pick the one with the WORSE spelling and decide it's the only correct word.
The evolution of the mealybugs has been shaped by the choices of ants in the same way that goat, sheep and cows have been shaped by the choices of humans.
This isn't just symbiosis. It's animal husbandry.
And it's absurdly effective too! These ants never need to leave their nests to forage.
This is what I mean about ants having achieved the same kind of complex solutions we celebrate in human history...just in their own way.
4/4
When a young ant queen is ready to leave her colony to try to found a new nest she selects a mealybug from the many her sisters are tending in their underground galleries. The mealybugs live on the roots of trees and the ants dig out spaces so they can feed and reproduce. They thrive on the sugars from the mealybugs and cull their herds for protein.
A young queen ant *chooses* which mealybug to take on her flight. They like larger females, ideally pregnant. 3/
It's not like the ants are deciding which aphids will make the best cattle then selecting those for the next generation.
But this more typical and casual form of symbiosis finds a kind of refinement in the ant genus Acropyga.
These hypogaeic ants almost never leave their underground nests due to their ancient and highly refined relationship with several species of mealybugs.
2/
I want to say a bit more about how ants participate in selective breeding. Most people are aware of the symbiotic relationship between ants and aphids. The ants protect the aphids from predators, the aphids process plant sugars for the ants. Over millions of years many species of ants and aphids have come to depend on each other in this way.
But is that *really* "selective breeding" I think most people would say it isn't. 1/
Some of the best portrayals of eusocial insects in all of SF.
As creatures that need to cooperate and coordinate our actions over millions of willful individuals we could learn a lot from ants.
They are anarchists, you quickly discover. Anarchists with excellent communications and foundational shared values that make the fact that two ants may each decide to solve a problem in a different, or even in a conflicting way irrelevant.
In fact, the constant push and pull between individuals is essential to "ant genius"
I mean... kind of. But there were some things about the way that the "hive mind" was portrayed in those books that annoyed me.
The mind of the superorganism is emergent from individual minds. It's not some central clearing house controlled by the queen or the "big brain bug"