Food is the one I’m interested. Food banks and the like?
It's a social thing really. Food Not Bombs would gather food from dumpsters (more excess food than half-eaten rolls), then eat communal meals in parks along with any hungry or homeless people. Fancy restaurants throw away unused food, people are hungry and don't have much money for food, FNB puts it together for free meals once a week.
I know Food Not Bombs was doing this in Florida and had trouble with the police. It was a real all-American conflaton - hungry people lining up for free food, even if it came from dumpsters, police cars rolling up with night sticks and guns to stop this, anal-retentive upper middle class white liberals pontificating about the feeding, the discarded food from the upscale restaurants going to waste amidst the police breaking up the food lines. As American as apple pie.
In either case, when you are hungry, bad food is still better than no food. (unless it is so bad, that that you puke from it, but poor people usually have a strong stomach. They have to have)
There is still a remote chance you qualify FYI:
https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligibility/citizen/non-citize...
It's more messed-up because I'm currently on house arrest and so I can't even go to a food bank to get food. I have to rely on the kindness of strangers who pass through the building I live at - occasionally one of them will drop off some food randomly. I'm pretty much down to some packets of stuffing and cans of sliced potatoes right now, but I don't mind. Before I started my last business I was down to zero and was finding canned food in Dumpsters, which while it isn't great, will mean you don't die!
SNAP doesn't have time limits like that.
I think you're thinking of TANF which does have time limits.
> process is demeaning
Absolutely. Still, over 10% of people in USA receive SNAP (including myself) and it's why poor people don't literally starve here anymore.
>I think you're thinking of TANF which does have time limits.
No, actually, I am talking about SNAP specifically, the only program I have personal experience with, as well as know people who have also experienced it.
If you are in any way "on the grid", SNAP will make you do a mountain of work collecting all your paperwork proof that you actually qualify for it.
If you have not given up yet, you MAY get the benefits. In order to claim them, you will have to carefully look for which stores support them (by far not all) and then carefully select the products you're buying, and then argue with the cashier or manager (or put the product back) if it has not been correctly entered into the POS system as eligible.
THEN, a year later, you will have to go through a detailed re-certification process, which requires scheduling an appointment for a phone call, making that phone call at a certain time, holding on the phone for an hour before being hung up on, re-scheduling that appointment, and so on, until eventually you MAY then be required to receive a mailing at an address that you have to respond to.
Then, and only then, you may receive your benefits for another year.
If you cannot list at least 5-10 ways a person must be hugely privileged in order to receive these very basic 200 dollars worth of food credits per month in the text below, please consider yourself extremely privileged to not realize this.
Because it requires the ability to be patient and polite to often rude and impatient handlers (a HUGE privilege), having a phone you can call from for an hour, having an address, being able to deal with all this paperwork, and being able to stick with a long and complicated process, one which is more involved and time-consuming than everything which was required of me to operate a single-person contractor business, something I also had experience with just a few years prior.
Think about that. You have to do more legwork and paperwork in order to receive "basic" benefits to feed yourself than to operate a business. In a country which is overflowing with food resources (double-digit percent of food thrown in the trash every day).
> THEN, a year later, you will have to go through a detailed re-certification process, which requires scheduling an appointment for a phone call, making that phone call at a certain time, holding on the phone for an hour before being hung up on, re-scheduling that appointment, and so on, until eventually you MAY then be required to receive a mailing at an address that you have to respond to.
Sounds like the kind of shit they do for sure.
However, it's not the same thing as a time limit.
And how is requiring a process designed to induce "breakage", to use marketing term, not the same thing as a time limit?
I'm not defending the churning tactics in any way, they're very morally wrong.
I actually have not eaten from a dumpster in months.
But most dumpster food is quite safe, because it is still in packaging, or it is of the non-risky variety.
We did occasionally dumpster also though, but Food Not Bombs groups have a loose guideline of serving vegan food, which is much less likely to go bad after a few hours of not being refrigerated (though the veganism is part of the ethics also)
I basically wait for food to "manifest" for me to eat, and do not eat until it happens.
To "fuel" this manifesting, I practice karma yoga.
I developed this practice based on reading various teachings, finding parallels between them, and then poking about and experimenting until I found what works.
Sort of like how I learned computers...
I prayed. I typically pray in 3 parts: gratitude-forgiveness-requests, and this time was no exception. It went something like this: Thank you for [... some gratitudes ...]. Please forgive me for [... some regrettable things I've done ...]. Please help me find a banana or two to eat.
Before I pray, I typically focus on my breathing, in traditional "breath meditation" fashion. This was the beginning and the foundation of all these practices, and I started practicing breath meditation several years ago.
After prayer, I listened carefully, and I followed what one may describe as physical intuition to a place where someone had left behind the bottom of a banana nut muffin. Not quite a banana, but it did the trick.
Physical intuition is subtle, it is like when you go for a walk without a purpose, going whichever way feels most natural.
In this case, of course, I went out of my way for food, but I also went for a walk, I meditated along the way, etc. I'm not an absolutist by any means.
How did you get into this lifestyle?
For a while, I thought I could do both, but I realized eventually that I only have so much "programming juice" to work with, and after a day of doing software dev for advertising and investment banks and other such stuff, there was almost none left for me to do my own thing.