The Ugly Truth of Ugly Produce
I spent nearly six years homeless. I ate at soup kitchens and got food from food banks for a small portion of that time.<p>I grew up with a garden in the back yard. My dad hunted and some of the meat on our table was squirrel and deer he killed. My mother cooked from scratch.<p>I&#x27;m used to eating well for relatively little money. Most of the food at soup kitchens and food pantries fails to meet my expectations for food quality.<p>Food stamps (EBT) are a good program. You can use them to buy the same food from the same stores as anybody else and you get to decide what to spend it on. (Though the program could use more funding. They tend to last only 3 weeks of the month.)<p>Soup kitchens and food pantries tend to suck, even the better ones.<p>I&#x27;m not saying we shouldn&#x27;t provide compassionate support to anyone. I&#x27;m just saying some programs for doing so would be acceptable to people with middle class expectations and some wouldn&#x27;t be. For many reasons, including germ control, we need to be shooting for programs that fit middle class sensibilities and not act like &quot;beggars can&#x27;t be choosers.&quot;<p>Furthermore, if you are homeless, you are living without a fridge. Produce doesn&#x27;t keep well under those conditions. When I was around a lot of other homeless people for a time, it wasn&#x27;t unusual for free produce to go to waste, in part for that reason. Some idiot would give a homeless person some giant bag of apples. They could eat a few of them before they rotted, but not all of them. Maybe they managed to give the rest away. Maybe they didn&#x27;t.<p>Last, I have serious reservations about creating systems to serve the poor instead of creating systems to help them resolve their problems. Systems designed to serve the poor tend to actively keep poverty alive, a la the Shirky Principle:<p><i>&quot;Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution&quot;</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle</a>