It seems I eat food homeless people throw away

August 28, 2020 by Joshua
in Nonjudgment

When the pandemic began, New York City began a program of giving free meals to anyone—no one turned away. The meals usually consist of a sandwich, a piece of fruit, a bag of chips, some cookies, some baby carrots, a tub of hummus, and about eight ounces of milk. In other words a mix of food and doof. Partly the program feeds hungry people, partly I suspect it funds doof producers.

Since people get that food in a package, a side effect of the program is that people throw away what they don’t want. How do I know? I keep seeing plastic bags with food in them on the sidewalk.

I conclude what people who get the bags like and don’t like by what they leave behind. Consistently I see left behind the fruit and carrots. I can’t bear to see the fruit go to waste, so I reach into the discarded bags and take the thrown-away apples, oranges, and peaches. You may consider that salvaging gross or unhealthy, but I see wasting the food as more gross and less healthy. Needless to say, I wash them before eating them and most of the apples I use to make vinegar.

The upshot: I eat food homeless people throw away. There are too many things I consider wrong about this system for me to enumerate, so I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider for him- or her-self what happened that we give free food and doof to needy people, they eat preferentially the doof, and a guy with an Ivy League education salvages food from their trash, probably for his readers to think he’s doing something weird.


Incidentally, if you’re hungry in New York City, here’s the page with where you can get this food.

Read my weekly newsletter

On initiative, leadership, the environment, and burpees

We won't send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time. Powered by ConvertKit

1 response to “It seems I eat food homeless people throw away

  1. Pingback: More of: I eat food homeless people throw away » Joshua Spodek

Leave a Reply

Sign up for my weekly newsletter