You must log in or # to comment.
Most cities have food banks, but in some places, to access them you need to take on the expense/debt of operating a car.
If I were Chinese, I would have so much fin asking “clueless” questions to USians.
They made a whole app for that
People in the US don’t actually starve to death. They die from exposure and malnutrition first 🙃
The product of generational convincing of populations to have automatic irrational fear of anything that isn’t ultra-capitalism.
I remember one time when I was very young and working as cashier at a grocery store a family came through (mom, dad, and like 2 year old kid). They scanned their EBT card and it came up like 1.25$ short. The mom said she would put the bread back and I just did a manual coupon for 1.25$ to 0 out their balance instead. They acted as if I’d just done something so amazing for them but like this is a multi-million dollar company I think it can afford to give you a 1.25$ coupon so you can have bread? To me it wasn’t even a big deal. We gave stupid boomers coupons to shut them up when they compained all the time. But America is so backwards that helping someone out in need is seen as a shocking thing. While it’s entirely normal to give free stuff to annoying petit-bourgeois who are having a temper tandrum.
I saw this when I was a grocery cashier too and it’s crazy how easy it was to make someone’s day by just giving them a dollar discount or something stupid like that. They treat you like a saint afterwards. I’d do it all the time and nobody ever said anything to me about it because the customers loved me.
Many places in the US have laws that prevent you from feeding the homeless. Most, if not every state has laws to prevent you from dumpster diving, but also laws to prevent you from giving away food that you’re going to throw away. Kids can rack up lunch debt.
“School lunch debt” is one of the most vile phrases in the English language.
I’d almost rather have that debt than get the “emergency lunch” they would give me when I didn’t have lunch as a kid. They gave you a brown bag so everyone knew you were broke, and the entire lunch was two pieces of bread with american cheese and an apple, and some juice or milk.
When I was a kid I have memories of filling up my tray with food then when I got to the cash register to pay and my parents hadn’t put money on my account they’d take the tray, throw all the food in the trash right in front of me, and give me a roll with a slice of american cheese on it. I was 5.
Dear lord that’s fucked, at least where I was at they would make sure you could pay before they gave you the food, that’s just extra cruelty, how could anyone think that’s the way it should be done? It’s almost unbelievable but from what I know of Amerikkka it’s not that surprising (if that was in the US).
…when i was in school it was a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich…
my job throws away mountains of food and we’ll be fired if we take any home even though we all openly did for years until a guy was like no that’s against corporate policy
My previous job was pretty good with food waste, usually less than 30 pounds of errors and rejects and kitchen scraps combined throughout the day. Except for dough, where on an average day we’d throw out 50 pounds of it around closing time.
random question but were you ALLOWED to take food home? like I know everybody does it but my dickhead boss is like “no food service job anywhere will ever let you take home food” and it’s like, that can’t be fucking true, there has to be so many places where the owners realize it’s literally extra compensation that comes from the trash can into their employees’ pockets, and that helps keep their business going
I am literally gonna die mad over this shit because I tried so hard to explain how it benefits the business, it makes the workers happier and healthier, it makes the cooks (ME AT LEAST, THE OTHERS SUCK) more motivated to make good food because wow, I’m gonna take some of that shit home! etc etc
i explained how a single container of food is like, basically $20 to us, because of the value of the food and also the value in not having to prepare another meal at home
but no doesn’t fucking matter. it was really great having a new 30 minute commute AND no more “you never have to cook dinner at home again” saving me time
Every so often the owner would come in and say “no more house pies [making one pizza per shift to share amongst the employees]”, every so often they’d crack down on saving mistakes that had been cooked already and say that we had to throw them away. I would often dig them out of the trash when the managers were busy, or slip a menu item into a box, a bag, or even a paper towel and tuck it away. This was pretty common. Also I would often team up with a comrade who worked there and we’d take all the fully cooled leftover lunch slices to our social center.
Other people would be more brazen and literally go in to cook a bunch of food for themselves before their shift or before break.
Part of what made that job so easy to continue with was that it was a 6-minute jog from my apartment. It’s a well established restaurant and losing a little bit of prepped ingredients here and there, even if done by all employees, wouldn’t even touch their bottom line.
Oh okay so they were tools about it too. Idk what’s wrong with people. If there’s shit getting thrown away that people want, and you don’t let them have it, you’re an asshole. If you think that encourages people to make more waste and you can’t like, tell the difference between normal waste and people doing that, you’re oblivious
Other people would be more brazen and literally go in to cook a bunch of food for themselves before their shift or before break.
yeah I definitely make my own lunch if I don’t want what I’ve got going on on the vegan station. But that’s not to take home, just because I’m sick of the other cooks’ food and also if i can’t take shit home i’m gonna make my employer pay for it
it was a 6-minute jog from my apartment.
i’m too lazy and dainty for such things so i drove but yeah it used to be a 2 minute drive from where we lived and half of that was waiting for two lights to change
god I fucking miss it. Having a house with a yard and a driveway that gets enough sun to grow tomatoes is nice but idk, even though the driving is only an hour a day it really feels like I suddenly have no free time after work. I DO, it just doesn’t feel like it
If you think that encourages people to make more waste and you can’t like, tell the difference between normal waste and people doing that, you’re oblivious
That’s it, they are oblivious. They are disconnected from the actual day-to-day labor in such a way they don’t actually know the ‘average’ amount of waste to expect. They have MBA brain and are trying to use abstract formulas and concepts to create ‘lean’ sigma chains or whatever the fuck, they are thinking idealistically not materialistically. At least that’s how the managers and bosses have been at restaurants I worked at. Anybody above ‘chef’ doesn’t know shit about cooking, they visit the site maybe a couple of times per year on surprise inspections, and General Managers/Principals don’t know anything either but think they do. Corporate sets the policy.
Yeah I mean we do our best (or at least I do) but there’s just going to be a lot of food waste no matter what here since it’s a college dining hall with buffet style serving that’s also all you can eat. So we never know how many people are coming or what they’re gonna eat exactly and it’s not good enough to just prep X/X/X pounds of the main entrees and if one runs out, tough, we’re supposed to replenish it or at least replace it with something. And with some of these dishes i.e. meatloaf, lasagna, braised beef strips etc., it’s just not happening during service
well that’s what i would say but no i’ve seen these people quickly fry some shitty sysco beef strips and serve it as a braised dish and it’s like gee i wonder why these are tough and bland and just shit
anyway yeah. I dunno maybe I’m an asshole but I think this is entirely fine as long as we’re doing our best to overprepare by just a little, and then serve that the following days as leftovers (we’ll usually have the main line with two entrees, a starch, two vegetables, and a vegan entree, and then space over on the other side for maybe another 4 dishes if needed, unless it’s being used for nachos and stuff)
but I get shit from the sous chef for “always making too much” (like, if you’re reading this, dawg, you know i’m doing my best, I basically make enough food to feed 40 people, I’d be happy to make enough to feed 20 if I can tell people “mmmm sorryyyyyy, no more black bean burritos, ran out…” but instead since they take almost an hour and a half to reheat in the steamer like no I’m going to make enough for 45 people, keep 30 hot and probably serve the other 15 the next day. I’m not over prepping I literally almost always have the entirety of all my dishes eaten by the end of the following day when I put them out as leftovers) so like I dunno maybe I am just a bad chef who encourages food waste
either way, the stuff that’s out on the line when we close just gets dumped in the trash and there’s always plenty
burger king had a lock on their food waste bin… i used to purposely leave it unlocked in the hopes it was helping someone somewhere
Another benefit of US users getting on Red Note and learning about Chinese culture was the average Chinese person finding out how bad it really is in the US. Obviously things don’t compare to some parts of the world, but a lot of them honestly didn’t believe we have such a problem of homelessness, drug use, poverty, and so on.
NGL I’m skeptical of all these “I went to China and everything and everyone was BASED!” posts.
I think China is a geopolitical force for good on the world, but it’s also a big country that I’m sure has lots of disfunction and people who are assholes.
I don’t think that’s what this post is saying. A very real phenomenon on Xiaohongshu is Chinese citizens just straight up not knowing how bad it is in America. Of course there are assholes, but this post isn’t about how all Chinese ppl are saints (plenty of anti black and anti Indian racism), it’s about how by and large America isn’t understood as the predatory capitalist hell that it is. When I joined the app, it was a common misconception that every American owned and lived in a McMansion style home, and some Chinese users straight up called people liars for describing experiences with poverty, homelessness, medical bills etc
You’d be surprised, some people are actually completely unaware of how a bunch of basic things work in the west. My younger cousin, who had never left China and is also extremely offline (for a zoomer), once asked me what’s the deal with lawns. Like “Who maintains them? Is it like plants in parks? Why are they there?”. The more I explained it, the more confused she got.
So you can’t not have grass, everyone has grass. But it also can’t be too long. And you have to spend extra money keep it alive in a drought (which Australia experiences fairly frequently). And you have to spend money on equipment to cut it, or spend more money hiring someone else to cut it. If you’re renting, not maintaining the landlord’s grass will get you in trouble and possibly evicted. And you have to keep weeds out.
Now, she was 19 at that point in time, so fairly naive. But still.
i got away without it for a bit because it wasn’t raining and my yard was all dead but it’s been raining for days and now it’s all fucking needing to be mowed soon
I don’t live in an hoa area but i don’t want mice and ticks and shit all up in my yard so i gotta
China doesn’t have to be BASED, and likely isn’t. It just has to be better enough than the US, which in the 2020s is an embarrassingly low bar to pass.
China isn’t better than the US, it sucks equally, but in totally different ways.
lol yeah china can’t compete with america in taking 30+ years to (badly) build a road or bridge (which ends up being badly planned in the end too)
No county on Earth is perfect. China has genuine problems, like the urban/rural divide, hukou systen, and more. At the same time, it’s a constantly progressing country, among the fastest in the world, with a system that ensures the working classes are the primary beneficiaries of this progress.
The US empire is a genocidal settler-colony. It engages in constant war and genocide, plunders the global south of their social surplus, preventing it from being reinvested in development, brutally oppresses ethnic minorities and indigenous populations, and can’t even afford to bribe the white settlers any longer. The spoils all go to the wealthiest imperialists as the country continues to decay and die away.
China, meanwhile, is a progressive force for the global south. It is helping the global south develop, entitling them more to their social surplus and assisting with south-south trade. It’s uplifting themselves, while undermining imperialism, which uplifts others.
Equating China and the US is imperialism denial and genocide trivialization.
Care to elaborate on what China has done that even comes close to
-Killing millions through sanctions regimes
-Killimg millions through direct military intervention
-Killing and impoverishing hundreds of thousands of not more through enforcing austerity and privatisation on the third world through institutions like the IMF
etc.?
So you’re saying that China is exactly like America, almost 1:1, except it’s more densely populated and everybody’s Chinese?
Llm ass comment
You’re an ignorant shithead with your head so buried up your own ass you’re wearing your tonsils as a hat.
I love this insult so much I’m going to appropriate it and use it at the next opportunity I can find.
No that’s not even close to what I said? You’re the one who said they were exactly equally bad which is just plainly false
Holy shit you mean that both countries kinda suck? Man, that’s heavy. I mean sure I think my country sucks worse, because only a total fucking bootlicker would gargle the balls of a government that was openly screwing them over, right?
China has issues (but I would say has done far more good than bad so suck isn’t an accurate descriptor anyway) but trying to equate China’s issues with Amerika, who have spent the better part of the last century raping and pillaging their way across the world is fucking stupid.
No. Thats what you said “They suck equally” without elaborating. Now that you are asked to elaborate you put words into their mouth and try to make it look like a question.
This bullshit doesn’t deserve a response. That person is Chinese, or at least speaks Chinese. I am sure they know what problems their own country has.
Yet you “responded”. If they are really Chinese they might. On the other hand I see many Americans not seeing the US for the vile garbage it is.
I think it makes sense when you remember that alot of the bad is being controlled out of it through people being tourists and likely not speaking high level or in many cases any Chinese.
Tourists are not really going to interact with many/if any of the systems with real issues like the hukou system but will have daily interaction with systems that work incredibly well like the metros.
And then through not speaking the language spotting assholes becomes exponentially less likely.
I haven’t been to China in over a decade, but I always ask the same question and follow up with the same comment when Westerners ask about it. I usually use this to dissuade them of saying paranoid things.
“You ever been to Flushing?” Yes…? “It’s like that, except with more lights.”
The harsh reality is that if you have some sort of redeemable quality to the capitalist class (a lot of the time that means being white and neurotypical), you can at least be thrown into the mix of a comically absurd bureaucratic pipeline (local and statewide orgs as well as Christian churches) giving you the bare minimum
If you miss one channel along the way though, you will surely be shamed by liberals for not accepting help
Sadly the most mild
I don’t know much about China, what structures does China have in place to help folks who can’t afford food, or don’t have enough? Are there things we could learn from them about how to adress hunger?
In the US I feel like the main ways we aim to adress that are food banks and food programs like WIC. Which I frankly also dont know a ton about
It varies wildly. Nanjie Cun, for example, has an average monthly salary of $32 USD, but all housing, utilities, healthcare, education, public transport, basic furniture (tv, microwave, beds, chairs) are provided for free for all residents of all ages. Also, there’s a stipend of free food: rice, flour, some vegetables and some seasonings. Beyond that, there are communal canteens which is under $0.40 for a meal, or free for pensioners.
But you also have other areas of the country where you only get free food and housing if you’re unable to work or in an area without jobs.
for context this is a single (extremely based) village that basically refused to do the market reforms and said it ‘fuck it, we mao’
Nanjie Cun
some friends of mind visited here last year and had a great time. they were very surprised that foreigners were visiting, apparently it is not very common. everyone should go say hi!
The issue with food banks and food programs is that they often do little to address the underlying cause, which is that housing is not a guaranteed right. Difficult to store stuff long term if you have nowhere to store it. Fresh shit is basically right out.
The other thing is that most, if not all, of these private organizations are tied to religious organizations, most of which (Unitarian Universalists ftw here) make you attend a service or join a group in order to have basic access to these things. Hell around here, even the domestic abuse shelters are all run by Christian fundamentalist groups, and while it is good that someone is doing it, they actively turn away trans survivors because ‘they are actually men’.
The issue is that it isn’t a right. We give up so much to the state in terms of freedom and we don’t even get the right to the basic security of goods.
That isn’t to say that China doesn’t have its own issues, but in giving up some of your freedoms your are guaranteed some level of basic security.
welfare system called the Five Guarantees (五保) if you want to look into it further. as far as I understand it if you qualify for the Three Withouts (三无): without livelihood source, without the ability to work, and without family support then the state guarantees basic food, clothing, housing, medical care, and burial expenses
Damn if they don’t live for Number Plural Noun over there
Five Guarantees, Four Cardinal Principles, Three Withouts, Two Whatevers, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree
And I believe there was/is an ‘n’ number of household appliances, as a sort of economic benchmark, which has been revised a few times. However now I can’t find any details about it.
Three Alls.
yikes, not as fun
How often is that able to be utilized? For example, there is a filial piety law, but elderly are still abandoned occasionally, right? I heard from a friend that the pension elderly are able to sue their families for is very low, and nursing homes aren’t as popular. In most countries, there’s what exists on paper, and then there’s what actually happens.
That seems to me like the devil is in the details: what does “without the ability to work” mean? So if you lose your job and can’t find a new one, you’re just gonna die because you don’t qualify?
That is the opposite of what they are saying, “without the ability to work” meaning they provide you food if you can’t work, if you lose your job you won’t starve unlike what happens in many capitalist countries.
Well, it’s understandable how I could not understand it though, isn’t it? They could have also said “people without work” instead of “without the ability to work”, no? Then it would have been clear that someone that loses their job, but still has the ability to work, is included. The way they phrased it very much sounded like you’re fucked if you have the ability to work, but just don’t have a job right now for some other reason.
If that was the only “without” then yeah but just before that they say “without livelihood source” which means a job or income of some type.
A thousand points of light
