The Garbage Is More Deserving Than You!
I was standing in line at the grocery store yesterday and there was a man in front of me paying for his items with food stamps – actually, they use these special debit cards now, but you know what I mean. Anyway, the cashier told him his total after the government’s subsidy was six bucks and some odd cents. The man thought for a moment and then questioned having to pay anything at all.
“Didn’t I have enough on my card?” he asked.
“You have plenty left on your card,” the cashier replied, “but this chicken is from the deli and you can’t buy food from the deli with food stamps.”
“Oh.” The man looked like he’d been kicked in the stomach. “I thought I could get that. I am sorry. I have no other money.”
The checker removed the price of the chicken from the total and then something happened that caused my internal hard drive to skip: as the man stood there gathering up the bags of items that had been allowed him, he watched the cashier throw the chicken into the garbage. I don’t care who you are, irony making you its bitch to that degree is going to hurt a lot and for a good long time.
When it was my turn to checkout, I asked the cashier if she had in fact thrown the chicken away. She told me that it was required, since anything that comes out of the deli cannot go back to be resold. Health concerns. At that moment, I wanted so badly to go back three minutes in time and pay for the guy’s stupid fried chicken – not because I’m some kind of heroic comforter of the poor, but because of the frustrating absurdity of allowing to rot in a landfill perfectly good meat that a hungry person specifically tried to buy.
Now, I’m not stupid. I understand capitalism and the unavoidable dichotomies inherent in it. I get that the man should have known that the terms of the food stamp program do not allow for prepared foods. Nevertheless, there is something drastically wrong with a system that so badly wants to keep poor people from anything remotely constituting a luxury, that it is willing to unabashedly waste perfectly good food rather than allow those using food stamps to purchase it.
We humans must be capable of better than this.
Comments
Love it...........So sad.
"You can't buy deli food with food stamps." ??? WTF
Could rant for hours here.
This is nuts! Why can't it be up to individuals to make "inappropriate" choices with their subsidies? Hell, I really don't care if he wants to buy a goddamn lobster. It should be up to him to make the money last as long as he needs it to.
Granted, some poor folks got there because they don't have good judgment in measuring out their funds. But how are they supposed to learn better money management if the choice is paternalistically taken away from them?
That is a gut wrenching story.
I'm with sKZ. I'd like to leave, please.
Horrible horrible story. Sigh.
So many things to think about. I tried several different times to form something cohesive to write here, but there are no straight and narrow answers to the myriad problems plaguing society today. <sigh>
I'm with Kirk, I probably would have just stepped up and gave the guy the money to pay for it, cause I'm a softie like that...
I'm volunteering at a local woman's homeless shelter on Tuesday, and I keep thinking about how much food gets wasted at the closest grocer that could be used to feed them. The group I'm going with always brings a meal, and stays to hang out with the women.
I can't help but be angry that local business can't help aid their community for fear of being sued. What a messed up country/culture we live in.
Blame the lawyers for taking all those fake cases that jack up everyones costs, or blame the morons who file those fake cases that jack up everyones casts. Look at malpractice insurance for an example. Because of all the lawsuits, the cardiology unit I went to for testing had three fourths of their staff, three fourths! leave the State to go practice in another due to the required minimums for insurance. That's like, 3 out of 4 doctors prefer to not pay out the ass for insurance mandated by the government at prices jacked up by the lawyers and their moron clients who file stupid lawsuits.
Just a nice little note of disclaimer: There are legitimate cases and people who are really in need of that money to live after circumstances have been less than favorable. Not every case is frivolous, not every client is a moron and not every lawyer is a shyster. But sometimes it seems like an act of God to get the insurance companies to pay up. Holy Jebus!
When my [ex] husband disappeared, he drained all of our bank accounts, and since I was a stay at home mother, I was in a bit of dire straits. No job, no money. Back then, the stamps were little booklets with tear off stamps.
I cannot tell you how many times a day I was humiliated for having to do it. But personally... that humiliation was the drive for getting off of them as soon as I could. I know it took a year, but it was really hard to do.
There are bigger issues your post brings up, but specifically, if I were in that sort of situation, yes, I would have paid for the food for the guy as quietly as I could. Mostly to give the guy some dignity. However, if I was the cashier, I would have put the food off to the side and thrown it out later. Not right in front of his face. That's humilation tenfold.
However, here's what I feel is more important: That sort of action from the cashier wreaks of contempt. That kind of contempt; latent hostility is something people don't talk about enough as far as I'm concerned.
Shit. That is horrible. To throw the food away in front of his very eyes ...
In India, people look unfavourably upon wastage of food, especially in the South. There's a Tamil saying: konnal paavam, thinnal poogum. It means, the sin of killing (there are lots of orthodox vegetarians there) goes away with eating - that is, a person who kills an animal for food has not sinned, since he is not wasting the food and is using it to satisfy his hunger..
To throw away food that would drive out someone's hunger ... I don't really understand the system there, but that is still a very contemptuous and demeaning thing to do to a fellow human being.
Harsh. Very harsh.
I watched a programme that went behind-the-scenes in a famous fast food restaurant once, and they seemed to have this rule (if I remember correctly) that if a burger isn't made exactly right, to the correct specifications of the chain, then it's thrown away... same thing if a burger happens to get cold waiting to be sold... and then they pour bleach in the bin to render it all totally inedible. It just seemed insane to me.
Well, you know me - I always have to look at things from many angles. And, I've been thinking about this post since I read it three hours ago.
There are so many subjective points. The firstI thought of is that I've heard a story similiar to this one before. So that's interesting. The second thing I thought of was the time I bought a bottle of brandy and then walked out without it and drove home. When I realised I'd forgotten it, I said to Hubs, "if I phone them up, what manager's going to believe I walked out without the bottle? Hubs said,"Ring them. They've got it on camera." (!?) I had no idea, but sure enough, the manager looked at my receipt, the time of day was printed on it, the cashier stand number and he found the video of me forgetting the bottle. And he gave me another. So my thoughts are, perhaps the cashier had to throw it away immediately, or risk being reprimanded if she is seen not complying with the law on camera. Or maybe she just wasn't a very bright cashier. If her tone wasn't contemptuous when she spoke to the man, perhaps it was just a dumb mistake.
Now, if she'd handed it to him anyway, for free, what's not to say he wouldn't come back and take deli food again to put on the food stamps, this time on purpose, now knowing he might get another free chicken?
It seems the law itself is more the problem. I am not sure, but I think on foodstamps here, you can buy any food or drink except for alcoholic beverages. Who determined that 'ready food' is a luxury item? Whatever administrator who was assigned the job by the politican who was voted in. If we don't like that detail of the law, we can write a letter to our politican in charge of such and demand that people on foodstamps be able to buy whatever they like. After all, those are Canadian tax dollars, so in essence, you and every other taxpayer in Canada should be able to change that if you all so wish.
That right there was my entire point though I'm guessing I didn't make it clear enough. This post is about how a food-stamp system that disallows prepared food is messed up and counterproductive. It sends the message that people born into wealth deserve better things than those who weren't. It perpetuates a "nothing to lose" mentality on the underprivileged. I'd like to see a food-stamp program that said, "Here, fellow human, have a fish. After you're fed, we'll show you how to catch them yourself. You won't always be stuck like this." As I see it, welfare and food-stamps are devised specifically to keep people dependent upon them. There needs to be more attention given to getting people off food stamps and less attention given to making them feel inferior.
Gosh- we could discuss this one for hours. "welfare and food-stamps are devised specifically to keep people dependent upon them."
I SO agree.
But I sincerely appreciate you plugging mine, Toe-Knee. :) It's nice to know you felt as outraged as I did -- so much so that you felt the need to share. And it is such a confusing rage, because the problem isn't so clear cut. All I know is something is decidedly wrong with that picture.
Then there's my #$)%(#* relative who has made a career out of manipulating and using everyone and everything. She was on food stamps at the same time I was (still is now) buying brie and caviar because "I like gourmet foods." I felt guilty if I foodstamped Oreos for my kids because I never would have bought them had I had to pay for them myself - too expensive. But I had so much money in food stamps that I couldn't even use it up unless I did buy brand name items that I couldn't afford on my own.
That's messed up, too.
What does it mean that the government would step in to stop him? Why on earth? How myopic and short-sighted is that? Oh, what a depressing situation.
If he was doing it all simply to provide more low-cost food to a greater number of underprivileged people, then it becomes a definite question of ethics over economics and I'd probably be willing to turn a blind eye for a while. After all, I love people more than money. But allowing people to continue to make a regular profit off of food stamps seems counterproductive to me. Certainly someone that resourceful needn't be on food stamps for long, right?
But, sometimes, it just doesn't seem so...
This is so wrong on so many levels. I'm not one to vocally retaliate (My voice stutters and I'm much better on paper.) - as a matter of fact I've done it only one in my whole life - at the check-in desk at an airport. However, I think this incident would have spurred me to give that woman a piece of my mind and a lecture on how to treat her fellow human beings - just sell him the damn chicken, for gosh sakes - but to throw it out in front of him?! Maybe she could have given him the chicken anyways, paid for it - no fuss - afterwards. I mean, really! Where's the common decency? Like you, I probably would have seriously thought about (and likely done it) grabbing a fried chicken and giving it to the guy. I used to volunteer at homeless shelters all the time - this kind of waste makes me furious. Is it that it's cooked already? If you're homeless and you're on food stamps - do you have the convenience to cook food all the time? (Arggh - these government policies really are so counter-productive - who are these conscious-less, compassion-less, condescending twits who come up with ways to humiliate people who are already down-on-their-luck, anyways?) I don't know if that's the issue...You know we're all just a few incident of bad luck away from being on food stamps. It's a shame how people treat one another!