May 14, 2020. The middle of a global pandemic and this is a question that has burned in my mind for the past 2 years. People are losing their lives, their jobs, their ability to pay bills and above all, their hope. This article may at times seem as if the words are personally coming from me, the author. But these words, these feelings are not mine alone. That is because they are your words,feelings, and the pulse of what our world is experiencing in relation to my travels. I am no trained expert on human emotion, but I share these words in hope that some places I’ve been you never have to see while I want to bring you the joy of all the places that have filled my heart.
Many weeks ago, a few weeks before the pandemic hit, I was walking through a local grocery store here in San Diego. I was spending the day researching some loopholes to the instacart platform. As I browsed through the aisles, I couldn’t think of 1 thing I needed if it were free. You see, the nature of instacart is you are shopping for someone else to then get paid. After a few shops and some luck, you end up with extra groceries you can’t deliver or return. Couple this with the fact I rarely have empty cupboards at home and you can see how maybe on a perfect day you wouldn’t need groceries.
Because I couldn’t think of anything to buy, everything that caught my eye seemed so extra. I started wondering why on earth there’s 500 different ways you can buy grain… and actually every other staple I realized. You can buy anything you NEED to survive in hundreds of varieties but there’s only a handful of categories in nutrition. That means an entire grocery store, from chips, to apples, to candy corn; thousands of options all fall into THESE 6 categories.
Naturally, my next question was, if we have thousands of different options for the same 6 categories, and if we have thousands of stores stocked just like this one, how do we still even make people pay for food?
Stay with me. Food is a major need to survive. Without it people die. From just the eye test and boots on the ground, we have enough food to feed everybody in this country and many others. Diving deeper and you can begin to see where people may conclude that housing is the same kind of necessary resource in the same kind of pickle.
There are MILLIONS of homes that have been abandoned just in the US. Yet we have a system in place that overlooks hungry and homeless people when it could help them all in spite of a dollar. A dollar that with this pandemic we see doesn’t mean much. No they will not turn off the lights, no they will not turn off your phone, no they won’t kick you out. Something like that would 100% spark a revolution.
It was crazy to watch everything get bought up at the grocery stores just because the first people to go shopping were the best capitalists trying to make a buck. That didnt mean we ran out. Within a week or 2, most stores had put systems in place to ensure a fair supply. In fact, no respected analyst even projected a food shortage because it cant exist in 2020 and if it did we’d have much bigger global problems.
There is a quote I really love. “Control the food, you control the people. ” In 2020, I don’t think any human needs to be controlled. Maybe it’s time we take a hard look at the casualties of capitalism and explore some alternatives. We need empathy and empowerment of each other. We need to live UNreduced.