You can always feed someone

Back when I was full-time traveling, on my last day in any given city, you could usually find me doing the same thing:

Cooking up meals with whatever was left in my kitchen and handing them out to the houseless folks within walking distance of my apartment.

I didn’t talk about it much back then, because I never wanted to feel like I was doing it for accolades or approval. I just wanted to do it. To feed someone. Or leave them a blanket I couldn’t fit in my bag. Or give them a pair of shoes that were still in decent condition.

I always thought of it as doing good quietly. Often without the person even knowing my name.

A few years ago I stopped.

Not the doing good part.

The quiet part.

Because when I occasionally told someone, sometimes they took those stories and turned them into inspiration. They copied those little good ideas. Or they created their own.

And I realized I could do more good by talking about it than I was by keeping it to myself. Because two are more powerful than one and five are more powerful than two and hundreds are more powerful still.

And sometimes all we need to turn one into one hundred is to talk about things.

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I think this is because we’re so overwhelmed.

By the flood of need around us.

It’s the Choice Paradox, a psychological concept that says too many choices paralyze us. Too many choices leave us second-guessing our decisions. Too many choices sometimes mean making no choice.

If we have $10 earmarked to donate to a charity, but we feel deeply for a hundred causes—for houseless folks and hungry kids and desperate people posting health and safety GoFundMes—how do we choose where to send that money?

If we haven’t even gotten as far as to earmark that $10 for donation, and we are just walking around hurting for the avalanche of Things That Are Wrong with the world, where do we start to try and make things better?

More often than not, we aren’t sure where to start, and so we end up not starting. We aren’t sure what to do, so we end up not doing.

Perhaps all we need in those moments is for someone to remind us that starting something is better than waiting until you find the perfect thing.

Someone to say “you can always feed someone.”

You can always feed someone.

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If nothing else, you can make up a second sandwich when you make yours and hand it to the next hungry person you meet.

If nothing else, you can buy extra snacks and put them somewhere the neighborhood kids can get to them—no strings attached—if they want or need them.

If nothing else, you can donate that coffee gift card you got for your birthday and know you are never going to use to your local Food Not Bombs or whoever is feeding the houseless in your community.

Whenever you feel helpless, you can feed somebody. And no matter how bleak the world is, that’s never nothing.

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I’m writing this because this morning, someone dear to me asked me where to start. Which person should I feed? Where do I find them?

Maybe you aren’t sure either.

So here are some places to start:

Volunteer with a pre-existing organization like Food Not Bombs. There are groups all over the world that feed people. They need food preparers and sometimes drivers and simply just people who can stand in a line and hand food out and say hi and how are you and we’re glad you’re here to people as they take their meals.

Personally, when I work with groups or charities (for any purpose), I look for non-religious ones, because (sadly and often) religious groups tend to prioritize proselytizing or limit who they serve on morality grounds. If you choose to work with a religious group, make sure you understand what the limitations are and whether you can live with those limitations. Or, like me, you can choose non-religious groups (regardless of your own beliefs).

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Give directly to the houseless in your community. When my friend asked me this morning where I find people to feed, I told them that I know of two small encampments not far from where we live. When I have extra, I take it to them.

And when I say extra, I don’t just mean if I make an extra sandwich. I also mean: leftover snacks after an event (if you host the event, you can just give out those extras; if you didn’t host, ask the host if you can take what’s left to distribute it). For me, this is extremely low barrier to entry because I walk past these two camps almost every day. So all I have to do is leave a bag of snacks by my door and take it next time I go by.

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If you know someone on disability or unemployment, see if you can help. Depending what country you live in, disability benefits are often direly low. The average disability payment in the US is between $1,300 and $1,600. The average rent in the US is $2,000. And the US punishes disabled people if they make too much money by removing their benefits long before they can actually cover living costs.

E.g. your neighbor or friend who is on disability might need help.

Now, USers are trained not to talk frankly about money or need. We’re pull-ourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps folks (never mind that that is literally not possible). So opening the conversation can feel a bit fraught. But trust me, it’s worth it.

Recently, a friend of mine shared that his unemployment benefits had been stopped. Said benefits were not enough in the first place, and now they were nothing. So I asked the uncomfortable question:

“Do you have food?”

And then “do you have basics? Toilet paper. Soap. Toothpaste.”

He struggled to answer, which was how I knew what the answer was.

As a person living alone, I am literally incapable of finishing perishables before they go bad, so I always give parts of them away. Half a head of lettuce. Half a loaf of bread. The kiwi or cucumber (both of which I’m allergic to) that come in the mystery veggie box that I get from local farms each week.

I don’t just do this out of the goodness of my heart. I also do it because I’m committed to living a low-waste life. And I literally cannot eat all that.

After that conversation, I bagged up those things for my friend. And when I told the friend they used to go to why I was going to give them somewhere else, he brought me his extras to add to the bag.

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Offer before someone asks. In a culture that loves to pretend that it’s merit-based, it’s hard as hell to ask for help with something as basic as food. It is vulnerable. And often people suffer rather than do it because they are afraid of how others will react. (And with good reason! Some people are rude, patronizing, or infantilizing when people ask for help. I shouldn’t have to say this, but don’t be those people.)

Which is why I asked my friend if he had food. It’s why I opened the dialogue before he did. Because I have food—and I am not going to wait until he has to ask me. That’s one small burden I can take off him.

So let’s normalize asking and offering when we can. When someone tells you they’re on disability, that they lost their job, that their benefits just got cancelled, ask. When someone jokes that all they’re eating is ramen, find out if it’s true.

Sometimes this is all as simple as texting your friend and saying “hey I’m at the grocery store; what do you need?” and then refusing to let them pay you back when you drop off that gallon of milk or loaf of bread or head of broccoli.

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Feed people randomly. I cannot express the utter joy of paying someone’s bill at the coffee shop and watching as they realize they owe $0. The simple pleasure of sneakily covering lunch and then telling your friend they cannot pay because it’s already paid for.

A couple months ago, I walked into one of my favorite coffee shops and saw a woman in the corner crying silently. She’d bought herself a big, gorgeous breakfast, and she was clearly having a heartbreaking day. Perhaps she was buying breakfast in defiance of her bad day. Perhaps she’d been stood up. Perhaps something else. Whatever the reason, she was clearly going through it.

When the cafe dude came to take my order, I told him what coffee I wanted and I asked him if I could pay for her meal.

“I already did,” he told me.

Turns out, he’s the cafe owner.

Turns out, there’s more than one person in that cafe wishing a heartbroken girl well.

Turns out, it’s something a lot of us can afford to do sometimes.

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Get into cahoots with your community. Feeding people on your own is good. So is involving your friends, your neighbors, your community.

There are a lot of ways to do this. One is to simply identify someone in need and spearhead efforts to get them what they need (if you can’t feed them yourself, ask friends and neighbors if they want to help). Another is to get creative and build ongoing systems to feed people.

I don’t just mean groups like Food Not Bombs. I heard a story about protests in Korea: people who could not attend the protests themselves called into local cafes and put money on a tab so that protestors could come and get coffee for free. What if we did that for houseless folks in our communities? If we collaborated with cafes near them to put $20 or $50 or $100 a day on a gift card so that all a houseless person had to do is go in, say our names, and get a sandwich or a coffee or a cookie?

That’s not the only way to do it. But it’s one way. If it excites you, try it and let me know how it goes.

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It’s been a couple years since I started telling people more about the small ways I try to do good. The food I give away. That time, when I was making good tech money, when I funded strangers’ rent fundraisers late at night so they’d wake in the morning and be able to put down that anxiety for a month. Or the time I paid off someone’s credit card debt. Or how when I feed someone, I don’t just give them the basics. I add cookies or candy or cake.

Because people who are struggling deserve beautiful things too.

Not just sustenance but joy.

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I’m seeing so much despair lately. And I understand it. We’re overwhelmed. We’re afraid. We’re surrounded by need and don’t know where to start.

So consider this me reaching across the space between us to squeeze your hand. Not to promise it will be ok or even just to comfort you. But to say we’re in this together. And we can help each other.

And if nothing else, you can always feed someone.