Animal Food, Mammal Food, No Food: Inflation.
I recently wrote a friend of mine, and was a little off in the weeds about people with unfathomably deep pockets living lavish lives while our elderly are living off tins of Kal-Kan (an old animal food reference).
What made my brain itch and my heart hurt a little was that I was not really being facetious. Somewhere close to half my lifespan ago, I used to work retail in a large national chain grocery store, and I would have these elderly customers who are on fixed incomes shuffle in from the nearby retirement communities. They would get a shopping cart, wheel it on over to the pet food aisle, and buy as many tins of this pet food (my brain insists it was named Kal-Kan) as they could afford. Along with that, they would get whatever canned vegetables were cheapest and a box of cheap crackers (usually saltines).
I had not connected the dots yet, so my heart had not broken.
When I quit retail and went homeless myself as the housing bubble imploded, someone living on the streets connected the dot inadvertently for me. You see... there's this product sold here in the States called potted meat. They take the whatever's left over from a pig, a bucket of salt, nitrates, and nitrites, grind it all together into a thick paste, and put it in a small tin. The tin... is about the size of some of the wet food tins for cat and dog food.
This unhoused gentle was eating what looked like potted meat from a tin one day, but I observed that the label was the wrong color. They put the tin down... Cat food.
Brain Flashback Initiated:
Elderly customers buying animal food, crackers...
Oh... there is no end to the cruelty in this world. We got old sirs and dames eatin' pet food 'cause it's all they can damnit afford. My heart broke for those people, the customers I helped buy pet food so they would not starve, people trying to make do on $750 a month or so in fixed incomes.
Hell, to this day, it still makes me cry a little in frustration: Back then, I didn't have a way to contribute to a solution, financially or otherwise -- I lacked knowledge and access to directly do anything. I was able to at least point people toward help that made food available and affordable as my situation and knowledge improved, but I could have done so much more if my love for gardening then were anything like it is right now.
Right now, I lack the freedom, actual freedom, to just go garden and encourage others to take back access to the keys to plant reproduction from those who withheld it.
In this age, this time, this place, I lack direct power to do the very things I wish to do, but I have ideas that would love to execute on. Whether it's putting together a quirkily designed vertical planting bed system to stymy snails and slugs while sprouting squash and spuds, or taking old pans and pots, old radios and televisions, transforming them into planters from previously ignored waste, I want to grow good food. Things I can harvest, and maybe drop by a neighboring house, ding-dong-ditching a bag full of tomatoes, radishes, carrots, lettuces, and what have you on their doorstep.
"You look like you could use a sun-kissed smile. Enjoy. <3"
It just might save that neighbor from needing to eat that tin of pet food.
And, with my growing knowledge of how to harvest seeds from various plants, I can also give seeds to our local public library -- back home, they emptied out their card catalog after migrating to a digital system, but what does one do with a big system full of drawers without throwing it away?
- Fill it full of packs of seeds, lovingly gathered by locals to grow local gardens!
Your tax dollars at work, friends, fighting inflation and hunger one vegetable or fruit at a time. :)
But, as a twisted aside, this blog post came to mind as we were watching a The Farmer's Dog commercial here in the dorm, and one of us remarked:
Man, dogs eat a hell of a lot better than we do.
Yeah... now. Look how far dog food has come in a generation or two, haha. :)