It’s so gross and hypocritical to frame food waste as a personal failing. Like, people are dying of hunger because someone forgot some leftovers at the back of their fridge and ended up throwing them away. Major chain grocery stores throw away millions of pounds of food because it’s “too much work” to donate it, and then poison it and destroy it when they throw it away to punish dumpster diving.
Waste is not a personal failing. It’s engineered by corporations, and they profit off of obscuring that.
Much like water waste - shaming a dripping bathroom faucet for wasting water, while hundreds of gallons get wasted in industrial settings.
Always be suspicious of micro-focused framing of environmental issues, when there’s the possibility of macro-level issues hiding behind them.
(Sorry if this is only tangentially biology, but I minored in sustainability and reducing food waste is a great way to be a friend to the environment, farm animals, and wildlife.)
Once when I was working at a Salesforce conference in SF, just answering questions for people, one of the vendors came up at the end of the day and said “Do you know if there’s a food bank around here? I want to donate these. Except, I don’t want a homeless person to choke on these and sue me.” What she was holding was a small bowl of promotional breathmints. I think that conversation was very emblematic of how people don’t understand how food waste works. Here’s a breakdown:
1. No one wants your half-eaten sandwich, your crumbs, or your food-like substance. Mints aren’t even food. Try to avoid that kind of food waste, and if you can’t help it, accept that a certain amount of personal waste of all items is a reality. You should see what happens to your clothes. (Rarely does anyone want that, either.)
2. Even if it was good food, it is very difficult to organize food donation. When I worked at Google we threw away about 40 fully-prepared meals a day, just from my 3-person project (idk what they do with the cafeteria food.) Everyone who walked in to the studio said “you should donate that to a homeless person.” Well there weren’t any homeless people hanging out at the Google Maps building, so are you volunteering to drive food around until you find one? I bet just about everyone is shocked the first time they work with food that TONS of it gets thrown away. I contacted Food Recovery Network to try to organize a daily pickup, but it never happened before the project went on the road–which I anticipated. You just cannot poof extra food into a needy person’s hands!
4. I also want to point out–you don’t have to be homeless to use a food bank. If you are hungry, having some trouble this month, or worried about making rent, in some states and counties food banks can’t turn you away or even legally ask you qualifying questions. You don’t have to wait until you are in dire straights before utilizing these services. They hope to prevent you from getting in too deep. Sometimes they have TONS of a certain item, like maybe potatoes if you’re in Idaho, and bread and bagels everywhere in my experience, that they’re more than happy to get rid of. Also, don’t think of people who use food banks as failures, and don’t think of it as a defeat if that’s you. Some people get help from rich partners and parents, some get it from good jobs, some get it from food banks. Everyone gets help in their life and everyone deserves to eat.
So what can you do to prevent food waste? There are different organizations, depending on where you live and what you do. You can print out Bill Emerson and tell your boss at the grocery store that you can donate food, and these Good Samaritan laws were passed in 1996 so people should know that by now. But people at the grocery store want minimal work, so see if you can organize the food van to pick up the extras on a schedule. You can support legislation and NGO’s that are working on streamlining food waste reduction. Look for Meetup.com dumpster diving groups, freegans, and food donation apps.
You can find your local food-redistribution charity, and they are more likely to know how to utilize your time. Since I lived in the SF East Bay, I know there is the White Pony Express which drives around collecting food from restaurants and grocery stores and donating it. There are organizations like Food Forward and the Food Recovery Network on the West Coast. Food Not Bombs is fairly common across the US and the world, so see if there’s one of those nearby you.
And lastly, if you have an extra pizza, just give it to your roommates or co-workers. You can ask them to donate the $5 they would have spent to a charity, because the charity is much happier with money than the pizza. Or just use that $5 to pay off your loans quicker.
a tiny old man who lies in a field doing a perfect imitation of a baby’s cry to attract concerned passers-by, before killing those who attempt to pick him up by rapidly increasing in weight until their bones shatter
an outhouse goblin with a long tongue who just scuttles around licking up that sweet sweet soap scum and other bathroom filth
what appears to be a man with an obscured face - when it spots someone at night, it drops trou, spreads its asscheeks to reveal a giant eyeball poking out of its anus, and then charges at its victim on all fours ass-first (seemingly for no reason other than to scare them)
a seemingly ordinary woman whose head detaches while she sleeps and flies around the garden looking for centipedes to eat
large angry goblins in straw coats that rampage through mountain villages yelling at kids to be good and not stopping until the parents appease them with booze
a giant who just squats over the japanese islands and washes his hands in the ocean (that’s literally all he does)
shapeshifting raccoons who use their enormous stretchy ballsacks to accomplish all manner of everyday tasks
goblins that live in the woods washing beans in the rivers, freaking out travelers by singing songs about washing beans that echo through the woods
a giant skeleton made of tons of normal skeletons combined like some sort of skeleton voltron
slimy balls of hair that just skitter around being nasty
a spirit that does nothing except sneak up on sleeping people, pull the pillows out from under their heads, and slides the pillows under their feet
vaguely humanoid blobs of obese, stinky flesh with no eyes or mouths that are harmless and by all accounts quite friendly - if you eat the flesh of one, you gain immortality at the cost of living your life as one of them
a little old man with a very long head who sneaks into empty houses and insists that he owns them even when the homeowners return (one of the most powerful yokai)
Most of these seem harmless or just assholes
My favourite detail about the aforementioned Voltron skeleton is that, in some folk-tales, it’s said to hunt by sneaking up on people and ambushing them.
How does a thirty-foot-tall skeleton sneak up on a person, you ask?
Simple: by exploiting the fact that nobody ever looks up.
(I’m not kidding - that’s literally the folkloric explanation for how they sneak up on you.)
I hate that some people are so dense that they need disclaimers for every single thing, like when women say “men are…” you know good and goddamn well they aren’t referring to every single man. It’s billions of us, how the fuck would they know all of us?
Whenever I hear these statements, I interpret it as “Not all men, but enough men to make this a prominent issue amongst men”
Same shit with “white people are…” Get the fuck out your feelings and actually listen so you can address the concerns of these people instead of defending people that ain’t shit.
I find it funny how @star-wars-discousre is saying there should be no oppressors in the regime, yet is doing the very thing heteronormative society has done before.
1. Asexual has founded basis in epigenetics and sexual attraction (in this case lacking)
2. The very notion goes against heterosexuality.
3. An acronym can change over time and adapt, or is otherwise archaic and doomed to modernity.
This is why I like SaGE more-so. It allows room to grow and allies to support.
Also, asexuals have a high rate of being victims of sexual abuse, most notably “corrective” rape in which ace people are sexually assaulted as a means to “fix” us.
You are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. That’s it. Aces aren’t LGBT.
I mean for one your forgetting a bit of that. Like the Q+.
Mod Bethany
The full acronym is LGBT.
I love me some ahistorical bullshit
The “full” acronym at one point was “GL”, after lesbians fought against male homosexuality being the “face” of the movement (i.e., the Alliance for Gay Artists (AGA), founded in 1982, was renamed the Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists shortly thereafter; and the Gay Activists Alliance never included “Lesbian” in their title).
The “full” acronym at another point was “LGB”, only after bisexual activists campaigned fiercely to be included, and is often still not even included in acronyms
The “full” acronym at yet another point was “LGBT”, only after trans activists campaigned fiercely to be included
Queer was added to the acronym after it was reclaimed and re-politicized by ACT UP off-shoot Queer Nation in the early 1990s. LGBTQ has been a thing since the 90s.
ONE Archives, which is the largest repository of LGBTQIA+ materials in the world and was founded by some of the principle members of the early (1950s-60s) homophile movement, which led to the gay rights movement post-Stonewall, uses the full acronym LGBTQ on their website and also freely uses the word “Queer” interchangeably.
As of 2014, NOW (National Organization for Women) agreed to switch to use of the full LGBTQIA acronym, and it likely isn’t the only large social rights organization to have done so
Many LGBTQ+ magazines use LGBTQ, including One (which has existed in some form since the 1950s) and The Advocate, use LGBTQ or LGBTQIA as the full acronym and regularly use “queer” as a phrase (and, in fact, some articles have welcomed asexual people and their narratives as part of the queer experience).
The acronym is constantly evolving. It’s not static. To claim otherwise is blatant ignorance. The modern-day LGBTQ+ community is a result of decades of political activism, social inclusion, and community outreach. It’s not a rigid structure that operates by a strict set of rules about who can and cannot join.
The full acronym is LGBT. Cishets don’t belong in the community. Aces aren’t inherently lgbt. We don’t want our oppressors in our community.
“we don’t want our oppressors in our community”
as if trans people don’t already have to deal with their oppressors (cis people) being in their community
as if LGBTQIA+ people of color don’t have to deal with LGBTQIA+ white people in the community
as if LBTQIA+ women don’t have to deal with GBTQIA+ men in the community
as if disabled LGBTQIA+ people don’t have to deal with able-bodied LGBTQIA+ people in the community
the LGBTQIA+ community is huge and consists of people with multiply-overlapping identities and privileges. we all (unless you’re a cis, able-bodied, wealthy, white gay man) have to deal with a member of our oppressing class in the LGBTQIA+ community
Even cis, able bodied, wealthy, white gay men occasionally have oppressors in the restricted lgbt community if straight trans people are included (although this is more rare; the only example of a homophobic trans person I can pull up is Caitlyn Jenner, my point is just that intersectionality means this is possible all along in a number of ways and accepting another dimension of intersectionality to the acronym isn’t anything new)
Reblogging for the historical smackdown.
And to make a final point - asexuals aren’t even cishet anyway. They’re asexual. It’s its own thing.
And intersectionality wise, you could also have trans or nonbinary aces, queer aces, homoromantic or heteroromantic or panromantic aces. You can’t just exclude every asexual person on the off-chance that maybe one of them is heteroromantic and/or cis.
Honestly SaGE is a better name: Sex and Gender Equality.
