Everyone Eats

Everyone eats. It's true, right? Have you seen a hungry person today? Someone who didn't eat?

I was homeless for about four years. Much of that time I ate food that was provided by the various altruistic folks who either ran homeless "feeds" as we called them, or just left their leftover dinners and lunches out on a newspaper box.

BTW, thank you. In a very real way, anything I ever accomplish will be due to you. Rock on.

While out there, and it is out, I noticed that we fell into two main overlapping groups: mental/emotional issue sufferers and nomads.

Now the nomads are pretty cool. They are "homeless" by choice, although usually they do not, in fact, have a home in the conventionally accepted sense, so they will only rarely contest the name.

They're mostly either young kids and adults, runaways and dropouts, or old timers on a groove, lifestyle on lock and no real reason to quite settle down yet.

Now your mental or emotional (what "or"? It's always "and".) issues sufferers are a whole 'nother thing. You may not have this sort of thing where you are, but out here in California the mental hospitals and wards that cared for a lot of these folks simply shut down one day about twenty or thirty years ago. There was some reason, but it hardly matters now, but literally overnight the streets here were filled with, if you'll excuse me, "nuts".

These guys have generally either died or been locked up by now if they completely couldn't cut it out there, so the ones who are left can kinda sorta get by on their own, or in little enclaves. But it's like Victorian England in the time of Dickens out there. I'll go take some photos if you don't believe me. These guys need help.

One easy and most immediate way to make a huge impact on the lives of someone on the streets is simply to hand them something delicious and nutritious to eat. Then do it again the next day. Then repeat for at least a month or three, or until the patient is showing signs of improvement.

You may think that's cute, but ask the fellas at the Seattle House! The first thing I did when I decided to stay was go to the store and drop a chunk on healthly produce. Then I took it back home, cooked it, and put it in front of them.

They say hunger makes the best seasoning and they tell no lies.

So the nomads need good cheap-or-free healthy food readily available, and the poor outdoors out patients need basic food for life because they can't fend well enough for themselves.

When I say food, I feel I should point out that I mean "Organic, Sustainable, Humane" Humane implies vegan, or at least vegan plus dairy, honey... what can be got in harmonious symbiosis.

For it to be food something has to be organically grown, using methods that can be sustained for millions of years or more, invalving ahimsa, non-violence, no harm to animals of any kind.

To have enough food for them, of this quality, my thesis is that it has to be surplus from Permie farms, so they must be selling enough produce to keep themselves running and overproduce enough to feed local petite-fiscal friends and neighbors.

Promoting Permaculture Food Parks

Xerblin is about computer aided living. "What do you want your computer to do for you?" One button per function you want to perform with aid of your computer.

This button would be, say, "Plan menu".

It helps you create a healthy tailored menu, with "taps" into online databases of recipes and cooking and culinary communities and so on.

It also taps into another group of databases and communities, the food growers. Since you're planning your menu in advance, you'll know your grocery needs in advance, yes? Give that information to your friendly neighborhood primary food producers and they can adjust their growing and delivery cycles with the aid of sophisticated computerized models.

We'll call it "Cybercapitolacommunisticalblooie", it's cool.

With a handle on their demand, and a network to buffer unexpected fluctuations, growers can reduce expenses and operate much more efficiently. You may think efficiency would preclude surpluses that could be distributed to the poor, but in Permaculture abundance and "return of surpluses to the community" and features of the methodology. They are built in to the design system inextricably.