Fellow Kossacks, this is a personal diary, and a plea for help. It's about my ex-boyfriend, currently languishing in an apartment in Northern California, going hungry on this World Food Day. And with the global economy the way it is, he'll have plenty more days just like this one.
I know there are plenty of ecologists, foodies, nutritionists and locavores around these parts, and I hope they can lend me a hand. How can my ex, and other people who were already on society's lower slopes, live healthily under the coming downturn? What is a cheap and responsible way to procure food? A vegetable garden springs to mind, but they live in an small apartment somewhere.
These aren't people who are homeless or particularly irresponsible with money. Like so many others, they've been dealt a crappy hand in life, and they have to make do with what they've got. They're the first ones being hit by the crunch of rising prices, the first ones to need a safety net.
I'm praying every night Obama wins, and finds that net somewhere in the White House closet. Meanwhile, we - and they - will have to make do. Follow me behind the jump for a little more personal backstory.
We make an odd pair, my ex and I. I'm 8 years his senior - he's 19 - from Western Europe and as white as you can get. He's a mixed-race kid, having grown up in rural Wyoming and spent his teens in Honolulu. I've known him for a long time now, since he was thirteen, a latchkey kid with a deadbeat mom. He confided in me online that he was so afraid of the crazy homeless people he could hear screaming outside that he couldn't get to sleep. He struck a chord in me, him and his artistry and bright, unnatural hair that seemed so unreal to me. I used to be a very conservative Christian, and I still carry the altruism with me, so I became his confidante, trying to comfort him and safeguard him, just some kid falling through the cracks.
(Later on, when he'd come of age, we started a long-distance relationship. It broke apart under stresses, but when I say 'ex', I mean it with the greatest possible tenderness. Our dynamic is closer to where it used to be, now - I'm his self-styled guardian angel.)
Life wasn't kind to him, growing up. Shortly after I met him, he was violated by an older white male, which he never got therapy or treatment for. He was a brooding outcast, a loner with a self-injury problem, largely ignored by the world and familiar with the seedy side of life from an early age. He dropped out of high school in his senior year, because of the stresses of his AP program and the need to earn his keep - he was living with his father then, who couldn't afford the sky-high costs of living in Hawai'i.
His Korean mother, who sucked up all the oxygen with her own mental issues, is gone from the picture now, but she left him with a lasting legacy. Her own chemical imbalances are genetic, having passed on to her son. The psychosis came into full bloom last winter, after he and his father relocated to California, and put him in hospital, then in a dreadful psychiatric clinic. Then in hospital several more times, of self-inflicted wounds. He's finally getting the help he needed, though it comes with a ream of diagnoses - PTSD, psychotic, bipolar and schizophrenic, avoidant.
The treatment naturally put a lot of strain on the family wallet. His situation prevents him from finding a job anytime soon. The cocktail of meds he's on, just to keep him stable, costs in excess of $600 every month, money his Veteran father simply doesn't make at his day job. But they've gotten by until now.
Recently, people broke into their apartment and stole a large share of his drugs, some of which are controlled substances. They have to make up the difference somewhere, so his father's selling off some of their possessions to make it through the month, starving himself to feed his son. I respect him greatly for his moral character, but it gnaws at me to know people I love are going hungry. It's so needless and pointless.
His arch-conservative father and I both try to look out for him, we do. But we're only two people. What could we do in the face of global recession? Going hungry again, even in California, is a huge blow to their morale, and the desire to help them burns inside me like a torchflame, late at night. Being so far away, the best thing I can do is give him advice. So I turn to you.
Have you experienced lean times like these? How've you gotten though them? Are you involved with food activism? Do you have any advice? Any useful links? Does cheap food preclude it from being healthy or organic? Is there any food that's easy to obtain, easy to grow? Possibly for free? I've never been confronted by this problem before, not here in my welfare state, and I wouldn't know where to start thinking about it.
All I know is that food's a basic right. Every human being should be fed, every human being deserves not to go hungry. The fact that a First World country is patently unable to ensure this is... It's just obscene.