Someone dropped off a massive food rescue haul to our free fridge and community pantry today.
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Someone dropped off a massive food rescue haul to our free fridge and community pantry today.
They're not part of my program and we're not sure who's doing it. This is awesome. It means there are others outside of our volunteer group that does maintenance on the fridges and outside of the group that I'm working with to build out our formal food rescue program.
This is huge.
This means we have successfully built post-scarcity *infrastructure*!!!
Folks are using our fridges both to contribute and to utilize. Folks that have nothing to do directly with the core group of maintainers. Wow.
We need to build more free fridges. This one is running out of room.
#freeFridge #foodSecurity #postScarcity #mutualAid #solarPunk #foodRescue
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Nonya Bidniss :CIAverified:replied to Tinker ☀️ last edited by
@tinker Amazing. Any idea how many people this effort has served / is serving?
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Tinker ☀️replied to Nonya Bidniss :CIAverified: last edited by
@Nonya_Bidniss - No. I know through anecdotes... We have two cleaning/maintenance "shifts" (usually only takes ten minutes) per day. So we compare notes on how much food we see and how much is contributed etc. The fridges are usually empties out a couple times a day.
I encounter multiple families, individuals, and kids whenever Im there - either for my shift or whenever I'm contributing or grabbing food.
Soooooo lots. Just a lot. But we dont track it formally.
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Nonya Bidniss :CIAverified:replied to Tinker ☀️ last edited by
@tinker Emptying out a couple times a day means people are definitely making use of it. Wow.
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Tinker ☀️replied to Nonya Bidniss :CIAverified: last edited by
@Nonya_Bidniss - Yup. And we are just getting started.
Richmond VA has 14 fridges!!!! They're a much bigger city, but talk about goals!!!
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Large Format Projectionistreplied to Tinker ☀️ last edited by
Is there a summary of the process to set this up?
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. @kechpaja - Au contraire, my friend!!!
Prepare yourself for a lengthy rebuttal! (And thank you for the opportunity to info-dump on you!)
So this *is* an example of post-scarcity infrastructure. But how and why?
High Level Definition of Post-Scarcity Food (so that we may agree on terms): Post Scarcity is where we produce more food than is consumed and distribute that food out. It can be universal or local - so unevenly distributed post-scarcity or the fact that one area has it and another doesn't, does not imply that post-scarcity in the place that has it does not exist.
Great.
In the *pragmatic* sense: Post Scarcity Food needs inputs and outputs. Contributions and Distributions.
Overview:
*Current* Contributions / Inputs (read: not ideal, not what is being built or hoped for, but how it is right now):
- Charity (which you reduced food rescue and free fridges down into)
- Food Rescue (not charity... not even mutual aid)
- Mutual AidCurrent Distributions / Outputs
- Centralized
- Decentralized
- Peer-to-peerDetail:
Contributions / Inputs
- Charity: Examples of this include food drives, food banks, church food pantries. Charities are not ideal and often have conditions tied to them ("Means Testing" and the like). They rely on "people being kind and generous" as you put it. If all we had was charity, we would not be in post-scarcity. While charity is often a cover for artificial-scarcity (our current over-arching economic model), it CAN be used as an input into post-scarcity. You just can't rely on it and need to build it further infrastructure. I use it because its there, but it's more of a transition thing.
- Food Rescue: Food Rescue is not Charity. Food Rescue is not Mutual Aid. Current Food Rescue relies on a capitalistic model. A for-profit store/restaurant/bakery/etc makes food to sell. Cannot sell all of it. Instead of throwing it away, it "donates" the left over good food to be consumed elsewhere. Food Rescue is NOT out of the goodness of a corporation's heart. Corporations do not have hearts. They cannot be kind or generous. Instead, Food Rescue is applied to the bottom line / profit margin and is justified by things such as "lowering the fees for trash" and "having a tax-writeoff to a non-profit (again within a capitalistic system). But! While Food Rescue is not charity and relies on the current capitalist system, it absolutely shows that we produce MORE than is consumed. Ironically, an example that we have the MEANS for post-scarcity. I use it because its there and is a ready source of feeding people. While I push for post-scarcity, I care about feeding people *now*.
- Mutual Aid: This is the ideal and the model for a full post-scarcity economy, and we're already building this out. Community Farms / Ranches (Centralized), Community Gardens / Local Small Scale Ranches (Decentralized), and Home Gardens / Home Ranches of various forms (peer-to-peer) are ways that we produce for ourselves, our neighbors, and our towns. This is post-scarcity mutual aid and does not rely on the people being kind and generous. It relies on us taking care of our neighbors AND ourselves (call it selfish if you like). Mutual means mutual.
Detail:
Distributions / Outputs
- Centralized: The charity model uses food pantries / churches / mobile pantries to distribute out food from a food bank. We can utilize that now, but we are absolutely not (nor should we be) limited by it. Instead, Free Stores are the Centralized model of post-scarcity mutual aid.
- Decentralized: Free Fridges & Community Pantries - This is where my fridge above fits in. It's not charity by any means. It's a node in a distribution network.
- Peer-to-peer: The simplest form of this is one person handing it to another. A neighbor asking for sugar. Handing off your extra squash on your street corner. You can scale this up using things like mobile apps such as Olio to coordinate this across larger areas.
Great, so we laid out inputs and outputs for post-scarcity food.
To give a specific example, see this post: https://infosec.exchange/@tinker/112582425833711424
There I show how I used the Input of a Mutual Aid Home Garden and the Output of a Decentralized Free Fridge.
None of that was charity. None of it was "kind and generous". Instead it was building the infrastructure for post-scarcity mutual aid that I use myself.
I take from the free fridge all the time. I drop off at the free fridge all the time. I produce for the community. I consume from the community.
We have the tech & the means. We have built infrastructure already (see the original post). We are now scaling it out.
#solarPunk #postScarcity #foodSecurity #mutualAid #freeFridge
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Tinker ☀️replied to Large Format Projectionist last edited by
@Benhm3 - There are, yes.
Right now, we're still building ours out, but let me leave you with a couple resources:
Freedge: Start a community fridge in your neighborhood: https://freedge.org/freedge-yourself/
Quick guide: https://lifehacker.com/start-a-friendly-fridge-to-feed-your-neighbors-1844489776
I plan on documenting this all on https://hacker.solar - I just need to sit down and do it
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