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Parent Post: If 50 % of the population tried this each year, we would have a healthier world
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saarnok
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8/29/2026, 2:59:57 AM
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There's a tragedy to helping people that can perhaps only really be experienced when you have children. Helping someone takes the pressure off them. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that helping someone actually resulted in them improving their lives. I could still do it if that hand had been involved in a tragic accident leaving me with only one finger. I know a guy who commonly loads up a trailer load of staple foods to give to his workers, which they greatly appreciate; but it keeps them from rising above their circumstances. He can buy bulk foods for prices that seem impossible to ordinary shoppers, and while they wouldn't look at him nearly as favorably, he'd be doing them a far greater service to sell it to them cheaply, but at a price that at least compensated him. I grow a big garden. One of my greatest challenges is giving away the food I produce to people who are both "poor" and ordering "uber eats" from McDonald's or some such. But, something changes when people get enough gumption to grow a tree or berry bush or virtually anything that produces good food. Suddenly they want to share it with the world. No. Not all of them. Serenity is on the right track though. One person at a time, the world can change. It always has. It always will. My grandparents had virtually nothing. They built virtually everything. They weren't unhappy. Today's people built virtually nothing. They're dissatisfied with virtually everything. Growing your own food, even just a part of it, even just a trivial part of it, is actually accomplishing something. And that's what's missing from most people's lives.
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babyvaso
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8/29/2026, 3:59:06 AM
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When people reference the past they often forget, as well as you, that there were incentives to building a home with your own hands, you were not regulated to dea-h as thus, you had the freedom to build what you wanted at low risk to yourself. For example, you can build a barndominium or a tiny house for extremely cheap compared to a standard home, but their value is nonexistent in the housing market making them unattractive as assets. If you could appraise a barndominium and tiny home at the rates of standard homes then 10x more would have them.
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saarnok
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8/30/2026, 4:00:03 AM
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You're not actually addressing what I or Serenity wrote. Your response to her post seems like disappointment that modern industrial agriculture has alleviated scarcity to the point where it's genuinely a step down in well-being in terms of dollars/effort expended to grow healthy fruit as apposed to simply buying fruit from the megalomart down the road. In old "science-fiction" stories a character might travel by rocket to the nearest town in order to make a phone call. This isn't merely some quirk of shortsighted authors myopically viewing reality from an inflexible point of view. It's the actual fact that very, very few of us can reasonably see, not only the future, but even the trends of our own time. Very few of us can even see the reality of the innovation we already benefit from. Right now, all of us are really conscious of the "high" price we pay for gas, me included. Very few of us can see that compared to the upheaval of the 70s we are actually in a "golden age" of plenty. I and more than one of my friends used to sleep in our cars. My brother woke up to find his boots frozen to the floor of his car one morning. And, we were relatively well off. We had cars. We had cars that got 12-16 mpg. We would find roadside potato sales where people sold dirty fresh dug potatoes for $4.50 per 50lb sack, which you could only use if you divided it with other "poor" people. My parents lived in an old school bus after they were married. My cousins shared bath water for the bath they got once per week. We only got a bath once per week. We were well off. They were poor. We had a house. They had an honest to goodness shack. Some of those exact people helped develop the tech in the phone you're using right now. I helped to install the tech that provides apples and other fruit for a cost lower than what would have been possible at the local orchard store when I was a child to your home hundreds or even thousands of miles away from where it's grown. We live in a world of what should have been unfathomable plenty when a greater percentage of the populace than ever has what feels like good reasons to believe they've been left behind. I can tell you that myself and my contemporaries did not have that feeling. I became hungry enough to attempt to eat paper bags without ever coming to believe there was something wrong with the way the world works. The weird thing is that I did start to feel that way when the idea that I might go hungry became essentially unthinkable. This is not a simple subject to explore, and it's not necessarily reasonable to compare what was with what is. The world is changing. That is the only constant.
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