Grape workers striking in the 1960s made it very clear what they wanted people to do: don’t buy or eat grapes. Food and money for those striking. Your presence requested at these specific places. Chavez: “the requests must be absolutely clear and definitely within the scope of what ordinary people do.”
What is clear today is that early-career white-collar workers do not know what to do, or what they can do.
Sally Rooney writes about walking into a convenience store, being washed in shame, and then buying a pack of chips and walking out. “…this is it, the culmination of all the labour in the world, all the burning of fossil fuels and all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations. All for this! This convenience shop! … people … were … ground to death in the most horrific ways, children, women, and all so that I could choose from various lunch options, each packaged in multiple layers of single-use plastic. That was what they died for – that was the great experiment. I thought I would throw up. Of course, a feeling like that can’t last. Maybe for the rest of the day I feel bad, even for the rest of the week – so what? I still have to buy lunch.”
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is always either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.
Is it true that at the heart of every famine is the failure of a state? John Mitchell: "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine."
Clarice: "No, no. I do not feel sorry for those who die of hunger. What I feel is rage.”
Adorno: “There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more.”