after looking over this picture i posted yesterday and reading some of the messages i received i have to get a few things off my chest:

as i mentioned previously, i was born into and spent my formative years a part of the LA County Foster Care System. it feels like a literary cliché, but i actually was born a poor orphan (which is just about as fun as it sounds). i will preface this with saying that although this isn’t something i necessarily hide from people, it’s also something i generally avoid reflecting on… BUT when i do, it makes me grateful for my present circumstances and i think it’s important we all do that at times.

in several of the homes, food wasn’t made available to myself or the other kids. sometimes i really think it was out of intentional cruelty, often it was just gross neglect. the foster parents were paid to provide those things to us, but sometimes they just kept the money as a means to subsidize their own vices. i was placed with alcoholics, drug addicts, chronic gamblers, all sorts of quality folks. in one particular home, we were given a steady diet of ramen noodles that we had to split. this meant that 3 or 4 of us, would have a meal that cost roughly 15 cents as our days nourishment. i even found myself picking through people’s trash looking for something to eat. that’s just how glamorous things got. after a good amount of time like this, i eventually ended up malnourished and with scurvy. this and other hunger spells brought me a myriad of health issues, a few of which still affect me to this day.

my point in telling you this is to explain that i fully understand what it’s like to regularly cry yourself to sleep with hunger pains. i wasn’t the first and i’m not the last person to suffer in this way. like myself, there are people in absolutely every community who are starving. like myself, for many people the circumstances that brought them to that place was entirely outside their own control. truthfully, I think that’s pretty irrelevant. no one should be starving. period.

i’m often troubled by the amount of food i see thrown away and wasted. while i was a pr maven, i hosted lavish parties for rich assholes for a living. if an event had 200 RSVPs we got catering for 250 - 300, just in case. invariably, only half of the people would show and I’m left with thousands of dollars worth of food. typically, people throw this stuff away, but there are organizations like City Harvest or Food Not Bombs across the country that provide meals for the hungry made entirely with waste from individuals and dining establishments. these groups ALWAYS get my leftovers because every little bit helps. if you’re eating out and you have anything left on your plate, have it boxed up and leave it out on the street near a waste can for someone to enjoy. do the same with your leftovers from home. it will be much appreciated.

give what you can to those in need. i don’t generally give money to people i see on the street, but i will give food. make sure the places you dine or work at do something with their potential waste. if they don’t know about the programs, bring information and see if you can connect the two parties.

it goes without saying that at some point most of us are guilty of taking our situations for granted. we have a tendency to play out the “Woe is Me’s” to the Nth degree, allowing ourselves to get into a funk. maybe you’ve got health issues. maybe you’ve got a great deal of dislike for your work. statistically, both of those things are pretty common. whether you are carrying massive amounts of debt (which is just about the most American thing one can do), dislike your spouse, are sometimes driven to the edge by your children, yada yada yada these are really good problems to have. things can’t be all that terrible. you and i are both sitting in front of computers or you’re reading this on your uber-fab cell phone. i think it’s safe to assume you’re at least eating. why not take a moment to see that others are as well?