Cash and Gift Cards

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When people want to help me, they sometimes go shopping and clearly spend serious dough on some kind of upscale food or whatever. I am sure they mean well, but like many homeless people, I have a medical condition and significant dietary restrictions. I often cannot eat what they buy me. In some cases, I am outright allergic to it.

Further, the fact that I am on the street does not mean they know more about good nutrition than I do. I realize they think they are going to feed me better than I could feed myself. This is potentially true insofar as sometimes I do not have money for food. But insofar as ability to decide what is best for my health: No.

I know quite a lot about my medical condition and how to properly feed myself in the face of it. A random stranger on the street will have no idea what my medical diagnosis even is.

So I am generally not too crazy about people buying me food in that manner, where they choose the food for me without any input whatsoever from me. It usually winds up being pretty wasteful. If I can't use it, it may just end up in the trash. I often do not have any means to pass it on to someone else who might use it.

(Contrary to what many housed people seem to think, I am not part of some homeless network. We don't all know each other. It isn't a club or something.)

I far prefer for people to just give me cash as a means to feed me instead of deciding for me what they think I should eat. But I realize that many well-meaning people are reluctant to give cash to homeless individuals because they are convinced it will all go towards some addiction. So here are my thoughts on best practices for giving gift cards/buying them food:

  • If you have personally seen them eat in a particular eatery, you could get them a gift card to that eatery.
  • If you run into them in a grocery store, it works well to just offer to pay their bill on that occasion for the items that they personally picked out.
  • Alternately, buy them a gift card for that grocery store.
If you have no idea where they shop or eat, give cash or give them the most generic kind of gift card you can, like a Walmart gift card or a Visa gift card. Let them decide how to spend it.

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