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As usual, it's mostly small businesses, for whom it might actually be a sacrifice, trying to make sure people don't starve, and large corporations that would barely notice the expenditure doing nothing.
There's actually a lot more under this, about resistance and building resilient communities, but the TL;DR if you don't want to read the thread I'm about to do is: shop local. It's actually a form of resistance.
Okay, so once upon a time I did a thread about etymology and the concept of giving to the poor--about the roots of the word "charity" and its focus on the virtue/compassion of the giver, vs "tzedakah" and its focus on the idea that poverty is unjust and needs to be remedied.
So there are two different models there of why you'd feed someone who can't afford to eat: one is about voluntary compassion, and one is about the obligation to respond to injustice. There's a third: interdependence.
One of the effects of the push in the 1950s to move to suburbs--the focus on the American Dream as a house and a car and a yard and two kids--was to destroy interdependent communities.
Cities? People in each other's faces, all the time. You don't get to ignore other people. And just because of scale, there have to be economies of scale. If the power goes out in your apartment, it's probably going out in your entire building.
And the chances that you borrow matches or a lamp from your neighbor, whose door is 3 feet from yours, are much higher than if you're in a suburb and it's just your house. The interconnectedness is way more in your face.
Similarly, in small towns, that vaunted--and despised--small town sense of connectedness, where everyone's in everyone else's business, is because when you're kind of in the middle of nowhere, you know you need each other more.
But suburbs were advertised largely on the basis of privacy and independence. You could escape the city and having to have all those people in your face. (Also on racism and classism--your neighbors would be People Like You.)
And without the interdependence of community, what did we become dependent on? Corporations. It's not coincidence that a push to suburbs and a giant upswell in consumerism both happened in the 1950s.
Like, look, I'm not a historian, so I don't know how much was strategic and intentional vs opportunistic, but isolating people out in the 'burbs so every household needs a TON of stuff that it's not sharing with neighbors is a great way to sell shit.
(The rise of planned obsolescence in the 1950s is also tied into this, but that's a different discussion.)
Fast forward to today when it's way easier to just order something on Amazon, if you need it, than it is to borrow from a neighbor or shop local.
A big part of our technological drive has been to erase our awareness of interdependence. We don't like being vulnerable, and at its heart, "vulnerability" and "interdependence" are the same thing. We need others, and have the capacity to meet others' needs.
A giant corporation needs *all of us* in bulk to survive, but it doesn't necessarily need a particular community. (See: a corporation like Walmart comes into a town, local businesses dry up, Walmart eventually leaves.)
And as vital as internet community can be for people who are isolated in their offline lives, and/or are members of disadvantaged groups, it doesn't have the same level of interdependence as offline communities (and doesn't provide the same benefits).
So you end up with local communities that are dependent on corporations, but that corporations are quite willing to sacrifice. The same's not true for local businesses, obviously.
So, your local restaurant that is deeply interconnected and vulnerable to people in its local community has a good reason to feed people in the community who aren't being paid. Because it's PART of the community.
That's not to impugn the generosity of local restaurant owners--I think most of them are offering free meals out of compassion--but just to say that even the *awareness* of suffering, and urge to help directly, is heightened by being part of a community.
I also talked a while back about a book called Countrymen that delves into why 99% of Denmark's Jews survived the Holocaust, and a big part of it appears to be that sense of community and interconnectedness.
Point being: the internet is vital in getting information out, helping people organize and see larger patterns and access data and fight back against propaganda. But local, resilient, connected communities are vital in keeping people alive under murderous governments.
Getting to know your neighbors is vital to getting people through what's happening now. And part of that is shopping local--acknowledging and leaning into community interdependence and rejecting dependence on giant corporations.
And, like, look. Most of us aren't going to kick dependence on corporations any time soon. We can't afford it. The entire system is set up to ensure we can't afford it. I'm not here to shame anyone who shops at Target or eats at chain restaurants.
And hell, there are a lot of online small businesses (especially minority-owned ones!) that aren't part of your local community that are great to support. I'm just saying, where you can, develop relationships with local small businesses.
Support them, because they're a lot more likely to support you. Face-to-face, local, resilient community is vital, and we've lost a lot of it, and we need to rebuild it in areas that are designed to kill it. That, too, is resistance.
