Had a guy in one of my grad school courses who always found a way to shoehorn in the fact that he’d summited Everest not just once, but TWICE! 🙄 Climbing Everest just strikes me as rich person bragging rights, and it isn’t even that impressive given that a lot of the people who do it pay porters to carry their supplies and dig their latrines.
deleted by creator
Food bank in the US. Food drives and individual donations of food don’t really mean shit to food banks and they result in overwhelmingly low quality food. Your local food bank isn’t hurting for your expired cans of coconut milk or your forgotten boxes of Kraft mac & cheese. Sugary junk and expired food will be sorted out and tossed. Most staple foods at food banks are distributed by the federal government or purchased by the food bank. Most other foods are donated in large volume by supermarkets and manufacturers. What food banks really need from you is donations of money, not food.
Another thing about food banks is that some supermarkets and manufacturers abuse them to dump their spoiled, expired or overproduced goods and get a tax write-off on them. I worked at a medium sized food bank that would throw away multiple pallets of sugary bakery items from Walmart every day because they didn’t meet our nutrition guidelines and Walmart had been told repeatedly not to donate them, but they did it anyway for the tax write-off. Ever walk into a Walmart and wonder how they can have so much bakery crap on display and sell it before it expires? Yeah, most of that stuff will be marked down multiple times and then trucked to the local food bank where it will be thrown away. Trader Joe’s also does this with their returns (most of their donations are unusable). Whole Foods on the other hand is really amazing about donating tons of high quality stuff on a daily basis.
I feel the same about Paris, there’s nothing romantic or magical about it. It had easily the worst air pollution I’ve ever seen in Europe (but I understand that’s improved a lot in the last decade), it’s overcrowded and smells like sewage everywhere. Not a place I’d ever care to visit again. That said I use a number of French services and I really like a lot of their cultural exports, and I’d love to explore other areas of France.