飢不擇食 / 饥不择食
jī bù zé shí
“hungry not choose food”
This is fairly obvious: when one’s hungry, one doesn’t get picky about the food.
The S.African woman I'd met at the bus stop said how she absolutely hates food wastage, saying how shocked she was at being turned down by homeless people when she offered them food. I told her my own experience of offering food to homeless people and being asked first of all, “What is it?”
I am aware that it could be that they were vegetarian/vegan or allergic to certain types of food. Of course, the more common reason is usually that they just don't like that kind of people (like Chinese people not liking cheese), but it doesn’t feel right that they should be so picky when they more likely than not don’t eat three meals a day. (Actually, I’ve just remembered here that a student of mine who helps out as a volunteer at a charity for the homeless said a lot of the people who go for the free meals there are often very choosy, wanting this instead of that. That was my own experience too, helping out at a church cooking breakfast for the homeless, with a woman in her 30s asking if she could have fruit yoghurt instead of the plain one being on offer that day.)
I added another account of mine about my first day picking up two children from school. The younger one was eating a fruit salad. It was one of those already cut up into bite-size chunks, in a plastic container about 4”x 4” costing at least ￡2 at the time (two years ago). The boy ate half of it, then binned the rest. I couldn’t believe my eyes: “Did I just see you bin the rest of the fruit salad?!?” He said, “I didn’t want anymore.” I told him he could’ve kept it for the next day. He shrugged his shoulders. It’s true that in the case of this 7-year-old, he was not homeless, his mother would take them to eat out regularly, and would leave her food rotting in the fridge. (Maybe that’s where he’d learned his bad habits from…)
(London, 2023, 2021)
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