Recently, while staying at my brother's in Pennsylvania, I was in a grocery store; a proper grocery store. We don't have a "proper" grocery store in my neighborhood; it's what I call a "ghetto grocery:" small, ugly, lit badly and carrying an assortment of odd products (t-shirts on a shelf up front?).

When I am in "real" grocery stores I tend to be intimidated and a little sickened - and perhaps a bit high. The high comes from thinking about all the things I could buy and wanting to have and eat thousands of products in the store. The intimidation and nausea comes from the sheer quantity of products on the shelves and the knowledge that not all of them will be bought and that perfectly edible foods will be discarded or go bad because they weren't bought within the time frames of their legally appointed freshness.

How much new food - from cereal to packaged meat - ends up thrown away in this country because it doesn't get bought? How many people could that feed, both here and abroad? That is the sickening part of the equation. I once heard immigrants describing their first experiences of American grocery stores; a woman from Russian talked about breaking down at the sheer abundance after having come from such a lack (and maybe being aware that said lack still persisted even as this bonanza was happening here).

I think anyone would be nauseous with the cognitive dissonance of awareness of the sickening glut of food on offer here while at the same time so many people struggle for even the basics.

So what does all of this have to do with the lottery? Well, two things:

1. As I stood in the cracker/cookie/bread/cheese/butter/milk aisle of that grocery store, I thought about all those people without and wondered what a joy it would be to just open the store to hungry/needy families and say "Take what you want" and foot the bill yourself.

(As I think about it, the actuality of it might - or probably would - be ugly, with people racing through the store like wild animals and possibly fighting over items. I still like the idea in theory.)

2. A couple of years ago I visited my uncle and aunt in Texas and marveled at the Great Wall of cereal boxes in their local Kroger. At that time I thought about creating a project whereby people bought up all that cereal and then chartered a plane to fly it over to some needy/hungry country in Africa; to a refugee camp in Ethiopia, perhaps; something like that. The cereal would be a good dry food that wouldn't spoil easily and would be tasty and (supposedly) full of nutrition (according to the manufacturers).

(Of course, the food charity community has come up with Plumpy Nut, a nutritional paste that is apparently cheap to produce and provides all the nutrition a child needs. Maybe it's just a case of getting it to the right people.)