When Sharing a Meal Becomes Criminal
More on the need to legalize sharing, with some guidance from poets old and new
I’ve had the words of John Donne in my head often as of late, that set of lines so classic they now mostly read as cliché:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
We don’t often ring bells for the dead anymore, so reflecting on these lines set me to wondering about the kinds of bells we do ring, at which point my thoughts drifted towards dismissal bells, though it’s been a long time since I’ve been in any kind of school setting. But my mind grabbed the notion of dismissal bells, attached it to the act of being laid off or let go, and then was filled with a cacophony of such bells ringing in recognition of these weeks of massive and haphazard federal firings. So if you’re looking for a new contemporary reading of Donne, there you go.
It seems, from doing a quick internet search on Donne in order to grab the above passage, that many a reader re-discovered him during the pandemic. His gesture in those particular lines towards mutual interdependence have, if I am honest, often felt a little abstract to me. But set in their broader context—a plague was sweeping through London and Donne himself was ill and potentially facing death when he wrote “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” in which they appear—they gain weight, and seem to have helped more than a few people face the hardest of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I think, though, that these lines have been calling to me in recent weeks not for any emotional resonance but because “No man is an island” sums up for me a whole body of literal physical, biological, and social truths. I take it to be an actual law of nature: we are not islands, but porous, interlocking beings. And I believe that unwanted, detrimental things happen when we fail to honor this truth. Despite that, an awful lot of people seem determined to do so in our current moment, be it ignoring such truths in everyday life (your average anti-housing NIMBYer) or stomping all over them at a systemic scale (your average corporate CEO).
When we pretend that we are islands, and act accordingly, the world starts to break down. One person on a distant island burning a single pile of coal is not so big a deal, but 8 billion people all doing the same thing is smog, lung disease, and climate disaster.
(Very few of those reading this are likely to directly burn coal in any way. Let me offer as a substitution the act of idling in your car, the sort of action that feels minor to most folks even as you are literally shooting poison out at anyone passing by. And when all of us do it, again: more smog, more lung disease, more climate disaster.)

Yet somehow it’s become culturally acceptable to pretend we are all islands when we know full well we live on a shared planet with those billions of people. As a result, a good many of our social and economic systems are set up to encourage us to make individualistically oriented decisions. Which we do, and then we wonder why so many others (or perhaps ourselves) don’t have basic needs met, or why the land around us is dying. Maybe, just maybe, we would get a different result if we tried a more collective approach.
This is part of what we emphasized in our January pieces, both titled “Sharing Will Shelter Us.” If you missed them: in the first I wrote about some of my own family’s experiences of sharing housing, and argued that perhaps the housing crisis would look rather different if we didn’t presume we all needed to live in little individual islands:
My own belief is that sharing more of the space that is presently walled off for individual private use is the kind of solution that diminishes multiple problems in one go. It takes what has been counted as a single unit of housing and magically doubles it. While doing so it creates the potential for relationship and connection, attacking the ‘loneliness epidemic’ so often touted by the mainstream press in recent years. Loneliness and lack of relationship can be major contributing factors to depression and addictive behaviors, which are themselves contributing factors to someone’s risk of losing housing. Round the circle of beneficial interplay rolls. For some, sharing may feel like giving something away, but it might also be precisely what saves your own life.
In the second, I discussed how this basic cooperative act of sharing housing has been made difficult by laws effectively making housemates or collective living illegal.
Housing isn’t the only domain in which humans seem intent on crafting laws that prohibit us from acting in accordance with our basic interdependence, be it physical or social. Consider all the preemption laws against different forms of plastic pollution that have sprung up around the country. Fracking bans have received the same treatment. In both cases, that individual or corporate action has collective impacts (like polluted waterways) is treated as trivial, and everyone suffers as a result. At the same time, cooperative action to halt those shared negative consequences is made illegal.
Perhaps more akin to the regulation on sharing housing are the many laws that regularly pop up to deny individuals or groups the freedom of simply sharing the most basic essentials, like food and water.
Some of these are directly political in nature, such as the increase in recent years of laws criminalizing the sharing water or snacks with those who are waiting to vote in discouragingly long lines. These “line-warming” bans cross party lines: yes, Georgia received attention for passing a new law in 2021, but New York already had one in place. (Haven’t seen it, but Georgia’s law gets worked into a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, where Larry David gets arrested for offering his water bottle to someone in line.) Almost all the existing laws have been challenged in court. The result has often been alteration of the specifics of such bans, rather than their complete overturning. You can get a summary of where some of these cases stood last year from Democracy Docket.

There have been similar efforts to criminalize sharing water with immigrants. You may have heard about the case of Scott Warren, a volunteer with the Arizona-based organization No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, who was charged with various felonies after sharing food and water with migrants in the desert. In this instance, creative enforcement by local law agencies, rather than specific state or local rules, led to Warren’s arrest. A jury ultimately failed to convict. Still, Border Patrol routinely destroys water and other supplies left to prevent unnecessary deaths in the borderlands and No More Deaths often receives threats of arrest even when their humanitarian efforts involve transporting groups into Border Patrol custody.
Elsewhere, we’ve seen Food Not Bombs consistently in court as cities prohibit them from sharing meals with others, as in Ft. Lauderdale—though the courts ultimately ruled that the meals were protected acts of free speech, and that the city’s ordinance requiring permission to give meals in public didn’t withstand scrutiny as it offered no guidance on how to secure that permission. That ruling came some seven years after volunteers were initially arrested. Consider needing to take the better part of a decade of showing up to court because you thought sharing meals with your neighbors rather than letting people go hungry was a good idea.
Meanwhile, a church in Brookings, OR continues to fight the city’s attempt to limit how many meals a week they can serve at their soup kitchen, and to restrict other services they offer as well. While the church received a partial victory in 2024 (three years after the city instituted its new rules), the matter remains ongoing.
And in tandem with increased criminalization of homelessness after last summer’s Supreme Court decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, cities are testing their ability to criminalize those offering support to people without shelter. Fremont, California made national headlines this month with an ordinance containing language against “aiding” or “abetting” those camping in the city. City officials promise it won’t be abused and argue that it doesn’t in fact prevent providing aid, but legal experts disagree, saying that “as the law is written, distributing camping equipment, food and water could be a violation, as could providing legal advice to homeless people living in encampments.” The California Homeless Union is already preparing a legal challenge. (The Washington Post has good coverage but a paywall; see also CalMatters.)

All of these laws and their often select enforcement are at the state or more local levels, which makes them an easier (not easy, but easier) target for the average person looking to make change than the mess currently happening at the federal level, where billionaires are playing like toddlers in taking apart the complicated apparatus that has been built to help us figure out how to share and distribute and do things together as a nation of hundreds of millions of people. (Overall I actually don’t mind the shrinking of the importance of the federal bureaucracy. But I take it for granted that Trump and Musk intend to privatize and profit from the ostensible cuts they are making, because much of the work—say, maintenance of the electrical power grid—is actually necessary and will need to continue.)
Insisting on our desire to do things collectively, and to share freely with one another in recognition of our interdependence, is an important and necessary mode for engaging in political resistance in this moment. It’s also what will make it possible for many of us to make it through the upcoming years and all the political turmoil we can surely expect to continue. It’s strategic, then, to work preemptively to ensure we aren’t fighting off jail time or heavy fees while engaging in the most basic acts of caring for one another. It will look different in every municipality or state, but there’s almost certainly work to be done where you are to keep sharing and mutual aid legal.
We started this piece with a poet, so let’s end with one too.
I had the great pleasure this past week of seeing writer Ross Gay read in-person from his Book of Delights at the library in Medford. If you’re unfamiliar, the book is the result of a daily practice he kept for a full year, writing short pieces about what he found delightful each day.
One of the “essayettes” he read aloud that night is “The Sanctity of Trains,” in which he offers his observations of the practice on Amtrak trains of leaving one’s bag and belongings unattended without much obvious concern, say while heading off to the restroom or a more extended trip to the cafe car. How just about everyone does it—despite or contrary to how they typically act in other public spaces—and how everything is generally fine, their belongings left untouched. Gay concludes the essay like this:
I suppose I could spend time theorizing how it is that people are not bad to each other, but that’s really not the point. The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, of subtle, caretaking. Holding open doors. Offering elbows at crosswalks. Letting someone else go first. Helping with the heavy bags. Reaching what’s too high, or what’s been dropped. Pulling someone back to their feet. Stopping at the car wreck, at the struck dog. The alternating merge, also known as the zipper. This caretaking is our default mode and it’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.
Caretaking, sharing of ourselves, is basic to being human. We are not islands. It’s always a lie that convinces us to act or believe otherwise. Always.
Thanks for reading Unsettling.
Until next time,
Meg