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thebiscuiteternal · 3 months ago

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Could you explain more about the WIC shrinkflation issue? I was advised to apply for the program and now I'm worried about the complications.

Sure thing.

For starters, while WIC is a national program, states can and do implement certain aspects of it differently, so disclaimer that this is coming from a Tennessee viewpoint.

Okay, so.

WIC (Women Infants Children) vouchers are designed to help make sure that babies and toddlers are getting enough nutrition during early development. It usually runs alongside food stamps, but sometimes someone might be eligible for food stamps, but not WIC, or vise versa.

For infants -> pre-solid-food toddlers, it covers formula and baby food, and for pregnant mothers and/or toddlers eating solid foods, it usually covers fruits, vegetables, and certain staple foods.

WIC vouchers are very specific about what you can get with them, especially when it comes to baby food. They will label

Brands (Usually Gerber, Beech Nut, or other approved affiliate brands)

Formula varieties (usually high-vitamin)

Food type (Typically no mixed flavors, i.e. you can get jars of spinach and jars of turkey, but not a jar of blended spinach and turkey. This also trips up a lot of first-timers.)

Age (Baby foods typically come in development stages, so the vouchers will usually say whether you can have Stage 1, stage 2, etc)

Packaging (Whether it has to be glass jars or you can substitute with the mini plastic tubs. Usually pouch foods are not allowed)

Number (i.e. 12 jars of pureed meats or what have you)

Weight (boxes of baby cereals like oatmeal or rice, the size of the formula cans, or the size of the jars)

Some foods will specify whether or not it has to be organic

(Note: The local WIC offices used to send a pamphlet with the vouchers that included pictures of particular packaging to help ESL recipients, but with companies changing the look of their packaging too frequently, this has stopped in a lot of places.)

So, already a lot to look out for, yeah? And weight is usually where things get fucked. As I said in the previous post, companies (especially Gerber) have a really irritating habit where they will up and change the actual weight of the product without informing the WIC office of the change in time for the next round of vouchers (if they bother to inform them at all, instead of the WIC office having to contact them due to complaints). But of course the store knows about the change due to their inventory programs.

As a result, you'll either get:

A: The parent who has already been through this shit and now tries to verify the labels and is upset because they can't find the box with the correct ounce amount anymore (because it no longer exists).

B: The parent who hasn't been through this shit yet and grabbed the same box they got the month previously and is unaware it's now the wrong box until the register refuses to apply it to their monthly voucher.

C: The cashier who has to deal with this day in and day out and is just as frustrated as the parents, especially if they don't have enough experience to know this is the companies' fault, not the parents'.

I should also note that this has been a problem for a long time. It was already happening back when I was still working. But at least back then, you could count on at least 8 months (or even a couple of years) between sizing incidents, whereas Post-Covid, it's accelerated to practically a fuckup (or more) a month. If this month, it's the cereal, next month, it's the formula, etc. A neverending carousel of corporate bullshit. And the companies don't care, because they've already gotten their government subsidy for participating in the program at all, and if the parents have to pay out of pocket for the things the vouchers no longer cover that month, that's just more profit for the company.

#long post #government assistance programs #corporate fuckery #sorry if this is a little rambly #it's a lot #shrinkflation #price gouging

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sarahowritesostucky · 2 months ago

Text

📖"The Commander's Omega"

Rated: Explicit

Pairing: Steve Rogers x Bucky Barnes

Tags: alpha/omega, dystopia, sex slavery, forced breeding, mutilation, rape, corporal punishment, fascism, hurt/comfort, power imbalance, mpreg, age gap (38/23), mentions of abortion, miscarriage

Summary: After years of a mass infertility crisis, the United States is overtaken by religious fanatics, and Bucky Barnes finds himself thrust into a brutal world of survival. When he's discovered to be fertile, he's forced to serve as a vessel: a caste of omegas who bear children for the political elite.

Chapter V. Shredder

Story Masterlist

Before:

Bucky rushes to the bathroom when the cramps get too painful, sure that something bad—he doesn’t know what, just something—is going to happen. He pulls down his pants and sits on the toilet, hand pressed against his belly. He’s barely started to swell. It’s only noticeable to him because he was always in such good shape before. Twenty weeks is finally enough to make him look pregnant, at least when he has his clothes off.

“Ah!” He cries out, trying to stifle the sound as pain flashes through him. He can’t let the Putnams hear, he can’t. His insides hurt in a way that they’re definitely not supposed to, and Bucky feels scared. Even though he’s almost twenty two-years old and it’s ridiculous, he wishes that his mom was here with him. She’d know what to do. And even if she didn’t, he’d still be with his mom, not all alone in the Putnams' cold basement bathroom.

He removes his hand from his stomach and reaches between his legs with trembling fingers. When he brings them back forward to look, there’s fresh blood. Bucky whimpers.

Red. He’s so fucking sick of red.

It takes almost two hours, but eventually Bucky’s body pushes out the baby—though “baby” is a strong word for it. It’s small and bloody, the size of a lemon. And it’s shaped wrong. Bucky catches it in his hands before it can fall into the toilet water. Something about that just seems so wrong. He can’t let it go in there, even if it’s just going to be buried or thrown away in the end. For now it’s his, and he’ll treat it the way it deserves.

“Hey,” he whispers tearily to it, once the cramping’s gone away and he’s just left cold and messy and alone. He pulls his pants back up and lies down on the cool bathroom tile, using the bathmat as a sort of pillow. In his hand he cups the fetus, mournful in a way he never thought he could be for something he never wanted in the first place. “M’sorry,” he tells it. “I tried.”

He really had. Having a baby is the only way for a criminally-convicted omega like him to avoid being sent away. And he’s only got five years to do it. After eight months with the Putnams, he’d been excited to get pregnant—Not because he’d wanted to be violated and knocked-up and forced to give away a child, but because it gave him hope that he might be able to avoid the toxic wasteland of the colonies. If he can’t produce a baby for Gilead, that’s where he’ll go.

Eventually, he has to gather the courage to get himself up off the bathroom floor and cleaned off. He unrolls a bunch of toilet paper and lays the fetus on it, not knowing what else to do. Then he runs a bath and gets in, and watches as the water turns pink.

Downstairs, Commander and Mrs. Putnam are having their Sunday morning breakfast. The table’s covered with tureens of sausages and eggs and waffles—more food than the two of them will ever eat. Once they’re done, the household staff will get to split what’s left. Bucky walks into the dining room to the sight of the Commander on his tablet and Mrs. Putnam pouring herself more orange juice. He waits quietly by the doorway to be noticed.

“Ofwarren,” Mrs. Putnam says when she notices him. “Good morning! Blessed be the fruit.” Her face lights up with a smile for Bucky, something it’s only done since she found out that he’s pregnant.

Bucky can’t bring himself to speak, nerves twisting his guts into knots.

As if he senses this, Commander Warren looks up from his tablet. “Did you want to take some breakfast from the table?” he asks amicably.

Ever since Bucky’s pregnancy was discovered, he’s been allowed to eat as much as he wants, whenever he wants. No more waiting for prescribed meal times. It’s a privilege that he’s going to miss. “No,” he whispers. “No, thank you. I um, I have something I have to tell you.” God, he’s never been so nervous in his life. What will they do to him?

Both the Putnams are paying attention to him now. They still have pleasant sets to their faces. Not for long. “What is it?” Mrs. Putnam asks.

Bucky has to try several times before he can force enough air past his vocal cords. “I … I lost the baby.”

Complete, utter silence. Commander Warren sets his tablet down, eyes immediately flicking to his wife. Mrs. Putnam has tightened her fingers around her orange juice glass so hard that Bucky fears it might break.

“I’m so sorry!” he says hurriedly, because he is. God, he is! He’s scared shitless right now. “I-I didn’t—”

“Get out of here,” Mrs. Putnam gasps. She sounds like the air’s been punched out of her. When Bucky doesn’t immediately move, her eyes darken and she smacks the table, rattling the silverware. “Get out!”

Bucky turns and runs from the room.

A servant comes down to the basement later, to take the fetus away. Bucky never does find out what they do with it.

After:

Bucky takes to spending the evenings with Steve in his office. It’s nice. As the weather gets colder, Steve makes a habit of keeping a fire going in the fireplace, and each night, Bucky pulls one of the couches a little closer to the hearth to read. He goes through several science fiction novels before he finally has the courage to take down a book about politics—old politics, from how the world used to be, but still interesting. It’d been written by some liberal pundit, and Bucky finds himself smirking once or twice while he reads.

Steve looks up from where he’s working at his desk, smiling at Bucky when he notices him. “What’s funny?” he asks.

Bucky tenses up. “What? Nothing.” Steve quirks an eyebrow, and Bucky shifts uncomfortably. “It’s just a joke in here,” he excuses, indicating the book. He doesn’t mention how the joke is at the expense of Christian nationalists. The book had been written back when The Faithful were still worth making fun of. “It’s nothing,” he says again, and averts his eyes back to his reading.

Steve sighs. Bucky hears the desk chair roll out, and then Steve is coming over to sit next to him on the couch. He doesn’t get too close, which Bucky is grateful for (Commander Warren would’ve been demanding blow jobs by now). But so far, Steve has proven to be about as different from Commander Warren as a man could be. “Bucky,” Steve says. “I wish you wouldn’t be nervous of me.”

Bucky’s eyes flick over, not quite making it up to Steve’s face. “Sorry,” he murmurs.

“No, that’s not—” Steve huffs, frustrated. “You don’t need to apologize.”

Bucky has to cut himself off from immediately saying ‘sorry’ again. Old habits. He sets the book over the arm of the couch, saving his spot. “I’m not used to this,” he admits.

“What do you mean?”

He purses his lips, still unable to meet Steve’s eyes. “I dunno. Just … You don’t get mad at me about stuff, okay? You let me come in here and, and read.” He says ‘read’ in a whisper, like it’s something awful, not to be uttered aloud. “You eat meals at the table with everyone else, and you talk to me. And you haven’t—” he cuts off uncomfortably.

“What?” Steve cants his head. “I haven’t what?”

Bucky shakes his head. “You’re just different. I don’t know what to expect with you.” He nearly jumps when Steve’s hand comes over and envelops his own on top of the couch cushion. It’s large and warm, and the simple contact makes goosebumps prick to the surface of Bucky’s skin.

“You can expect to be treated like a human being,” Steve tells him. “Because that’s what you are.”

Bucky winces. “M’not used to that either.”

“I’dve hoped you could trust me a little better by now,” Steve chides, eyeing up Bucky’s book pointedly. “I told you my household is different.”

“Yeah but you never explained what that means,” Bucky snaps. “I mean, that could mean anything. You know?”

“What do you want to ask me, then?” Steve challenges. “You can ask questions, Bucky.”

“Well aren’t you—” he cuts himself off, shocked at the reckless question he almost lets slip through his lips.

“Aren’t I what?” Steve presses, staring him down. “Ask me, Bucky. Ask the question.”

Bucky looks him in the eye, confused and scared, unable to get the words out for a few more long seconds. Then, finally, he breathes, “... Aren’t you a True Believer?” Steve gets very still, his expression like stone, and for one terrible, all-consuming instant, Bucky is sure that he’s signed his own death warrant. “I’m sorry!” he blurts, sure that he’s finally done it; he’s finally said the thing that’s going to get him executed, or sent off to the col—

“I’m not.”

He falters, his mouth still open from the next preemptive apology he’d been about to fling out. “What?” he says weakly, trying to figure out how to put “I’m not” into a context that makes any kind of sense—because what Steve’s just said could get him arrested, could get him put to death, and Bucky and all the rest of his household reassigned to another Commander. But fraught seconds tick by, and he comes up with nothing, the “I’m not” hanging in the air between them like a baited hook with no fish, like a noose waiting to be filled. “S-steve?” he whispers. “I don’t understand. You’re n—”

“Not a True Believer,” Steve finishes for him, nodding somberly. He’s deathly serious, Bucky realizes, and he’s looking at Bucky in a way that says he’s completely aware of the vulnerable position in which he’s just put himself, by admitting it. He watches Bucky appraisingly. “And I get the feeling you’re not, either.”

Bucky doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t have the courage that Steve does. He can’t just … just make himself say it. Not out loud. “But you’re a Commander,” he blurts. “How did you get to be a Commander if you weren’t … if you aren’t a—”

“I worked my way up,” Steve says. “I joined the Sons of Jacob before congress was assassinated. I pretended.”

Bucky can hardly believe what he’s hearing. Steve is admitting to treason right now, and he’s admitting it to Bucky. “But why?”

Steve’s expression turns guarded as he measures out his words. “Because it was my mission,” he says. “It still is.”

“Mission?”

He nods. “We knew something big was in the works, just not how big. I didn’t know—” He cuts himself off, looking pained. “We were put in place to infiltrate the Party of The Faithful. To assess the threat, to try and stop whatever they were planning.”

“We?” Bucky echoes. “Who is ‘we’?”

Steve shakes his head. “I can’t tell you any more, I’m sorry."

Too late, Bucky wants to say. Steve’s told him too much already. “So you’re just telling me this? That you’re some kind of a … a what? A sleeper agent?” He scowls. “You and what army?”

“It doesn’t take an army,” Steve snaps, surprising Bucky with the quiet vitriol in his voice.

Bucky blinks at him, sees the regret flash across his face, and realizes something. “Natasha and Sam,” he breathes, clocking the slight widening of Steve’s pupils. “And Clint, and Sharon?” Steve’s lips thin but he nods, and Bucky exhales hugely. “Well shit.”

“It’s okay, Buck. We’re very careful.”

He scoffs, feeling dazed. “So, all five of you,” he says weakly. He can’t imagine what Steve and just a few other people could possibly achieve, what they could possibly do to overthrow the whole regime. Gilead is the new United States. A fledgling nation, sure, but with all the same resources that its predecessor had, and more: Weapons, infrastructure, military, a secret police, an extensive surveillance apparatus. From what little Bucky’s been able to garner these past few years, the only states remaining free of it all are Alaska and the West Coast coalition.

He sits there with Steve in thick, uncomfortable silence for a moment, the crackling of the fire in the hearth the only sound to accompany his racing thoughts.

“Buck?” Steve says gently. “Are you going to be okay?”

One glance up at the alpha’s face is all it takes for Bucky to realize what it is he’s really asking: are you going to keep this to yourself? “Yeah,” Bucky says. “Yeah, I’m good.” He offers Steve what he hopes is a reassuring look. “I’m glad.”

Steve’s shoulders relax, and he offers Bucky a tight-lipped smile that is commiserating, if not altogether pleasant. “Okay. Good.”

“Good.”

Steve pats him on the knee and then gets up from the couch to return to his desk on the other side of the office. He resumes working on his computer, and Bucky picks up his book to resume reading. Or at least he tries to, but the words on the pages blur together meaninglessly. All he can think about now is how Steve—his new Commander, the man who owns him, whom Bucky’s been renamed after—is a member of the resistance.

Steve somehow gets a hold of Bucky’s medical records. He brings it up in discussion on another night spent together in the library. “You had a baby?” he blurts out, from over at his desk.

Bucky’s eyes shoot up. “What?”

Steve guiltily indicates the folder he’s been reading through. “They gave me your medical records.”

Bucky frowns. “Oh.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to invade your privacy.” Bucky snorts, and Steve flusters and clears his throat. “I just … Well, I’m supposed to schedule a doctor’s appointment for you every three months.”

“Oh. Right.” Bucky remembers that the Putnams had done that as well. It was how he’d confirmed he was pregnant in the first place. “Um, I miscarried,” he mumbles.

Steve’s expression dissolves into something too close to pity for Bucky’s liking. “I’m so sorry, Bucky.”

Bucky shrugs from over his book. “I wasn’t that far along.”

With the fertility crisis being what it is, he’s known a lot of other omegas to miscarry far later on in their pregnancies, or to give birth to non-viable babies that die gasping and shriveled soon after birth. Just the other week, all the neighborhood vessels had been escorted to OfJoseph’s house to see her through the labor and delivery ritual. But once the caretakers pulled the baby out and got a look at it, the fancy party that’d been set up for Commander and Mrs. Lowe in the downstairs parlor had ended in stricken silence and tears.

“It’s not like I was attached or anything,” Bucky says. “And it needed to die.”

Steve balks. “What?”

“It was a shredder. You could tell. Things weren’t … growing right.” Bucky averts his eyes back down to his book, hating to remember. If he’d carried to term, it just would’ve been declared an ‘unbaby’ and gotten rid of. “It was better that it died,” he says.

Steve doesn’t say anything.

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