Silverstar (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} wimpygimp) wrote,@ 2004-07-27 16:24:00 |
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The headline caught my eye...
In the latest edition of Real Change. Real Change is the local homeless newpaper, and so the headline "I wouldn't feed that to a dog" was intriguing since I had posted elsewhere about the lousy food the homeless get. No such luck. I guess maybe since the author is still homeless, he maybe didn't want to piss anybody that he might be dependent on a meal for off. So I sent them an email, thus:
Hello there,
If you are going to have a headline like that, I would like to find something of substance behind it. David Trotter's article was ever so nicey-nice. The worst thing he can say is the UGM aren't Christlike because if you don't listen to their bull..... er, I mean sermon, they want you to plunk down $3. If you had $3, you would go to McDonalds. I agree with him, but if that's the worst example he can come up with, you should have changed the headline.
From my experience of homelessness, (and I was in a nice, cushy transitional housing situation, not on the street) there is plenty of things to justify the headline. He should have gone to eat at the Aloha Inn.
Now, Flo Beauman and her staff do excellent work considering the ever-decreasing amounts of money they get, and I am ever so grateful I landed there. However, with that said, despite great efforts, the food was often despicable. And I am sure any food program that relies on donations from food banks is the same. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. There was the batch of some noodle dish I am sure was donated by some restaurant because it had been vastly oversalted. But poor, homeless people could choke it down. You were wise to check the bread for mold and the milk for souring before you proceeded too far as we got them when they were outdated. A lot of times the produce for the salads was mushy. We got it when it was old, too. There was the totally tasteless white salmon nobody would eat, and some kind of fish with a million bones. And then there were the grilled cheese sandwiches made with cinnamon bread.Then there were the "heart attack nights" when every thing was deep fried. These are but a few of the memorable meals we en....dured.
We got supper, usually for sure, but a couple of times, the kitchen never did open. You were really out of luck if that happened, and you didn't have any money or transportation to go get something to eat. If there were leftovers, they might be put out for lunch, but you couldn't count on it. Depends how good the supper was the night before. We had breakfast most Sundays, and supper. Bonus. You could get a packed lunch if you worked or went to school, but sometimes it had really weird stuff in it. Mushy, pulpy apples come to mind.
Not every meal was bad, some were downright delicious. Once we even got a catered supper from a classy restaurant. The holidays were always great, Flo would bust loose some money to make sure we had good meals. But for the most part, they had to make do with what came in from donations.
Trotter also missed the point about all the sweets that are out there. Grocery stores pull that stuff very quickly, usually the next day, and so it comes to food banks. Food banks are awash in it. We drowned in it at the Aloha. Sometimes it was all there was to eat for breakfast and lunch. This high fat, high cholesterol, high sugar diet tends to have people gaining weight. Flo has often threatened to make "gained tonnage" one of her annual statistics. Yes, it has little or no nutritional value, and I not sure which is worse, hunger or reactive hypoglycemia. Some doctors have even put their patients at the Aloha on prenatal vitamins, (and some of them were elderly men.) Just because you weigh 250 lbs doesn't mean you aren't hungry and malnourished. And yes, I wouldn't feed some of that stuff to my dog, but then again, she eats better than I do a lot of the time.
I know, I know, I'm not living in a cardboard box at the dump in some Mexican city, but I don't think THEY should have to eat garbage, and neither should I.
In the latest edition of Real Change. Real Change is the local homeless newpaper, and so the headline "I wouldn't feed that to a dog" was intriguing since I had posted elsewhere about the lousy food the homeless get. No such luck. I guess maybe since the author is still homeless, he maybe didn't want to piss anybody that he might be dependent on a meal for off. So I sent them an email, thus:
Hello there,
If you are going to have a headline like that, I would like to find something of substance behind it. David Trotter's article was ever so nicey-nice. The worst thing he can say is the UGM aren't Christlike because if you don't listen to their bull..... er, I mean sermon, they want you to plunk down $3. If you had $3, you would go to McDonalds. I agree with him, but if that's the worst example he can come up with, you should have changed the headline.
From my experience of homelessness, (and I was in a nice, cushy transitional housing situation, not on the street) there is plenty of things to justify the headline. He should have gone to eat at the Aloha Inn.
Now, Flo Beauman and her staff do excellent work considering the ever-decreasing amounts of money they get, and I am ever so grateful I landed there. However, with that said, despite great efforts, the food was often despicable. And I am sure any food program that relies on donations from food banks is the same. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. There was the batch of some noodle dish I am sure was donated by some restaurant because it had been vastly oversalted. But poor, homeless people could choke it down. You were wise to check the bread for mold and the milk for souring before you proceeded too far as we got them when they were outdated. A lot of times the produce for the salads was mushy. We got it when it was old, too. There was the totally tasteless white salmon nobody would eat, and some kind of fish with a million bones. And then there were the grilled cheese sandwiches made with cinnamon bread.Then there were the "heart attack nights" when every thing was deep fried. These are but a few of the memorable meals we en....dured.
We got supper, usually for sure, but a couple of times, the kitchen never did open. You were really out of luck if that happened, and you didn't have any money or transportation to go get something to eat. If there were leftovers, they might be put out for lunch, but you couldn't count on it. Depends how good the supper was the night before. We had breakfast most Sundays, and supper. Bonus. You could get a packed lunch if you worked or went to school, but sometimes it had really weird stuff in it. Mushy, pulpy apples come to mind.
Not every meal was bad, some were downright delicious. Once we even got a catered supper from a classy restaurant. The holidays were always great, Flo would bust loose some money to make sure we had good meals. But for the most part, they had to make do with what came in from donations.
Trotter also missed the point about all the sweets that are out there. Grocery stores pull that stuff very quickly, usually the next day, and so it comes to food banks. Food banks are awash in it. We drowned in it at the Aloha. Sometimes it was all there was to eat for breakfast and lunch. This high fat, high cholesterol, high sugar diet tends to have people gaining weight. Flo has often threatened to make "gained tonnage" one of her annual statistics. Yes, it has little or no nutritional value, and I not sure which is worse, hunger or reactive hypoglycemia. Some doctors have even put their patients at the Aloha on prenatal vitamins, (and some of them were elderly men.) Just because you weigh 250 lbs doesn't mean you aren't hungry and malnourished. And yes, I wouldn't feed some of that stuff to my dog, but then again, she eats better than I do a lot of the time.
I know, I know, I'm not living in a cardboard box at the dump in some Mexican city, but I don't think THEY should have to eat garbage, and neither should I.
