A writer who looks and sounds young, and actually uses the name Lucky, has started to notice some things about American foodways. Plough, to which someone has kindly subsidized a subscription for me, and Christianity Today, to which someone else would be welcome to do the same, have received the benefit of her insights from volunteer work at a free food line.
E.g.: When she set out a home-cooked meal for free food diners, the chili and cornbread disappeared fast, but nobody touched the seltzer water.
Oh my word, I thought, reading her article. Seltzer water? Do people still drink that? Maybe in the Northeast where the tradition seemed to be concentrated? I hadn't thought about seltzer water in years but I do have memories of a grocery store I frequented in college where nobody complained if I bought a cup of some hot or cold drink, I think for twenty cents, and sipped it while I read a paperback book. Seltzer was in the cold drink machine. I liked the mildly bitter taste and the idea of drinking something straight out of the Golden Age of Radio. I didn't lug drinks home, and I liked lots of other drinks better, but...if I had ever been at a dinner party and seen the other drinks disappearing, I would have been the one to ask for seltzer water. Not that that's ever happened. People know that you don't find a person who likes seltzer water in every crowd. I don't think I've ever gone to a dinner party where it was offered.
But no. People wanted soda pop, not seltzer, at the free food line. Some of them wanted the little cheap cups of cut-up fruit packed in syrup, too, rather than whole apples. They wanted the Wonder Bread, not the crusty, artisanal (but equally bleached and denatured) Whole Foods loaves. They tended generally to prefer everything Lucky considered yucky.
And it's so much cheaper, you can claim that more people have swallowed something or other, if you just hold your nose and buy the tacky corporate products poor people probably prefer after all...
Some poor people. I think of the summer when Dad's letters to everybody, up to and including President Nixon, seemed to have been heeded. Dad no longer had a job packing up horrible generic free-issue foodoid stuff that most poor people didn't bother to claim, hiring a taxi to haul boxes of it home for us to try to use up, because poor people now received food stamps they could use to buy normal food. This was a clear gain for the poor people, and, that first summer, when we moved across the continent in between Dad's last day distributing powdered egg \and his first class in organic farming, we definitely qualified as poor people. Mother took those food stamps into the Safeway and picked out whole-grain flour, fresh almonds, El Molino carob powder, Sue Bee honey until she could get a darker and rawer kind from a local farm, and--while I checked out the stacks of Cheerios and Apple Jacks and even more sugary, kid-appeal cereals--oldfashioned oats and the rest of the ingredients for her infamous granola. This was before "granola" cuisine had been commercialized, when if anything identified as "healthy" happened to taste good somebody would always score a point by putting it in a blender with an equal volume of nutritional yeast. "Healthy" food was supposed to represent a victory of the will over any natural appetite. When she was paying her own money Mother tempered her urges to find out whether more whole wheat and nutritional yeast would make us all healthier, but when she had those food stamps she indulged in yogurt, blackstrap, and whey.
"Well...but...teachers in summertime are not exactly typical poor people." No? In what way? Apart from the Daddy-moved-out-so-Mommy-could-collect-handouts-as-a-single-mother cliche, the people in America who have least are a diverse lot. They have diverse foodways. Some of them read magazines, go to restaurants when they can, and will spend their food stamps on arugula and artisanal bread for a week and then eat supermarket rejects and mission kitchen soup for the rest of the month. A type that used to be more common than it is now were frugal ethnic cooks. There is, of course, the type who was basically brought up by the teevee as a child and who still seems to think the essential food groups are candy, chips, cheese, and cola drinks. There's also the type, typically young, ambitious, underpaid, and in debt, who pick pomegranates and quinoa as long as someone else is paying, oatmeal and bologna sandwiches when they're paying.
My point? If you're going to hand out free food, it never hurts to offer poor people choices. The "It's a free handout, so they should be grateful for whatever dumpster specials they get" attitude may be typical of government social workers but has no place in anything identified with Christianity. Trying to eat whatever is set before them is a very bad habit for human beings at any level of income and should never be encouraged.
What is "healthy" food? It's different for every body. Some people thrive on cow's milk products even into old age; some bodies reject cow's milk even in infancy. Louisa May Alcott wrote about people for whom whole grains, especially brown bread, were medicine; for me, as an Irish-American celiac, they're poison. Some people digest meat; some don't. Vicki Griffin, whose book Grandma Bonnie Peters prized and recommended, used to like to contrast a breakfast of whole-wheat toast and an apple with a breakfast of Fritos and Mountain Dew: "Which do you think would prepare a child to focus and learn at school?" I don't know which child she had in mind, but if I, as an adult, wanted to accomplish anything that morning, of those two options I'd take Fritos and Mountain Dew.
Does that mean I eat Fritos and Mountain Dew for breakfast every day? Of course not. I like picking breakfast out of the yard. This time of year, my favorite breakfast is violet blossoms. In winter I like citrus fruit for breakfast. In summer and autumn the orchard progresses through strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, cherries, blackberries, peaches, apples, pawpaws, persimmons, and nuts. Leftovers from dinner are also a good breakfast. I try to buy Cheerios or Barbara's Puffins every few weeks to show support for those companies' efforts to deliver glyphosate-free cereal. When I buy Fritos, I think of them as more of a dinner item, to be layered with beans, tomatoes, onions, maybe meat...or as road food that's more likely to be available, early in the morning, than other things I could eat for breakfast. As far as celiacs are concerned, hotel "breakfasts" are not food.
Glyphosate has reversed what we need to think of as "healthy food," though. A reliable rule used to be "The closer it looks to the way it grew out of the soil, the healthier." Fruit was always better than sugar; green vegetables were always better than red meat; and anything was probably better than soda pop, which often isn't even made with sugar as we know it. No more. Instead of "How many vitamins and minerals does it contain?" we now ask, first, "How much poison does it contain?" If food contains glyphosate, the vitamins and minerals don't matter; the body can't absorb them anyway. Instead of "How much nutrition am I getting from food?" the health question about food becomes "How sick is it likely to make me, right away?" Sugar is definitely better than grapes or berries, meat is better than green leafy vegetables unless you know the vegetables grew a long way from any spray poisoning site such as a public road, and soda pop is better than a big juicy salad.
What happens, even after we get that total ban on glyphosate we need, to the generation who grew up with physical experience telling them, "Don't even look at apples if you want to get anything done in the morning. 'Wheat' sounds like 'week,' which is how long it's likely to make you feel sick and weak. Spinach just might kill you"? I don't know, but the adults who let that situation arise have a lot to answer for. Especially the ones who allowed the label "certified organic" to be placed on glyphosate-drenched foodlike-pieces-of-toxic-waste.
Chips alone aren't a very satisfying meal, but many's the meal I've made of peanuts, salted or chocolate-covered. When I was blogging from the cafe, that was my usual diet. Peanuts in some form, coffee, and then some chickweed, or maybe dandelion shoots or wild garlic, when I came home for the night. It got monotonous, but it was preferable to eating all the glyphosate-loaded foodlike-toxic-waste other people were eating and being sick on.
If you are one of the people who are still trying to feed other people things that you think ought to be good healthy food, you need to wake up. Pay attention to the patterns with which other people reject your offerings. A few specific things, like seltzer water, just aren't very popular; you might need to accept that you like these things because you have peculiar taste. Other things, like cow's milk, wheat, corn, cheese, and egg, may be rejected because some people are not built to digest them as food--for each solid food this is a minority of humankind, for cow's milk it's the majority. Other things have become increasingly unpopular since 2009 because, whatever they're told by other people who don't want to believe it, people find that they feel worse when they eat these things; these are the foods-made-into-toxic-waste-by-glyphosate, You may be able to enjoy these things as food either because you are less sensitive to glyphosate than other people are, or because you are deeper in denial of how foods actually affect you; either way, one important reason why people now tend to reject "healthy" food is that so many things that look like what used to be healthy food are now toxic waste.
Many people like celery. I love celery. It contains a natural painkiller. I used to eat a whole celery stalk, stem by stem, when troubled by the intense pain of viral arthritis. One of the things that make celery special is how easily it wicks up substances like food coloring...or like glyphosate. What now grows from celery seed, unfortunately, is toxic waste. Don't expect anyone to eat that.
Strawberries. Who doesn't like strawberries? /Strawberries are another former food crop that soak up glyphosate like little sponges. Unless you can be absolutely sure about where they grow, strawberries can no longer be regarded as edible.
Feeding people feels as if it ought to be a good thing to do What is good can sometimes become the enemy of what is better. Sharing the food you have, and regard as edible, with anyone who wants to eat it, is good. Supporting other people's food choices is better. Perhaps our current situation, in which it's become so hard to find things that other people will even agree are food, was meant to help us learn an important truth about helping people, namely: Food--of some sort--is not all that hard for people to get in North America. It never was and, unless we listen to Chinese and European Socialists, it never will be. When money is tight, people get some benefit from free food, and there's nothing wrong with offering your own surplus food to anyone who wants to eat it. Once in a while, usually after a natural disaster, we still even find ourselves in situations where a large number of people can actually benefit from just having food offered to them. More often what people really want, what people even need for the purpose of recovering from whatever level of poverty they are on, may not be food at all.
It would be pleasant if we could just give people the intangible gifts that people generally agree are more important to us than material gifts. But that's not the world God made. If we say, even to ourselves, "I'm going to give X the gift of love," what X actually gets is more likely to resemble the effects of food poisoning. If you do sincerely love or respect or admire X, that's all very well, especially because your sincere feelings will probably keep you away from the conceited idea that you can give other people your good will as a gift.
What would be better is to ask X what X wants, and obey the instruction God gives you through X's answer. If you are very lucky you might be able to get X to let you pay for the food X wants, or even share the experience of cooking whatever X believes is good for X to eat. More likely the assignment you volunteered to receive won't be so simple. What X wants might be something you are genuinely unable to provide, or it might be something you don't want to provide. It is worth spending some time meditating to get a clear understanding of which. If you can honestly say "I don't want to provide illegal drugs because I don't want to be involved in illegal activity," or "I don't want to provide a new car because I can't afford it," all is well. For too many Christians the truth would be something like "I don't want to stop poking food at X and invest serious money in X's idea, because I never dared to invest money in my ideas and I don't want to admit that X might have a better idea or be more determined than I was, or am." In which case the clear guidance from God is to pull down that vanity and support X's idea. Maybe you once had an idea that might have been as good as X's, and then again maybe it's only vanity making you want to believe you did. Having more than someone else has does not make you "better" than that person. It may well mean that God has allowed you to be more comfortable than that person because God knows how inferior to that person you always have been and will be. To face this kind of painful truth and pull down your vanity might be the best thing of all for you.
"But," someone may protest, "I love to cook. I've always taken that as a sign that I was called to help in the church's free food kitchen. My only doubt is about this question of whether we should try to provide 'better' food, or merely more food."
Part of the answer to that question may be that we are led to do this kind of thing in groups so that there can be variation. The farmer may feel moved to give prime-quality food; the person who loves to cook may feel moved to concoct a good medium-grade dish; a teenager who is growing fast enough to need junk calories may feel moved to contribute pastries and chips. A rule like "Each person can fill one bag per week with whatever person chooses from whatever is available" might ensure a good mix, at least.
There is no perfect solution to all the possible problems involved in running a mission kitchen. Some relatives of mine run the local food pantry. They solicit, and regularly receive, donations of the kinds of food that seem to be most useful to most people, plus donations of what people have, or feel moved to give. Each month, each person who takes home the bags of food provided gets a nice mix of "staple" foods like dry rice and "treat" foods like Snapple. And each month, along roads leading away from the food pantry, you can find a selection of foods poor people are likely to reject. Each food item can potentially be a problem. Dry rice is good for people who have a way to cook it; some don't. Peanut butter is good for people who are not allergic to peanuts; some are. Christians who are determined to give large amounts of food to large numbers of people just have to accept the fact that, if people did not choose every food item for themselves, some food will be wasted.
would have gleefully called a Guy Thing. It was about driving extremely fast, and banging extremely large arnd expensive pieces of metal together, and bouncing out of a smoldering heap to wave to thousands of screaming fans, and the possibility that one day you or one of your friends might not be able to bounce out of the wreck. Although a minister, John is still a guy, and he does appreciate these things.
