Thanksgiving 2010

Since moving to the Bay Area I’ve done a bit of volunteering, helping a church group make & serve lunches to a couple of homeless shelters in San José. We serve at each of the two one Saturday per month.

For the past two Saturdays the menu has been soup, sandwiches, fruit & dessert. We actually make vegetable soup from scratch—it’s not like we’re opening a couple of industrial-strength sized cans of Campbell’s soup & nuking it; there are aromatics, potatoes, greens, tomatoes & herbs. Last week I got to taste it & it was really pretty good.

What upset me were the sandwiches: white bread, a slice of processed turkey, a slice of American cheese, mayonnaise & mustard. I’m leaving aside the issue of whether there’s any nutrient value in white bread—I’m sure it’s injected with all kinds of stuff to make up for the over-processed flour. & it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than the $2.99 you pay for a small loaf of Trader Joe’s multi-grain bread, so I get it. We made 100 sandwiches each Saturday.

& I won’t cavil at the American cheese, although I personally think you shouldn’t be able to call it “cheese” if Stilton, Brie, Edam & Asiago are also “cheeses”. Protein is protein.

What brought it all home to me was that as my co-volunteers were laying out the assembly line was that the homeless people didn’t get to choose to opt out of either the mayo or the mustard. Every sandwich had it. & once that stuff is on the bread, it’s pretty much impossible to scrape it off.

Then I thought back to last month, when the menu was pasta (with chicken—really pretty good), salad (with dressing applied en masse) & garlic bread. Now me—I happen to like garlic bread; perhaps too much. But if you wanted a piece of bread that wasn’t already thoroughly infused with the stuff, you were out of luck. (Or if you didn’t happen to much care for the particular dressing.)

Your choices were take what was offered or go hungry.

Then, last Sunday, I was at coffee hour at the church, which is across from a downtown San José park that’s a center for the homeless. This park is surrounded by a couple of churches, offices & some up- & down-market housing, but I’m thinking that it’s not used by much of anyone but the drug addicts & homeless folk. (The church I attend keeps its doors locked most of the time, because there had been a lot of drug deals going down in it when they were open.) I noticed a lot of people lined up & asked one of the long-time parishioners if there was a meal being served.

He told me it’s a “drive-by” feeding: it’s actually illegal to distribute food in that park, so people come by, park & hand out sandwiches & things until the cops come by & roust them.

(I get it that there’s an issue of balance as to whether the park belongs to the bag people or the families who want to take their kids to the swings without them picking up drug paraphernalia in the sandbox. I myself feel uncomfortable walking past the place. But is it better to let them root through garbage bins rather than receive food that hasn't already been at least partially consumed?)

I think of the wealth in this area—Google has just announced plans to build yet another Googleplex that will have offices, retail shops & housing, so you never have to leave work—& all the upscale restaurants patronized by the technorati; & then I think of the children in the shelters & the park people lining up in an orderly fashion to get food before the police show up. Even if the food is sandwiches with both mayo & mustard.

There’s something wrong here.