Food For Thought
Sep. 8th, 2009 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plumtreeblossomI got a letter in the mail saying that my unemployment benefits have been approved and that the payments will begin this week. Thank goodness.
During this period of unemployment and watching every single penny with nerve-shattering fear, my mind has gravitated to people trying to survive in impoverished circumstances, and how very different life is for them than it is for those on more stable ground. A post by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
daisytells about roasting turkey put me in mind of something that happened a number of years ago that I wish I'd handled differently.
Back when I worked at The MIT Press, for several Thanksgivings the staff took part in a charity drive that involved assembling a food basket for an impoverished family whose card we'd chosen off a tree in the lobby, and I was in charge of coordinating it. We could put anything we wanted in the baskets, but the one required item was a frozen turkey, to be brought in on the basket-pick-up-day for same-day delivery to the family.
I didn't put 2 + 2 together at the time, but there are several problems with this. Having read all the cards on the tree, I knew that a good number of the families lived in homeless shelters or motel rooms. Lets think about the turkey for a minute.
If you give someone a frozen, raw turkey, it presumes they have access to, at the very minimum, all of these things:
Working electricity
A working refrigerator large enough to safely thaw the turkey (and store leftovers)
A working oven (not a toaster oven) and gas service if needed
A roasting pan (can be disposable)
Plates and cutlery (can be paper/plastic)
At least one person in the family willing and able to roast it
I question how reasonable it is for a charity to just expect this in every situation. For a family living in a motel room with only a microwave and a dorm fridge, what in gods green earth are they going to do with a frozen, raw turkey? In a shelter, I suppose they could ask the kitchen to roast it for them, but unless they have a designated shelf in a refrigerator or something, the meat would probably become the shelter's, not the family's.
If I lived in a facility where I couldn't cook beyond heating things in the microwave, I think the charitable gift of a frozen, raw turkey that I can't cook or eat would make me feel insulted. In hindsight, I think a frozen cooked turkey would be a better (if sub-optimal) choice, since at least it can be thawed and eaten cold or microwaved.
I wish I had thought more about food preparation when I rallied the staff to bring in donated food. I wish I had considered the details involved in cooking a large meal in possibly very compromised circumstances. The family I remember most did have a home of some sort, and was a single-father family (picked by me because nobody cares about single fathers), but how did I know he had an oven that worked, or a roasting pan, or the pots and pans needed to make the Stove Top Stuffing and vegetables? I wish I had focused more on food that can be eaten directly from the packaging. There were several meals-worth of food in there, and I hope he and his kids had what they needed to prepare and eat it. I should have thought to include a disposable roasting pan.
These are the things I've been thinking about lately, the way we seem to sometimes presume that people have at least most of the same basics we have. I get a taste of the other side of this whenever a friend invites me to a dinner at an expensive restaurant that I can't afford and I have to decline (this is true even when I do have employment). I'm realizing that when helping the hungry with food donations, we need to do so with conscious attention to the logistics of food preparation in unknown or little-known circumstances. When we think of "poor family" it's easy to default to something like the Bob Cratchit family, with their humble but safe home and their warm hearth with sufficient firewood. Most impoverished families and individuals today have it a whole lot worse.
During this period of unemployment and watching every single penny with nerve-shattering fear, my mind has gravitated to people trying to survive in impoverished circumstances, and how very different life is for them than it is for those on more stable ground. A post by
daisytells about roasting turkey put me in mind of something that happened a number of years ago that I wish I'd handled differently. Back when I worked at The MIT Press, for several Thanksgivings the staff took part in a charity drive that involved assembling a food basket for an impoverished family whose card we'd chosen off a tree in the lobby, and I was in charge of coordinating it. We could put anything we wanted in the baskets, but the one required item was a frozen turkey, to be brought in on the basket-pick-up-day for same-day delivery to the family.
I didn't put 2 + 2 together at the time, but there are several problems with this. Having read all the cards on the tree, I knew that a good number of the families lived in homeless shelters or motel rooms. Lets think about the turkey for a minute.
If you give someone a frozen, raw turkey, it presumes they have access to, at the very minimum, all of these things:
Working electricity
A working refrigerator large enough to safely thaw the turkey (and store leftovers)
A working oven (not a toaster oven) and gas service if needed
A roasting pan (can be disposable)
Plates and cutlery (can be paper/plastic)
At least one person in the family willing and able to roast it
I question how reasonable it is for a charity to just expect this in every situation. For a family living in a motel room with only a microwave and a dorm fridge, what in gods green earth are they going to do with a frozen, raw turkey? In a shelter, I suppose they could ask the kitchen to roast it for them, but unless they have a designated shelf in a refrigerator or something, the meat would probably become the shelter's, not the family's.
If I lived in a facility where I couldn't cook beyond heating things in the microwave, I think the charitable gift of a frozen, raw turkey that I can't cook or eat would make me feel insulted. In hindsight, I think a frozen cooked turkey would be a better (if sub-optimal) choice, since at least it can be thawed and eaten cold or microwaved.
I wish I had thought more about food preparation when I rallied the staff to bring in donated food. I wish I had considered the details involved in cooking a large meal in possibly very compromised circumstances. The family I remember most did have a home of some sort, and was a single-father family (picked by me because nobody cares about single fathers), but how did I know he had an oven that worked, or a roasting pan, or the pots and pans needed to make the Stove Top Stuffing and vegetables? I wish I had focused more on food that can be eaten directly from the packaging. There were several meals-worth of food in there, and I hope he and his kids had what they needed to prepare and eat it. I should have thought to include a disposable roasting pan.
These are the things I've been thinking about lately, the way we seem to sometimes presume that people have at least most of the same basics we have. I get a taste of the other side of this whenever a friend invites me to a dinner at an expensive restaurant that I can't afford and I have to decline (this is true even when I do have employment). I'm realizing that when helping the hungry with food donations, we need to do so with conscious attention to the logistics of food preparation in unknown or little-known circumstances. When we think of "poor family" it's easy to default to something like the Bob Cratchit family, with their humble but safe home and their warm hearth with sufficient firewood. Most impoverished families and individuals today have it a whole lot worse.