Caption: "Helping Hand: In West Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday, cars assembled in the parking lot of the Palm Beach Outlets mall, which partnered with Feeding South Florida to provide a week's supply of groceries to the first 800 vehicles in line."
Front-page photo this morning's WSJ (4/21/2020) showing a parking lot full of cars.
I'm hoping Tom Blackburn will explain this phenom...I'm sure there are poor people even in West Palm Beach. Do they all have cars? Do they need a week's supply of groceries?
Is it worth the umpteen hours they likely waited on line? Where was the social distancing?
In NYC there are many free food distributions operations, including our parish and probably 90 percent of all churches in New York plus senior centers and currently public schools. There are certainly many poor people. Ads on subways and bus stops call our attention to "food insecurity," often quoting "mother of three," wondering what she'll give her children for dinner.
At the same time, there are stories and pictures (last night on the Newshour) showing farmers dumping milk, plowing under greens, and lamenting their dire economic situation.
At the same time, obesity is said to be among the underlying conditions from which people with the corona virus are dying.
What is going on here?
As I understand it, the ones plowing under greens and dumping milk were reliant on the restaurant industry, which of course is now closed to a large degree. Both salad greens and milk have a short shelf life, and there is a limited window to get them to the point of sale. It does seem like charities such as Second Harvest could help by getting them to points of distribution to the needy. Which isn't going to help the farmers stay solvent, but at least would keep the food from being wasted.
ReplyDeleteMOS, the answer to everything is that this country has rich, and this country has poor, and if you look real hard real quickly you will see some middle class before they soon disappear. That explains why there are people living on pasta and potato chips and why they get sick and die easily. Expendables.
ReplyDeleteThe people on Palm Beach are rich. It's a place where, if a Rolls hits and totals a Porsche, each driver calmly takes a photo, calls his lawyer and goes on about his business. Use of tennis ball serving machines before 10 a.m. is strongly discouraged because they make noise.
West Palm Beach was built by the people of Palm Beach as a place where servants, cooks, groundskeepers, dry cleaners and that ilk could live. Henry Flagler his ownself built a church in West Palm Beach for the white folks and a different church for the black folks. Our community organization holds rallies at the latter. Thank you, railroad, oil and real estate magnate Henry Flagler. Palm Beachers put its hospital -- and called it Good Samaritan -- in West Palm Beach, where it wouldn't depress their real estate values. When they discovered people in West Palm were actually using it, the Palm Beachers built another hospital in West Palm for them and called it St. Mary's.
In between runs the Intracoastal Waterway, on which you can board your yacht in Delaware and reach Miami without going out to sea. The houses on Palm Beach therefore have water to their East and water to their West. This provides sunrises for breakfast and sunsets for the martini hour, and nothing unsightly in either direction. Mar (ocean) -a- Lago (lake, which refers to Lake Worth, which is part of the intracoastal system.
Three bridges connect Palm Beach to West Palm Beach. It's unfortunate, but there is no way to keep all the traffic one-way, so people from West Palm occasionally turn up in Palm Beach. This is discouraged.
One more thing: In the past four weeks, the state of Florida has received 1.5 million claims for unemployment insurance. Its computers have labored and spit out 162,000 decisions, one-fourth of which were denials. Everyone else is "pending." The state, if the computer deigns, will provide a maximum of $275 a week.
So yes, there are a lot of people without money and without food in West Palm Beach. They have cars because the folks on Palm Beach never decided they need a bus system.
Thank you Tom! You should sell that comment to the WSJ since they published the photo without a story: no details about Palm, East Palm, the intracoastal waterway, and why people who need free food have cars. Good work!
DeleteThanks, Tom. Useful insider information.
DeleteJust to support some of what Tom said, but much more prosaically: in our parish's little food pantry and distribution operation, which is part of our Outreach ministry, clients arrive three basic ways: in car, on bicycle or on foot. The bicycles are given to homeless folks by our local community agency which coordinates homeless shelters.
ReplyDeleteNearly all clients who have homes, and quite a few who are homeless, have cars. Our area is suburban and it's very difficult to live without a car. There are some buses and trains out here, but the train system is designed to funnel workers to and from the central city, rather than help poor suburban folks get around, and the suburban bus service is terrible and only gets worse with each round of budget cuts.
If you want a week's worth of food from our food pantry for your family of four, you either need a car, or you need the whole family to come and help you carry the food. Food is heavy, and our parish is not located within easy walking distance of the apartment complexes where poor folks can afford (or can't afford) to live. Speaking as a person who occasionally tries to make small grocery runs on his bicycle, bikes are problematic for hauling more than small amounts of food.
Our own family is not food-insecure; our moral issue is food excess.
We try reasonably hard not to throw away food, but I've been working at it for three decades of marriage and it's still not a perfect science. Breakfasts, we're pretty good at: each person in our household prepares her/his own, and there is hardly any wasted. Dinner and lunch are more complicated. For the evening meal we try to have a family dinner each evening. So each evening we try to prepare enough for the evening meal plus leftovers for lunches later in the week.
But we do end up throwing away a fair amount of previously-prepared food. Leftovers aren't always appealing to every member of the family, so some leftovers languish in the fridge until they expire. And sometimes we overestimate how much food needs to be prepared. On occasion I'll announce that dinner is a leftover meal. But that doesn't always go over big, either. Most members of our household have their own incomes now and they'll simply order in something more appealing if leftover hot dogs or spaghetti isn't what they want.
Thinking about these dynamics in light of families that are food-insecure really shines a light on these little dysfunctions of excess.
In Laudato Si, Francis wrote, "Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of the poor and the hungry." It's a thought-provoking principle, but if you take it seriously (and I try), it's not that easy to carry out. I can't donate already-prepared food (e.g. cooked Rice-A-Roni, which we eat once a week or so and always end up throwing away part of) to a food pantry. The real trick is to purchase less and prepare less food. If many families did that, grocery stores would end up with excess inventory. I'd like to think that some or all of that inventory ends up at local food banks, but I'm not completely certain of those dynamics. But maybe I'm taking the pope's maxim too literally.
It bothers my conscience to throw away food, but not if it has green fuzz on it. So maybe that's why sometimes unloved leftovers languish in the fridge until it's not waste but a public service to get rid of it.
Delete"Food is heavy, and our parish is not located within easy walking distance of the apartment complexes where poor folks can afford (or can't afford) to live."
DeleteThen why don't you take it where the people are or to someone who can get it to them?
Katherine: In one of her memoirs Ruth Reichel (foodie) reports on her mother's treasuring left overs for so long that the family had to inspect table offerings that might have passed their eat-by-date....
Delete"Then why don't you take it where the people are or to someone who can get it to them?"
DeleteSometimes we do deliver food. But by and large, the people in this area who have homes, also have wheels. The ones without cars are homeless clients, and they typically don't want/need food from the pantry - they have no place to store or prepare food. We have other forms of assistance for them.
Thanks, Jim, for clarifying.
DeleteA friend who drives a school bus in a district north of us says that the district is keeping the lunch ladies on making breakfasts and lunches. Drivers, who already know the routes, making and delivering meals to kids who qualify on the route.
The plan keeps some people working, and it means that parents who are working don't have to pick up meals and take them home around their work schedules.
The deliveries provides a check on kids who have to come to the bus to get the meals.
If parents are laid off, they are getting breakfast and lunches with the kids.
Seems like a really good system!
Jean, I agree - that is a good plan! Around here, they'd make it a lot more complicated and expensive than that, and it may not be as effective.
DeleteWhen I was in middle school in Niles, MI in the 1970s, the school had quite a few kids whom we would describe today as food-insecure. That school's program was to put out in the lunchroom gallon buckets of peanut butter which had been mixed with honey, together with loaves of cheap white bread. Any kid who was hungry could make themselves peanut butter bread or a sandwich, anytime they wanted, no questions asked. For quite a few kids, it was their breakfast and lunch plan (and, quite possibly, their dinner plan, too). I doubt it would pass regulatory and nutritional muster these days. But it was practical and cheap.
My friend tells me now that anybody on the bus route can get a free lunch regardless of economic status. They just call the school and sign up. Apparently they're saving money with the kids not being in school.
DeleteOur district has the peanut butter plan for kids who aren't poor enough to qualify for lunch program or who have neglectful parents too dead drunk or stoned to provide lunch or lunch money.
One winter I made lunch for some poor waif whose parents turned him out in the dark at 6:30 a.m. We found him sitting on our porch bench waiting for lights to go on. So he would come in, eat cereal, watch cartoons, and walk to school with The Boy. He never spoke a word.
I reported the situation to the school counselor, and she was on top of it, but his mother moved to parts unknown and we never saw him again.
The boy on the porch: Right out of Dickens!!
DeleteYou're not kidding. This kid was such a heart-breaker. He was here for breakfast and a sack lunch for weeks. The school counselor could not give me details, but said that single parents on the verge of child welfare scrutiny would move suddenly out of the county where an overtaxed system was unable to track them.
DeleteThere used to be some kids who lived across from the church who would show up for every funeral luncheon, and the church ladies would give them food. They weren't actually food insecure, but they were latch-key kids of a single mom who was at work all day. I suppose they got tired of making peanut butter sandwiches.
DeleteOften, those kids need a kind word as much as anything. One of The Boy's friends used to follow me around and show me his school work. His mother was a nice woman, but she was exhausted when she got home from work, worried about an older kid in the Army and another one on probation.
DeleteBtw, here is that PBS NewsHour segment which Margaret mentioned in the original post. A lot of good stuff here, about farmers, farmworkers, meat packing plant workers and other aspects. Seems the food supply chain is not as resilient as it needs to be.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-the-covid-19-pandemic-is-sending-american-agriculture-into-chaos
We have at least 3 hot spots in the state right now. All of them are towns where there is a meat processing plant. Unfortunately the managements of these plants were tardy in instituting safe practices. Guess it might cut into their bottom line. But they are perilously close to getting shut down right now, so it would have been smart to have been proactive. No, the food supply definitely is not as resilient as it needs to be.
DeleteWe have some new neighbors who recently moved in next door. I think one of them works at one of the meat plants in the next town. Sunday evening there were 8 cars in front of their house. Actually some of them were in front of our house. Looked like a little housewarming party. Don't think I'll be taking over banana bread anytime soon.
"Unfortunately the managements of these plants were tardy in instituting safe practices. Guess it might cut into their bottom line."
DeleteYes, as you say - it would have been smart to have been proactive.
FWIW, my wife and I both work for hi-tech-ish multinationals, and in our cases, we were sent home to work before the state governments (and their counterparts in India and other geos) started issuing shelter-in-place edicts. I saw the same thing among many of our clients; the corporate leaders were ahead of the elected officials. I am sure that (some of) the corporate leaders are genuinely concerned for the welfare of the workers, but of course there is an element of self-interest in it as well (keep medical expenses under control, avoid lawsuits, keep company locations from becoming uninhabitable for work purposes because of infection, etc.). I'm not sure that's a bad thing; if the self-interest incentives are well-aligned with the larger society's incentives, that can lead to good outcomes.
Capital cares about skilled and professional workers whose expertise is hard to replace. Grunts on the line are interchangeable cogs. If they get sick and die, there are plenty more to step in. It's why a friend's husband who works in the corporate offices of a well-known pizza company is working safely at home while the pizza makers and delivery people have no health care and have the highest potential exposure.
DeleteIt's just good business sense, Jim.