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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Fwd: It would be funny, it it weren't sad...
  • Date: Sun, 01 Feb 2004 10:57:05 -0700


couldn't resist sending this on. Pat is an interesting lady on the Community
Food Security Coalition list.
Paul
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On 2/1/2004 at 12:32 PM Pat Meadows <pat@meadows.pair.com wrote:
>From the trenches....

My husband and I are Food Bank 'clients' by virtue of our
ridiculously low income. We receive about $10-$15 worth of
food once a month. Most of it is poor quality, some of it
is OK, a very little bit is good food. It's a help in a
minor sort of way - and until my husband's disability claim
is finally settled - we need any help we can get.

My husband went alone to the Food Bank this month, and the
volunteers running the line there insisted that he take a
can of beef stew. He tried to tell them he didn't want it,
but they kept insisting, so he eventually gave in and took
it rather than make a scene and hold up the line. They try
to give everyone at least one food from each of several
categories: protein food, vegetable, cereal, dessert, etc.
The beef stew was a 'protein choice'.

When he got the stew home, we read the sodium content, and
realized that we couldn't possibly eat it.

What to do with it? We finally decided to give it to our
two dogs, a small quantity at a time mixed in with their
normal dry food. We thought this would be better than
wasting it.

(Yes, we have two dogs even though we're poor at present.
My husband is a chronic pain patient and I am also ill and
in pain a fair amount of my time and the dogs are absolutely
invaluable to us. They bring us out of ourselves, make us
smile and laugh, make us walk them and get a little exercise
whenever we possibly can, and keep us relatively cheered up.
Chronic pain is very depressing, very.)

My husband fed the dogs the next morning - I'd have probably
thrown the stew out if I'd seen it in time, but I didn't see
it until later. It was nasty stuff, with a thick bright
orange layer of grease (fat?) on top and mixed throughout.
My husband mixed about 1/4 of it into each dog's breakfast.
They're fairly large dogs, this didn't seem like an undue
amount.

All was well with one of the dogs, but the other one was
very comprehensively sick about an hour later. I wouldn't
take a dog to the vet just for vomiting, but she was
absolutely frantic: licking, mouthing, trying to eat dust
and dog hair (in lieu of the grass she can't get at because
the yard is snow covered), shaking like a leaf and obviously
scared to death. She vomited a couple of times too.

So off to the vet she went. The vet gave her a shot
(tranquilizer) to calm her and some pills to settle her
stomach.

She's fine now, and we're $40 poorer because of the damned
beef stew. It would be funny if it weren't sad.

God help people who try to live on this kind of garbage.

Cheers,
Pat
--
"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of
supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to
live under the laws of justice and mercy." - Wendell Berry



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  • [Livingontheland] Fwd: It would be funny, it it weren't sad..., Tradingpost, 02/01/2004

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