By Leslie Morgenson
Published in March 2008
The restaurant at the Westin Hotel in New York city recently added to their menu, a bagel dish featuring white truffles and gold flecked jelly. This new item sells for $1,000 US. But apparently that can be topped. The Serendipity 3 Restaurant also in NY, has a gold flaked dessert on their menu worth $25,000. Fortunately, they have yet to make a sale.
For all those who wonder how there can be poverty in this world where there is in fact enough food to feed everyone, here is the first piece of the equation. Though some may consider it simply a lark, such obscene overpricing is all part of an ongoing message- we always need to be spending. And our overspending is what drives prices out of reach for more people everyday.
If anything has become clear to me over my 8 1/2 years at St. John’s Kitchen it is this: the true testimonies of St. John’s Kitchen are the stories of people who don’t have to come daily for a meal, companionship or assistance navigating their way through a world that continually punishes them. It is the lifestyle of the rest of us that creates conditions where food, housing and basic needs are inaccessible for others.
There is nothing challenging about this thought. The more we are willing to spend, changes the cultural landscape for others. A gilded plate of food – beyond being ridiculous is tragic, not because the street population longs for just such a meal but offering this item adds to the ever widening socio-economic gap. A person’s willingness to forgo some overly priced extravaganza would go much farther than giving a $2.00 handout. Our willingness to examine our own spending and refusing to ride the consumer rollercoaster is the greatest kindness we can give to our community.
The greatest quandary for me is how to bridge my own pleasure in food with the hunger in others. I don’t mean gold- encrusted pleasures, but… how can I even find enjoyment in say freshly baked bread, my favourite food, when another is hungry? The question has plagued me for years. The pleasure of food of course is something I want everyone to possess. It’s not enough to just “eat to live”. I want people, in a modest way, to “live to eat”.
Alice Waters, a world renowned chef addressed this concern in an article, “Slow Food Nation.” As long as we maintain our allegiance to fast food, she says, eating alone on the run, we are submitting to the notion that eating holds no importance; that food is cheap, plentiful and therefore okay to waste. Our marriage to fast food misleads us into thinking there is food available for everyone at a low price when in fact we pay more in terms of the cost to the environment and public health, by eating cheap fast food. Waters states, “When we claim that eating well is an elitist preoccupation, we create a smokescreen that obscures the fundamental role our food decisions have in shaping the world.” We need to eat well, and we need to feed others well.
The other St. John’s Kitchen story that is best viewed from outside our walls is mental illness. This diverse population struggles immensely with mental health issues which at times is torturous for people and yet at other times a rare gift offering the insight of a Virginia Woolf, whose husband commented that her mental illness was “the lava out of which she created her great novels.”
For most people there is the complexity of whether they want medication at all and/or how they will medicate. The challenge is finding ways to support both. This tug and pull plays out daily within our walls. But the bigger problem still remains how mental illness is responded to outside of St. John’s Kitchen. Again it’s the testimony, or in this case the attitudes, of those who don’t come to the kitchen. People with mental health issues who are already in great personal turmoil are continually shunned and punished for being ill. The response in the wider community is often fear that leads to phoning the police. This lack of understanding creates a divide that makes it difficult to reconcile these two separate cultures both trying to live within the boundaries of the same city. How can people outside St. John’s Kitchen find the bridge to this large diverse population of people? Surely this is where the responsibility does lie. And the gift is the witnessing of an amazing second sight from a troubled mind as well as a relationship.
As a rich country we have a responsibility to examine and change, if necessary, the patterns in our lives when the health our own families, our communities and our nation calls for just such a step.
