Hunger Is Not a Disease

Happy Holiday!

IMG_2648-150x150Traditionally, holidays revolve around a meal served at a food laden table.  People sit around the table, or several tables, eat too much delicious food and visit with relatives, friends, neighbors.  They swap stories; catch up on news.

FOR MORE AND MORE OF US, THIS JUST DOESN’T HAPPEN ANYMORE.    Households and individuals  find themselves unable to finance the expense of the holiday table:  the turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, gravy, fruit salad, pies, cakes.

Not only can people not afford the food, more and more people no longer have the table to sit at, the chairs to sit on, and the stove to cook the food.

THE RECIPES, POTS AND PANS, CHINA, SILVERWARE, CRYSTAL ARE LONG SINCE GONE.  Cooking without a kitchen is the way of the modern household living on a minimum wage.

With luck, today’s minimum wage household will have the gas to get to the soup kitchen.  Otherwise, it’s going to be a regular day with a meal prepared in a crock pot, electric skillet, toaster over, or hot plate.

For the pantry shopper, there’s an opportunity to get extra fruits and vegetables.  Some better connected pantries will offer canned hams or turkeys.

The first year a person uses a pantry for primary shopping,  Thanksgiving  is a challenge, a holiday gone wrong.  After several years, Thanksgiving becomes whatever the household can make of it.  The adjustment is, for some, difficult, and for others …more difficult.

The difficulty lies, mostly, in the ability to get food items considered “traditional” by a family when the money is simply not available to purchase the item in the grocery store.

AFTER SEVERAL YEARS AND SEVERAL HOLIDAYS, A NEW TRADITION EMERGES.  The food gatherer in the household becomes, if time allows, more skilled at scrounging for and gathering food at both the pantry and the grocery store.

If the household is composed of people with multiple jobs, if there are other issues:

transportation challenges

disabilities,

serious illness,

the effort is yet more difficult.

As time goes by, the person/household hopefully adjusts to the situation as the members transition from being situational poor to resource poor to struggling poor.

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If you want to send a donation, our address is:  Reservoir Food Pantry, P O Box 245, Boiceville, NY 12412.  Or, use the Donate Button on this blog.  Thank you in advance for your generosity.

Peace and food for all.

Thurman Greco