Meat is Rare at the Food Bank

           

            On the Wednesday morning of July 13th, while checking my messages, I slid my foot along my wooden floor and drove a sliver into it. It went in too deep to pull out, so I had to live with the discomfort.

After charging the bike cam overnight, I mounted it on my ride and headed down to the food bank. My plan had been to lock my bicycle in the usual place but to angle it slightly so as to record the line-up. Unfortunately though there were cars parked near the trees where I usually lock my bike. I had to settle for parking behind the garbage bins, which would have obscured the view. The view screen was black on the camera anyway but I couldn’t figure why. I took it off the mount and put it in my backpack.

            I found where I stood in the invisible line-up and stood there. The chatty woman in the baseball cap took her place behind me. She wanted to know the time in order to discern if she could get a coffee before the line began to move. I told her it was quarter to ten. She named a place I didn’t catch then pointed up the street and told me she was knitting a blanket there. Perhaps she was talking about the Masaryk-Cowan Community Centre. She asked me the time again ten minutes after the first time. I stepped out of line a lot to avoid the smoke.

            After getting number 14, I rode to No Frills at Lansdowne and King to buy coffee. I was glad I went there instead of Freshco because I found 925 grams of Maxwell House Original Roast for $6.88.

            When I came back to the food bank at 12:30, they started calling numbers right away.

            The Parkdale food bank has a pastry counter open to clients while they’re waiting to get their food. The woman with the baseball cap went there to get some pastries and then came back with something wrapped in a napkin. She told me that her boyfriend likes donuts and so she always gets an extra for him. She added, “If he’s happy I’m happy!”

            Bruce called my number.

            From the top of the first set of shelves I took a can of evaporated milk.

            Further down were a bag of tortilla chips and another of sour cream and onion toasted bread crisps. I took the chips.

            Since I was out of sugar I took a couple of handfuls of single serve pancake syrup containers.

            There was lots of pasta, rice and sauce, but I didn’t take any.

            I noticed that they had no canned beans or fish this time around.

            I took a box of Shreddies, though they had lots of boxes of fancy gourmet granola.

            Sue was back minding the cool food. I took a couple of single serve cartons of 2% milk and two small strawberry yogourts. In one bin there were chicken wieners and in another a variety of frozen meats, including pork, steak, ground beef or liver. Would anyone really choose chicken wieners over steak? How often does one get steak from the food bank? I took the steak.

            I skipped the bread section and went straight to the vegetable lady, who gave me an enormous sweet potato and offered me “regular potatoes” too. I told her I’d take the regular ones because irregular potatoes are too unpredictable. There was a small eggplant, a few limes, a bunch of curly parsley and a package of mushrooms. Then she gave me three gift bags that looked like they were left over from a Canada Day event. Each contained a fruit salad, a serving of unsweetened yogourt with meusli, a shortbread cookie with a round candied emblem pasted on that had a maple leaf in the centre with the print beneath it saying “LEED Canada Platinum 2016” and then the largest print encircling the emblem in English and French. The English read: “Canada Green Building Council” LEED stands for “Leadership in energy and environmental design”.

            When I got home, I opened one of the gift bags and ate the yogourt, but it was very sour. The muffin tasted like medicine. I guess they aren’t leaders in food gift basket design.