Cigarettes and the Poor

            On Thursday October 20^th I went to the food bank, and in the year and a half that I’ve been going there on a weekly basis it was the first time that it’d been steadily raining. This time I was prepared though and brought an umbrella that I’ve had for at least a decade but never use. I think that my daughter’s mother bought it for her, but she didn’t care to take it with her to Montreal when she moved. Since I ride a bike I don’t normally have use for a bumbershoot and even if I’m walking in the rain I wouldn’t bother with one, but standing around for an hour or more in the down-coming wet is a different story.

            I found out whom I was directly behind, which turned out to be the same grey haired guy in the baseball cap that I’d been behind the week before. I opened my umbrella and read an essay from my Aesthetics textbook that argues that Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary about the Nuremberg Nazi party rally, “Triumph of the Will” starring Adolph Hitler, is an ethically flawed artistic masterpiece. I planned on watching the movie that night to see if she was right, but I have seen clips of the documentary over the years and it seems to me that the author was probably judging the film based on Nazi behaviour after the movie was made. The fact is that Riefenstahl’s documentary won her awards all over the world, including North America, so I doubt if critics at the time saw anything morally wrong with the movie.

            The Second Harvest truck arrived while we were waiting, so that meant that I had to move even further away from the driveway just to avoid the smokers that the truck had displaced into the area that I’d picked before that to avoid the smokers.

            When the truck left the driveway, everyone refilled the space. On nicer days the food bank clients spread out a lot more, but this time, I assume because of the rain, they felt compelled to bunch up together near the door, even though there was no logical reason to, since they were still all in the rain. I stayed a few meters outside of the massing, because so many of them were smoking. Even Joe, the manager was standing with his back to the door sometimes while smoking and once he even stepped inside of the food bank with his lit cigarette for a few seconds.

            Thinking about poor people smoking made me wonder why. I came across a 2006 study that found that poor people tend to take longer and deeper drags on cigarettes, thus increasing their level of addiction. With so many poor people addicted to smoking, it makes it very difficult for those that want to quit to do so. They go to places like the food bank, where so many are smoking and they can’t avoid it. Also it seems that raising the tax on cigarettes only causes people above the poverty line to quit smoking, because once you are poor, you are already getting by with less of the necessities, so a few more do not seem drastic. A poor person would also be more likely to find cheaper black market cigarettes than a middle class person.

I also wondered about how much money all the people I was watching spent collectively every year. I think it’s possible that the smoking Parkdale Food Bank clients alone might pay for one tobacco company executive’s annual high-end car purchase. I suspect also that as for the food bank clients that smoke and don’t have dependents, if they didn’t smoke they probably would not need the food bank.

The food bank did not start giving out numbers at the time they usually do. This was mainly because of the food delivery beforehand. From what I’ve heard, after the food is put away, the volunteers get to make their own food selections before the clients come in. I don’t know though if that happens before the numbers are given out or before the clients come for their food in the early afternoon.

The people outside were getting impatient in the rain. One woman banged on the door and shouted out what time it was each time it was another five minutes after 11:00.

The line-up was usually stretched out in single file by this time but on this day it was three people thick. I finally stepped in and took my place behind the old guy in the baseball cap. There were three women from the Caribbean that had been there together. One of them disputed the position of the man in front of me, saying that they had been in front of him at the beginning. I guess I should check for more than the person directly in front of me when I arrive there. Perhaps I should inquire next time about the first three people in front of me. One of the three women was standing farther back in line, but her friend finally coaxed her to move up beside them because obviously she was with them. She shyly did as her friend told her, but explained her reluctance with, “I don’t wanna get cussed!”

A man about fifteen people behind me started shouting at the people in front, saying that this is a volunteer place and nobody has a right to give the people that work there a hard time. He declared that if he were in their position he wouldn’t stand for it. His argument seemed incongruous to me. I didn’t notice as much negativity from the people near the front as was coming at that moment from him. I don’t buy the argument that people being served by volunteers don’t have the right to complain if the service is lousy. The volunteers are dry and they get first choice of food. There are probably other benefits that go along with the job as well. Anyone that does any job that’s worth doing, whether they get paid or not, should want to know whether or not what they are doing is quality work. Who better to tell them than their clients? Most people in the line-up at any given time are already registered and for someone whose name is on the computer it takes at the most, one minute to find their name and hand them a number. There are two reception people working side by side, so that means they can process two people a minute. If there are sixty registered people in line then it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to process them all, so what is the justification for keeping them waiting for ninety minutes?

Finally I got in and walked out at about 11:20, after an hour and a half of waiting in the rain, with number 19.

Back at my place, my next door neighbour came to tell me that he’d recently gotten a new phone from Bell, but when he tried to transfer his card from the old phone, he stuck it in the wrong slot and it got lodged there. He took it to the Fido outlet down the street and the guy said he would charge him twenty dollars to get his card out because it would take an hour because it involves applying heat to the phone. I wondered if it might be really a two second job.

It was still raining when I returned to the food bank at 13:30. The volunteers that prepare the meal had a table set up with a tent roof overhead. At the time that I arrived there were no smokers around the table. Over the ten minutes that I waited for my number to be called, two of the friendly women in charge of the food offered me some of the sweet potato chili, but I politely declined both times. At home I can sit down and eat in a relaxed atmosphere rather than standing and dining in a driveway.

Finally the doorperson called numbers 11 to 20 and I got inside and out of the rain.

After about five minutes, the tiny, elderly volunteer called my number.

The first thing I picked was a can of cranberry sauce, even though I probably won’t cook turkey again until Christmas. Then she gave me three chewy chocolate-coated energy bars. It looked like there was plenty of pasta, rice and sauce, but I didn’t take any. There was a good selection of canned beans and I took the chickpeas. She handed me a roll of toilet paper and after looking to see if anyone was looking, gave me another one. She did the same with the tuna, handing me an extra can. In the cereal section was a choice between Cheerios Plus and Shreddies. I’ve taken the Cheerios over the last two weeks and found that even though they had healthy ingredients, they were major stale, so I took the Shreddies.

            In the cold foods section, Hazel had single litre bags of chocolate milk and a choice between a loaf of packaged meat and a bag of frozen egg patties. I almost took the meat but then saw that it had macaroni inside. What an odd thing to put inside of meat! Why not stuff cheese with string beans or sell radios flecked with pieces of shredded conga drum? Hazel gave me an extra bag of frozen egg patties.

            The bread section was sparse and the woman supervising it said I could only take one item, so I grabbed a loaf of whole grain bread that was about the size of the average sweet potato.

            The vegetable lady, who I think I heard someone call Angie, was still serving the person in front of me, who wanted to take more items, but Angie said, “That’s it!” several times before the woman left. She gave me several pieces of fruit, several small potatoes, a few small peppers and two cobs of corn. There were a few local garden vegetables in a bin, such as half a cabbage, but I took some long greens that were in a bag and which she said had been picked that day. Some of the greens turned out to be very dark green baby celery.

            She asked me, “How’s your book?” I told her it’s just something I have to read for school. She looked disappointed again. She’d probably wanted to hear that it was a great read.

            When I got home there was time to put the food away and have a quick bite before heading out to work at OCADU. I took a northern detour on the way there to stop off at Hitech Direct to exchange the faulty mouse I’d bought for a functioning one. The guy behind the counter checked and confirmed that the one he’d sold me didn’t even light up with the red laser at the bottom. He took another one off the wall and this time started up a computer to test it on. He made sure that the right and left click and scroll wheel functions were all in working order before he handed it to me. I didn’t have to sign anything. I just put the new mouse in my backpack and as I left, he was looking at the mouse I’d brought him and shaking his head, saying, “Strange!”

            I worked that afternoon into the evening for Kieran Brent in the Design department. It would be a two-week pose, so I got him to take my picture with my camera for next week’s reference. He showed slides and lectured for the first twenty minutes or so, and so I worked on schoolwork on my laptop. I found myself to be dozing a bit during the first half, so I took a very short nap on the stage during the coffee break. It seems to have been enough of a rest, since I didn’t droop for the rest of the session.