Food Bank Adventures: Nobody Wants the Tofu

            On Saturday morning I finished memorizing “Ah! Si javais un franc cinquante” (Oh! If I Had A Dollar Fifty) by Boris Vian. It’s more of a barroom chant than a complicated poem, meant to serve as a showcase for Vian’s trumpet playing. Here’s my translation:

Oh! If I had a dollar fifty

I would soon have two dollars fifty

Oh! If I had two dollars fifty

I would soon have three dollars fifty

Oh! If I had three dollars fifty

I would soon have four dollars fifty

Oh! If I had four dollars fifty

I would soon only have fifty cents

            I finished posting “La ballade de Johnny Jane” on my Christian’s Translations blog.

            A little after 9:30 I headed for the food bank. The line-up was longer than it’s been for a month. I said good morning to Graham, who was five places ahead of the end of the line and then I bent the line around the corner onto Beaty Avenue.

            I was going to start reading my book but then I saw Beth coming and I knew I wouldn’t get a chance. I held onto it anyway just in case but she started talking right off the bat.

            She said that the kind of explosion that happened in Beirut, Lebanon is going to occur all over the world soon, either because of nature or people. I argued that Lebanon is a failed state whereas countries like Canada have safeguards in place to prevent disasters like that from happening. In Canada the storage of ammonium nitrate is carefully controlled by federal regulations and so there is only a microscopic chance of such a blast occurring here. I told her that in Canada the only comparable explosion was the one that happened in Halifax in 1917. The Lac Megantic blast in 2013 was much smaller at 0.0001 kilotons compared to 2.7 kilotons in Beirut but 47 people did die.

            Beth kept repeating herself that it is going to happen and added, “Trust me”. I gave up trying to convince her otherwise.

            It was very hear what Beth was saying and when I asked her to speak up she revealed that she was wearing two face masks. I asked her why she doesn’t wear three masks or maybe ten would really keep her safe.

            Beth told me that her twenty four year old son lives with her and she’s trying to get him into adult high school so he can get his diploma and go to university. She said she liked studying Biology but couldn’t handle Science. I reminded her that Biology is a science but I think she meant the kinds of sciences with formulas and equations.

            At 9:55 a young guy came around with a clipboard to take our names and membership numbers. I asked him if they’d changed their official start time to 10:00. He said they haven’t but since there was a longer line-up and they had the boxes ready they thought they’d start early. I told him I appreciated them getting rolling ahead of time.

            After the first wave of boxes had been given out the rest of the line moved around the corner in front of 1501 Queen. When I received my milk crate I put it down in front of my bike to sort through the items. I put the things I didn’t want on the left side and those I planned on taking on the right. While I was doing so the big guy who’s only been coming to the food bank since the PARC drop-in centre has been closed, loomed over me as he’s done before, pointed at the stuff on my left and asked if I was getting rid of it. I told him to wait and so he walked away.

            Of the items I kept was a pouch from Mountain House containing a freeze dried chicken fajita meal with rice, black beans, corn and fire roasted onions. It seems to have been designed as camping food since one can just add hot water to the pouch and eat the meal. On back of the package they claim that “through an ancient process inspired by the Incan Empire we have locked in the flavour and the nutrients”. The statement is oddly worded since "ancient process inspired by the Incan Empire" implies that the process was inspired by the Incan Empire in ancient times and that some ancient people were inspired by the Incas to develop the process. I assume they mean, “a process inspired by the ancient Incan Empire” but I didn’t know the Incas developed freeze drying. Freeze drying didn’t start in labs until the late 18^th Century but it did not have widespread practical use until world war two when they began freeze drying blood plasma and penicillin. Freeze drying wasn’t applied to food until they developed it for astronauts in the 1960s.

Mountain House is a division of OFD (Oregon Freeze Dry) Foods which is headquartered in Albany, Oregon and is the largest diversified freeze dried food company in North America. They started out making meals for US Special Forces fifty years ago because the US troops couldn’t kill the Viet Cong and themselves in a useless war fuelled by heroin and cannabis alone. Mountain House began after the Viet Nam war to market their products for civilians.

            I also took a pack of Lebby dry roasted chickpea snacks coated with honey and sesame seeds. On the cover there is an artistic rendering of a blown up chickpea snack withy the snack speaking about itself in the first person and saying, “I’m a chickpea snack”, because everybody wants to make friends with their food before they eat it. Lebby Snacks is owned by Healthy Habits delivered, out of Brooklyn, New York. The package also says it’s a product of Turkey and so I assume that’s where the chickpeas and sesame seeds come from.

            I picked two individually packaged chocolate chip cookies; and two Nature’s Heart nut bars with dark chocolate , cherries and coffee. Terrafertil Nature’s Heart was started in Mexico by three brothers from Ecuador. Terrafertil was acquired by Nestle in 2018.

            I grabbed the can of mixed chickpeas and faba beans; the six pack of raisin bran muffins; the two small containers of fruit bottom yogourt; the bag of milk; two red delicious apples; a bag containing a head of romaine lettuce and five green and yellow peppers; a bag containing five blue face masks; and a pack of red grapes. The grapes looked like a good score but when I got home I saw that underneath most of them were overripe and some were white with mould.

            I put the bag of rice; the bag of buns; the restaurant servings of saltine crackers; the cream of mushroom soup; the tube of frozen ground chicken; the six eggs; and the pack of tofu back into my milk crate and set it down in front of Beth to see if she wanted any of it. She was going through my offerings when the big guy came back and saw that I’d given the stuff he’d been coveting to Beth. I guess he’d misunderstood that when I said “wait” that it was some kind of promise that I would give the food to him. He declared that it was “a slap in the face” and even when Beth gave him some of her food he took it and tossed it angrily into his already full milk crate. Beth gave me her pack of Lebby snacks and her package of Mountain House freeze dried Italian style pepper steak with rice, tomatoes and bell peppers in vinaigrette just like the ancient Incan astronauts used to eat when they launched themselves into the inky blackness of space.

            I took my milk crate back in front of the door where there were already five milk crates that had been returned. I found it hilarious that in each one of the crates was one lonely pack of tofu.

            While I was unlocking my bike Beth discovered among her items a little pack of cooked, sliced meat. The big guy came into her personal space and tried to get it from her. He said, “Please! I need that for my sandwiches! Come on!” Maybe she and her son needed it for their sandwiches too and so she held onto it, but she, a little woman with a cane was clearly being made nervous by the hulking brute three times her size being so aggressive and getting angry when he didn’t get what he wanted. She offered him her tofu, her ground chicken and three of the eggs I gave her. He took the eggs, but was still visibly holding a grudge and so I reminded him, “It’s free, you know.” This just ticked him off more and he reminded me that I’d slapped him “in the face” and that now on top of that I was trying to make him feel bad. I told him that he should feel bad. I said, “You loom over people like a vulture and you spread negative energy all over the place.” He said, “What about you? Aren’t you spreading negative energy?” I answered, “No I’m not actually” and I rode away.

            I took my food home to put it away and then headed back out for the supermarket. My second floor neighbour Benji was ahead of me on the stairs, carrying a full plastic bag and a newspaper. I commented jokingly that he looked like he was on his way to work. He explained that he was taking out his garbage and said that he doesn’t use the back because the guy upstairs accused him of going through his garbage. It’s interesting how people think they still own what they’ve decided to throw away because they don’t want it.

            At No Frills I bought three bags of cherries; a watermelon; a three litre basket of Ontario field tomatoes; a pack of pork chops; a container of Greek yogourt; mouthwash; and a pack of toilet paper. The cherries were very expensive.

            When I was unlocking my bike a woman that had been behind me in the checkout stopped to inform me that she is mentally ill and lives in a group home. Maybe she noticed that I could see that she’d had a slight difficulty while paying for her items she felt the need to inform me of her situation.

            For lunch I had a cheddar, tomato and lettuce sandwich with the last of my Portuguese corn bread toasted.

            That afternoon I worked on writing my Food Bank Adventure but didn’t finish it that day.

            For dinner I had a fried egg and a warmed up naan with a beer while watching the first two episodes of The Adventures of William Tell. I remember watching this show when I was a kid but unlike “The Adventures of Robin Hood” I don’t remember any of the stories. I had thought that William Tell was a historical figure but it turns out that he is as much a myth as Robin Hood and that the Tell stories are hundred years older.

            The first story begins with Austrian troops marching into Uri, one of the free Alpine communities that would eventually merge to form the state of Switzerland. They declare to the villagers that they now have the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph of Habsburg to protect them and all they need to do is feed and clothe the troops and pay a tax in exchange. Tell says, “Here is your first payment” and throws an egg in the captain’s face. The villagers, led by Tell defeat the soldiers and send them running. Tell goes to see Furst, his father in law who is a judge in the nearest town where the soldiers have already taken over. The emperor’s hat is placed on a post in the square and the people are expected to kneel before it to acknowledge that they are vassals of the empire or be punished with slavery. As the men are coming home from the fields they will be confronted by a dire situation before the hat if they don’t kneel. Tell goes to the church behind the hat and has the priest bring out a relic of St Bernard and so the men kneel before the hat but to the relic and so the captain can’t arrest them. The new governor, Landburgher Gessler, calls for the arrest of William Tell. He is captured and brought before Gessler to be charged with treason. But Gessler tells William he can go free if he shoots an apple off his son’s head. He does so in the famous scene but when Gessler asks why he’d concealed a second arrow in his tunic Tell says that if he had killed his son he would have used it to kill him. Gessler tries to arrest Tell for planning the murder of the governor but when the soldier tries to chain him he grabs the chain, swings it, knocks a soldier down and grabs his crossbow. The prisoners are freed of the chains but trapped in the courthouse. They take the big doors off the hinges and use them as shields to escape to an alley and then to the tunnels below the street. Tell joins the leaders of the other free states to unite against the empire. They decide on the possible name of Switzerland.

            In the second story Tell and a friend see Austrian soldiers loading weapons into a row boat to cross the lake and take over another village. Tell convinces the pilot to let them pose as two of his oarsmen. When the soldiers try to get in they push them into the water and row away. Later Gessler sends soldiers to Tell’s village to capture him, but Tell knocks out a solder who is searching the barn and puts on his armour to escape. Gessler arrests six men of the village and declares that they will be executed at sunset if they don’t reveal the whereabouts of Tell or if Tell does not surrender. The village is surrounded but Tell reaches the village by floating while concealed by a large evergreen branch along a mountain stream. Just as the axe is about to fall on the first prisoner, Tell shoots an arrow close to Gessler. The soldiers chase Tell around the village but Tell makes his way around behind Gessler to put a crossbow against his back and tells him to order his men to withdraw. Gessler has the men release the hostages, call off the search for Tell and prepare to leave the village. But meanwhile Gessler secretly gestures to his captain that Tell is behind him. But when captain Hofmanstahl gets behind Gessler there is only a crossbow sticking in his back and Tell is gone.