farmdoc's blog post number 93

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...’ is how Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities begins. Today’s post is about one city – New York City. A 26 May 2008 New Yorker article by Ian Frazier is about New York’s largest soup kitchen. Located in the Church of the Holy Apostles on the corner of 28th Street and 9th Avenue in Chelsea in Manhattan, it serves an average 1,200 meals per day. Since its 1982 opening, its clients – called guests – have eaten over six million meals. Forty volunteers are needed to serve each meal. Counselling, community resources information, and a writers’ workshop (whose teachers include Frazier) are offered to the guests. Frazier’s article is beautifully written and uplifting, but I find it perverse that large-scale hunger exists in the wealthiest country on earth. It is the best of nations, it is the worst of nations. An estimated 1.3m New Yorkers don’t have enough food all the time. The soup kitchen spends US$10,000 per day, and to continue operating it needs US$2.7m each year. About 35% comes from individual donors. Red-state evangelical Christians haven’t responded to fundraising approaches; secular mailing lists have been more fruitful; but according to the soup kitchen’s chief fundraiser ‘If the Jews of New York City stopped giving, we’d go out of business’. Enough said.