Chicken Feed for Poor Families

by Vivian Hain/PNN

Thanksgiving, a holiday which glamorizes the ruthless colonization of America, is more of an economic hardship for many low-income families like mine than a holiday to over-indulge in food and drink on. Well, today, I went to collect my "holiday food basket," which is dispersed from my local food bank to either a non-profit agency or a food pantry, usually a local church in my neighborhood where I can get a food subsidy for a holiday meal like Thanksgiving. This year, I collected my holiday food basket from a non-profit agency.

When I went to pick it up, I was given a small cardboard box full of random canned and dry food that had nothing to do with Thanksgiving Day like dry macaroni, cans of pork n' beans, soup, sloppy Joe mix and tuna, along with a small gray plastic bag full of a couple of small potatoes, sweet potatoes and onions. What was most unbelievable is that instead of being given an actual turkey or a grocery store voucher so that I could go get a turkey for my family, I was given two small frozen low quality Sun-Land brand chickens! I was really upset and perplexed by the fact that this is what poor adults and families are given for the holidays from their local food banks when these families are already facing multiple economic challenges during a time of the season when capitalist values tend to be more important than insuring that everyone gets a proper and nutritious meal for the holidays.

Last year, the same thing happened. I got a "holiday food basket" donated to me from a non-profit and I collected another one from my local food pantry (church). Both places gave me the exact same thing; a bunch of random food that had no relevance to what Thanksgiving is supposed to represent at the dinner table and two Sun-Land young chickens that have a label on them that says: Some giblets may be missing. May contain up to 6 percent retained water. Also, when I attempted to cook one of these low grade quality chickens last year, they had a lot of fat on them and even still had some feathers attached to them too! My friend from Eastern Europe even got out his cigarette lighter and set fire to the feathers on the raw chicken and told me: "This is what we do back in the old country, while sparks flew from the damp feathers as a burning smell filled the air." The chickens had so much fat on them, that I refused to eat them and even ended throwing one whole chicken away after cooking it!

I phoned my local food bank to ask them why they are giving poor adults and families chickens instead of turkeys for Thanksgiving? Their response was that because of the Bird Flu epidemic, there is currently a mass shortage of turkeys. Hence, the Bird Flu is in South East Asia, where turkeys do not exist, but chickens do!

I was also told that there were very few turkey donations given this year (I suppose this could be said for last year too!) and that they had only received 500 turkeys and gave the majority of them primarily to agencies that feed a large amount of people on Thanksgiving Day. I was also told that currently, there is a lack of federal funding for food banks from the US Government (thanks to Bush Incorporated) and that the supermarkets have first dibs on the turkeys, so whatever is left over, the food banks get. I wasn't convinced by this information and later found out that much of it was incorrect.

This problem seems to cross the bridge here in the Bay Area. I was told by my POOR News Network colleagues who live in San Francisco that they were also given chickens instead of turkeys for Thanksgiving just like here in Alameda County. I was told by Laure McElroy, a PNN correspondent who also works with Homeless Prenatal in San Francisco that they had to resort to giving food referrals for "chicken Thanksgiving meals" from their non-profit agency too.

I would go to a local supermarket where I found so many turkeys, literally pouring over the frozen display bin and that the supermarket had marked them down half price in order to get rid of them. So, I bought my turkey with my EBT food stamp card, while thinking about the many unfortunate low-income adults and families who got that same "holiday food basket" for Thanks-Taking and didn't have food stamps or any choice, but to eat "chicken FEED" this year in the wealthiest nation in the world where food is always plentiful.