Lunch is the Way In

A Talk for Princeton High School.

END NOTES UP FRONT TODAY: I want to start by acknowledging the dead and traumatized at UNLV (University of Nevada Las Vegas) after a shooter kept students and faculty terrified and locked down for hours yesterday. Vegas is a big city, but it is also a small town. Everyone knows someone, loves someone on campus. My feed and DMs are full of people checking in and awaiting news, offering beds to students who can’t get back into dorms, rides for people who can’t get to their cars, therapists stepping up to give free trauma care, the helpers are helping. We find ourselves again taking care of each other. It is our community that gets us through.

This is who we are. #UNLVStrong #VegasStrong.

I just wish we didn't have to be so #Strong.

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Today’s post is one that is special to me.

I’m going to write a longer more involved essay about this at another point, but for today, I wanted to post the talk I gave at Princeton high school on Monday night. The students there are embarking on a semester long service program and my talk kicked it off. What an amazing honor.

The students interviewed me for the school paper (the questions were wonderful) and I gave a little talk (below) and other students interviewed me in front of the audience (they killed it) and then hosted a Q & A (lovely people, thoughtful follow-ups). There were local Princeton hunger organizations, community members, university faculty and high school students and faculty. Plus one of my dearest friends, from Brooklyn, and my St. Martin’s promotion team. (Yay!) Add to this, the AP English teacher is having students read The Meth Lunches so they can talk about poverty, vulnerable people in our community, and hunger, but also how storytelling intersects. Amazing.

I can’t think of a better use for the book.

I met and got to tag along with the folks at Aunt Chubby’s Luncheonette in Hopewell, that serves paying and non-paying customers, and delivers meals and groceries to the sick, the disabled and the elderly. (I’ll be writing more about them later) Their food is kick-ass, but more importantly, their philosophy is intentional neighboring. It’s beautiful.

The photos I have included here are some from the talk. If you read the book, you will be able to put the faces to the (fake) names. Thank you, as always for reading. xo

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Lunch is The Way In

A Talk for Princeton High School

I was a food writer when we lived in NYC. My husband, David, who produced Broadway shows got an opportunity to produce this show in Vegas.

He commuted for a while and we went out and visited him a lot. My oldest kids, Lucy 9 and Edie 8 at the time, were show kids. You know, they grew up backstage. We lived in the Cosmopolitan Hotel right on the Strip. My kids thought the hotel was their playroom. We bought xmas trees at Target and set them up in the hotel room, cooked Christmas dinner on hot plates, and hid Easter eggs on balconies. They knew the concierges and valets by name.

They were like Eloise at the Plaza Hotel.

And this feels like Vegas to most people. Where even my doctor’s office is located inside a casino. This was fun for a while. Until it wasn’t. And we decided to move out West and be there while David produced his show. We kept our apartment on 145th street, as you do, because it seemed like going to Vegas would be short lived.

The first week I moved there I went to find the supermarkets. That’s how I would know if I could live in Nevada. I walked into the one closest to my house and the first thing I saw was a man dressed as 1970’s version of Elvis, full on sunglasses and white pantsuit, with a red basket over his arm, perusing the tomato sauces.

This place was weird. And I was here for it.

But this is only the surface of Vegas. The stuff that gets kicked around in the media. We found out what real Vegas was like when we stopped living in a hotel and moved into a little house on a little street in a historical neighborhood off the Strip. We bought it without seeing it in person. It had good bones, but it had seen better days.

I didn’t write this in the book, I’m not sure why, I think it might have been edited out in various versions, but secretly, in my head, I called this “the poverty house.”

It felt like poverty to me. It felt forgotten, abandoned, and maltreated. Thrown away.

This is a shot of our new house from Zillow.

The walls were painted this sickly green color that reminded me of a 1960’s psych ward and someone left piles of old garbage and broken coffee tables and couches. There was a TV tacked to the wall, like it was a bar. We had mice in the walls. Cockroaches scuttled around the drains. And by cockroaches I mean the giant kind. The kind they don’t tell you about when you live in a hotel on the Strip. They were the size of small puppies. And don’t get me started on the scorpions.

I fell apart, and so my husband sent me off to the doctor for depression meds. The doctor in the casino. He painted the walls crisp colors, and hired a man named Charlie to help fix up the house and also the small house in the backyard, known, in Vegas parlance, as the casita.

We were still moving things in, so we weren’t working all the time. It was late summer. Hotter than hell. 117 degrees, like sticking your head in an oven. So when it came time for us to eat, it felt weird to not include the guy jackhammering in our backyard. It felt rude to not say: grab a plate. So we did.

And that is how we got to know Charlie.

After lunch, I found him slumped over in the backyard crying. He had told us this story about his life at lunch. His kids, his jobs, his wife, their happy life. But it was a lie. He had lost all his 5 kids to child protection. And his home and his cars and his work and everything that was dear to him. And that he and his wife had come to the desert to kill themselves. On meth.

I wouldn’t have known any of that had I not invited him to lunch.

Sometimes eating together brings a closeness and intimacy that is awkward and often uncomfortable. Sometimes it gets to the real and complicated feelings people are having. Sometimes, like Charlie, you eat some noodles together, and eating with the our family jostled the memory of his own kids, and the old days when they were together. For the first time in many months, he remembered what he had lost.

We kept inviting him to lunch and to work, without really understanding that we were helping him and hurting him. By hiring him, Charlie and his wife were able to house themselves and eat, but the money fueled their addiction.

Helping is complicated and complicating, as much as it is necessary.

But we kept eating together. I kept feeding him, listening to his delusions and lies, the way his brain and thinking was disturbed and twisted by the meth, until I couldn’t talk him through it enough or feed him enough to make it okay.

And that’s when I knew for sure that Charlie was a dead man walking.

There was a point where I was sure he would never come back from this. And that’s why I wrote the essay The Meth Lunches, exploring these themes of addiction through the lens of food. It’s the essay that started this book. I wrote it and knew in my heart that I didn’t have to ask him for permission to tell his story because I was quite sure he would never live to see it published. That he was a ghost.

I gave up on him.

Charlie + Tessie (not their real names)

Turns out, I’m the jerk. Because this is Charlie and his wife today.

This week they are putting Christmas lights on the house they own, in a little town in Texas, where they work and live with their youngest daughter. They see their older kids regularly for fishing. They go to their daughter’s soccer games and yammer with the neighbors and eat dinner together and love Jesus.

They are doing great.

So when the opportunity to write the book version of The Meth Lunches came up, I wanted his blessing, since I didn’t ask him the first time. And he gave me grace. And I was grateful that he let me tell his happy ending.

But I couldn’t forget that I counted him out. It stayed with me. The next few years I started thinking more about the people around me. Who is valuable? Who has worth? How do we decide who has value and worth? Who have we given up on prematurely?

About a year or so later, I met Johnnie who works in my neighborhood supermarket. The Elvis supermarket. We were chatting away and running my groceries over the belt. And without stopping, Johnnie told me, as we were bagging my groceries, how she was locked in a closet and starved as a child.

This, weirdly, formed the basis of our friendship. We had coffee and she talked and I listened. I wrote it down. She wanted people to know what happened to her.

And this is the power of being a storyteller. People do not want to be invisible. They want to be seen for who and where they are. They want people to tell their stories their way, especially when they can’t themselves. 

Johnnie and my oldest Lucy hugging in the supermarket, as you do.

When Johnnie was a child her single mother devolved into psychosis, delusion and such severe mental illness. She stopped caring for Johnnie and her other two daughters. Johnnie was the youngest and when her sisters left her, her mother continued to fall into psychosis. She locked Johnnie in a closet. She cut off her food.

Johnnie told me about sharing Milk Bones with her dog inside the closet. I will always remember the way she showed me how she figured out the halfway mark and split the biscuit in two and fed the bigger half to her dog.

“I would starve for her,” she told me. And then explained how she protected her dog.  Starving - the absence of food - is love for Johnnie.

Johnnie learned how to pry the bottom of the closet door open enough to run out, grab a bag of sugar from the counter and tip the bag into her mouth and then run back before her mother noticed.

To this day, Johnnie works in a supermarket, so she will be surrounded by food. Think about that: How her trauma defined her life, what job she took, her rituals and how she copes. Johnnie has engineered her life so that she will never be without food.

And yet, her relationship to food is messed up still. Even now in her 60s, Johnnie eats because she has to to stay alive, not because she enjoys food. Food and eating are a stressor. She wonders aloud if she deserves to have food. If she deserves to be loved and nurtured.

Because feeling safe and loved in the world is directly connected to food.

Before Johnnie, I had never never met anyone who didn’t like ANY food. Not because of taste or texture or preference, but because it was nourishment. Self-care. Something that could make you feel taken care of and safe.

When a child is hungry and not fed by their guardians, the child doesn’t feel safe. That is how connected food and attachment are. Kids who are hungry, get the message they don’t even deserve the most basic need, which is food. Johnnie didn’t feel worthy of even the most basic form of nourishment.

And this is because of hunger.

Now, I really want you to know, Becca.

Becca was a trans, Mexican woman who, when she isn’t wearing a wig, looks alot like young Johnnie Depp. She had a promising career, prior to her gender transition, body doubling for him in Hollywood. But her childhood was saturated with homelessness, sexual abuse and trauma and she could never get out from under all of it. She turned to meth and to stealing cars, was incarcerated, and later, took to the streets.

Becca occupied a kind of famous role in Vegas street culture. She was flamboyant and hot, always wearing little tank tops and bootie shorts, with her fake eyelashes and red lips. She also provided a service - she fixed bikes. That was her business, biking around with her tools and parts and fixing bikes for cash, homeless encampment to homeless encampment.

She was also a bit of a bike thief…. and would tell us, with a mischievous smile, about her latest acquisitions from our neighbors when she stopped by our house to talk bikes with my husband, who is an avid mountain biker. Like all of us, she was a mix of complication. Not simply good. Or bad. Complicated

But street life is murderous, and as a trans woman even more so. When her boyfriend set her on fire in her tent one night, she came to our house immediately after, where we tended to her wounds and fed her soup and let her sleep in our truck. That night sitting outside on the pathway outside our house, Becca hit a kind of cruel bottom.

“I am so alone.

I have no one, nothing. Do you have any idea what this feels like, to be in this city and to have absolutely nothing, no one? If I die out here they will just cremate me and no one will know I even existed. That’s not what I want for my life.”

Six months later, after I had turned in the book and edits were done, Becca was riding her bike at 4am and was struck by a motorist. Becca was killed on impact.

So, it feels so important for me to tell you about her life in the book and here.

I want you all to know that she existed. And she mattered. What she wanted for herself - to play Johnny Depp  as a character on the Strip, taking photos with tourists, a sort of amended dream of body-doubling, to be sort of a local celebrity - was always do-able.  But there was no safety net for people with complicated trauma like Becca and so, she fell through the cracks. She disappeared from view.

When I think of Becca I think of all the people for whom we have not cast a wide enough net to catch them.

Becca died alone and anonymous. The DA dropped the charges against the motorist. There was no reason to spend the money to prosecute someone so inconsequential. Becca didn’t matter to them.

But she mattered to me.

Our little free pantry with a fridge, and my youngest Desi, in front of our house. 2020.

Now, I met Becca because I was running a free pantry in our front yard during the pandemic. I didn’t mean to have a food pantry. It didn’t start out as anything more than putting out some toilet paper and supplies in my little free library for my neighbors.

But then people started pulling up in cars and asking for things. Do you have milk? Got any cold cuts? What about eggs?

Remember that you need resources to be able to prepare for scarcity.

Poor folks and people in crisis were not able to stock up, go to Costco, fill their cupboards. So when everything shut down, so many people were going from paycheck to paycheck situations, to “I just ate breakfast and have no idea where I’ll eat lunch.” situations.

And so neighbors started donating. And I started getting fresh vegetables and meat and dairy from supermarkets - the stuff that was still good but about to be cleared from the shelves - and I put it out in my front yard like a green market. A local bar gave us a beer fridge. We held pantry days so people cold get spices, condiments and basics. We made home cooked meals for pickup in the trunk of cars. My life became running a green market in the front yard.

Wholesome meals for curb pick-up.

And I learned some things:

I learned that people give food donations during the day, but people come at night to take the food.

There is shame in receiving, of being a recipient of charity. People came for themselves, but they also wanted to take a box to their elderly shut-in neighbor, to the homeless lady, on the corner by their house that they know by name, to their neighbors who had six kids and they know things have been hard.

The entire time I ran the pantry, people who came to be given to, also insisted on returning that blessing by giving to the people in their lives. 

This stands in the face of myths that we have circulating around us that people in poverty want to be given to. They want a free ride. To not work like the rest of us. The idea that some people are just sitting around wanting to take from government programs and just veg on the couch with a bag of doritos and a beer is a myth.

Everyone wants to be in the throes of equity, of giving and getting.

And so it became obvious to me that charity doesn't really work for people. It makes them feel bad about themselves. It doesn't allow them to give and be generous. There is no equity in charity.

Ms. B washing dishes on cooking day.

This is Ms. B, an unhoused Korean-American woman who often came to the pantry for supplies with her chihuahua, Princess. She is now a dear friend.

She took me to her van where she hoards all her supplies. In the front seat of this non-functioning van, parked in a vacant lot, she had a pot filled with scallions. Ms. B talked of making kimchi and was thrilled to get daikon from me when I had them in stock.

But why would an unhoused woman need scallions? And daikon?

Because it connects her to Korea, her father, their farm, the soil and the dream she had to come here and live her own life (Ms. B’s dad adopted her male cousin so he had an heir to inherit their farm). Her dream was to live her own life on her own terms. She is living a version of her dream.

It was a no-brainer, that when we cooked fresh food for people in the community, she came and helped us cook and clean and pack up food. She was right there, boxing, washing up dishes, stirring pots of stew, talking to everyone.

That is equity. To be useful in your community. To get and to give. To have people who will be there for you.

One day, I found Ms. B standing at my door. Flies swarmed around her. A cyclone of flies. And she was distressed and crying. It was over 110. She looked haggard. Ms. B always took great care with her appearance, so this startled me. She had her spots to get food, showers, hair cuts. She was never unkempt unless someone roughed her up or she was sick.

I looked down at the bundle of blankets in her arms and I knew…. Princess had died. Ms. B was carrying around the dead body of her best friend. She didn’t want to let her go. She didn’t know what to do with her.

It is a gift to be the person someone comes to at the worst moments of their lives. If you can be that person for someone else, you will have a legacy. Some of Princess’ ashes are buried in our front yard, so Ms. B can visit her whenever she wants.

Ms. B, Princess + Desi.

If you want to work to eradicate poverty, I suggest reading Princeton University’s own Matthew Desmond. His book, Poverty, By America is a blueprint for policy and legislative changes that could abolish poverty as we know it.

And at the end of the day, hunger abolition should always be our overarching and primary goal. But in lieu of being able to eradicate hunger and poverty, what can you do as a high school student, a pantry worker, or regular citizen who wants to make the world better? Here are some thoughts:

• Show up.

• Be curious about people outside of your socio-economic bubble.

• Listen more. Judge less.

• Get to know people. And accept them right where they are without trying to change them.

• Talk to everyone, as if everyone has the same value in our culture.

• Listen to people’s stories. Then, tell those stories (as appropriate and with permissions) to anyone who will listen. Awareness breeds connection. Visibility is everything.

• You’ll screw up: Admit when you get it wrong, apologize, be genuine, make a change, improve yourself and keep building relationships.

• The best thing you can do for people in crisis is to be in a relationship with them. That connection can save their life.

• Everything is local. Go out into the world and learn great things and then bring it back to your local community and try to live your ideals in your daily interactions. 

• Embrace YIMBYism. That is, say: “Yes, in my backyard, duh, of course! Welcome….”

• Know that people in crisis might not be able to be grateful, kind, or emotionally regulated when you work with them. That is the impact of poverty stress on their frontal cortex. They can’t help it. Deal with it.

• AND…. If you don’t know what to do, USE FOOD. Every human must eat. Food slows people down. It creates intimacy and comfort and discomfort. Inviting people to eat with you is one of the best ways to create strong community connections and start to make meaningful connections in people’s lives.

Lunch might not save a life. But it’s definitely your way in.

Thank you so much for having me.