This Hero
I never feel class so intently, so precisely, as when I am around food.
It’s Wednesday night, before the July 4th holiday, and this essay should’ve been ready to post. But I felt compelled to set that piece aside and write a different essay. One that is pressing against me.
Something happened this week and it’s stuck in my head. I can’t get it out. I cannot not write it.
If you read here regularly you know I have been a CASA (Court-appointed Special Advocate) for all of one week. One solid week! My job (as an unpaid volunteer) is to advocate for kids in the system. I currently have a family I am working with and obviously, I can’t talk about them specifically. But in the week that I have met the kids, they have moved out of a facility (a shelter that houses kids who have been removed, but not put into a foster home) and into a distant relative’s house.
This felt like the big answer to a serious problem in their lives. The kids, minus one older sibling, are all together, under one roof, with a benevolent parent figure who wants the best for them and took them in, truly because she could not leave these children in an institution. She is a friggin’ hero.
This family member works a low-level mental health position and lives in a simple but lovely two bedroom apartment. This Hero pulled four kids, ages 5-16, out of this institution and took them into her home with her own two kids (teens). She has a curtain up to create a bedroom out of what used to be her dining room. She doesn’t have a car. She is just making ends meet. She jumped in anyway.
This Hero calls me and tells me she doesn’t have groceries to feed these children. Of course not, there was barely time for her to prepare. I bring her groceries. We cobble it together. But then its the holiday week and people are not returning calls and there is a problem with the EBT, it was allocated to the last home the kids were in. There is no food for these kids. We make phone calls. We cobble it together again. She hears back from a non-profit support for kinship families that they can get a voucher for food at their local resource center. I don’t know this resource center, but we are all excited. This will get them through the weekend.
The system is slow, I think, but it works.
Turns out, that voucher is good for one whole day. One day. Get it now or lose it. This Hero moves things around, gets a ride and goes to the address they give her.
But I’m relieved. Let’s get This Hero a check so she can cook (she loves to cook), I’m thinking. This voucher is money, right? To get what she needs? Let’s feed these kids. Let’s get that house calm and in a routine where everyone has meals and snacks and normalcy. Let’s solve the big issues so we can just tackle the everyday concerns, healing trauma, getting ready for school, summer pool dates, creating harmony for kids who haven’t had it for awhile. Damn, just getting to know one another.
It takes, from my experience as a foster parent, about three months to settle a foster kid into a house. Get the feel of routines, expectations, what you need, what I need, what you like, what I like. Boundaries, guardrails. Feeling each other out. Getting past the honeymoon period where everyone is on their best behavior. Sibling groups even more time. It takes time to know each other, our weird pecadillos, our nuances. Allow ourselves to be seen. To trust. Trust is a tricky, tricky thing.
And these are kids who have seen some things. So I know from experience everything is chaotic and messy and crazy in that apartment right now. They don’t need to wonder where their next meal is coming from on top of that.
Then, This Hero sends me this photo:
She went to the resource center. This is what they gave her for the holiday weekend. For seven of them. They gave her a $25 card to a supermarket and bags of beans, rice, walnuts, raisins, and some canned veg.
I never feel class so intently, so precisely, as when I am around food.
Food is all class all the time.
Every choice of where we shop, what we buy, what aisles we like to shop in, everything we consume is a marker of what we believe, what we value, where we live, how we live, and what we can afford.
I say this a lot here but it’s worth saying again and again: your food choices are decided by the house you live in, the kitchen you have, the money in your pocket, whether you have plates and flatware, a can opener, whether your stove works, whether you have running water, whether there is vermin in your apartment, whether you have kids, whether your spouse hits you, if you are metally and physically well, how old you are, if you have air conditioning (it’s nearing 120 degrees this weekend - it matters), if you have time to cook, to shop, to think about food at all.
Imagine having to bring four kids into your home, that you don’t know and who don’t know you, and have been separated from their families for over a year and have sat in facilities where a stream of workers have parented them, and you do this big big thing for them, and you work full time and are just making it for yourselves and your kids, and you ask for support, just basic support, and the food they hand you - because God forbid, we just gave her a check and let her handle her house her own way - is bags of dried pulses that you have to rinse, soak and stew for long periods in order to even consider getting dinner on, and then you have to ask kids you barely know to eat it and love it and ask for seconds and fill up their bellies, and you have to have all the spices, herbs, flavorings, fats and acids that make these blank slates taste like something you want to put in your mouth. And the beans are probably old anyway, older than a year, and the nutritional values are diminishing so you need sauces and cheeses and bold bold shit to make them taste like something anyway, because they have grown stale sitting in warehouses and on pallets.
Pulses and beans are an important commodity crop for the US. The government pays farmers to produce them (support for farmers) and then that food is handed out to food banks and schools (kids and poor people) here in the US. The idea is that everyone flourishes. But there is always so little thought given to the people receiving, to their bellies, to their sense of importance in the world.
How does the photo This hero sent me nourish a new blended family? It doesn’t. It’s an afterthought and it sends the message that they are afterthoughts, too. These kids are after thoughts. Don’t tell me they don’t feel that.
When I brought This Hero groceries the first time, for instance, I bought a lot of ready-made foods so she wouldn’t have to worry about cooking. In fact, I didn’t know if anyone in the family cooked at all. I bought them family sized mac and cheeses, lasaganas, pizzas, rotisserie chickens, frozen corn, mashed potatoes and chicken gravy from the deli. Things they could heat up quickly. Things that felt familiar. Bread and cold cuts. Cereal and milk. I brought snacks for the kids, applesauce, cheese sticks, yogurt and fruit. A tray of cupcakes for fun.
After finding out This Hero cooks, I went with things like chicken thighs, jasmine rice, potatoes, eggs, oil, butter, salt, cheese, mangos and edamame.
Now, think about this box of food from the resource center: Imagine your pantry is low and you don’t have everything you need to get that food on the table, spices, fresh herbs, oils, butters, fats, vinegars. Or being a Black American woman who cooks, but you get yellow split peas, an ingredient that works well in Indian dishes like dal, Ethiopian dishes like kik alicha, and Middle Eastern dishes like Ash-e Anar, but maybe yellow split peas are not in your cooking lexicon? Or are not what small children are used to eating when they have been institutionalized for so long?
What you have been given is thoughtless. It checks someone else’s box. It is not about you at all. Shouldn’t our food be all about us? Shouldn’t we all get to pick out our own food?
I do not understand how we ask people to step up and do good things in our community and then when they do, we let them struggle. It’s so (North) American to say strive harder, hustle more, get it done on your own. Well, you signed up to take the kids. Figure it out…
Vegas, like many cities, is growing. Stadiums, ball teams, movie studios, restaurants with expensive fish toast, master plan communities on land typically reserved for mountain lions, burros, long horn sheep and scorpions, a strained water supply that threatens to dessicate us as the temps creep up higher and higher every summer. But focusing on infrastructure isn’t as fun as building a brewery district or a fancy food hall or a mall with Tommy Bahama in it and rows of apartments for rich people to live in over their favorite shoe stores and tweezer-using, fish toast creators.
We focus on rich people’s consumption while regular folks, doing all the right things, struggle and fall through the cracks.
So, Happy birthday, USA. I love you. I do. I feel that love in the way Edie (18) feels she has to defend the US while she is living in Spain, even though she and I both know, those critiques of our food, our bigotry, and our culture are spot on.
I love you, America. But I’m worried about you.
____________________
END NOTES:
I want you to know that our communties are filled with people like This Hero who jump in, even when it really sucks. I also want you to know this family will be okay. There are people on phones and in emails trying to get them what they need over the long term. We’ve got them.
And These heroes deserve that. They don’t give in. They stick it out. And no one knows what they do. They don’t get awards and write books and get written up in major papers. But let me tell you, no matter who is president in November, or what happens in the world, it will always be these people, These Heroes, who carry us on their backs and get shit done. They wedge themselves into the cracks and prevent us from slipping away.
I am grateful for every single one of them. They give us reason to celebrate.
Hope you have a great holiday today with your people. Thank you, as always, for reading.
xo Kim
This: “What you have been given is thoughtless. It checks someone else’s box. It is not about you at all. Shouldn’t our food be all about us?” We are living—have been living for a long time—in an epidemic of thoughtlessness. You bring it into such sharp focus that reading your piece feels like a gut punch. As it should.
Where the hell is that caseworker?!?! I don't care if it's the holiday. The fact that she/he/they did not make sure that family was taken care of needs to be reported to the worker's supervisor and/or the county office administrator. I know it doesn't do anything about the issues of "now" but they should never have done that and should be reprimanded. You are not allowed to abandon a case, period. Okay, off my soap box. If there's anything I can do from here -- just say the word!