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Would You Eat In A Soup/ Soul Kitchen?

Life sometimes changes fortunes, and you can either adapt or give in. According to various reports in traditional media, the last few years has produced a new category of workers: the full-time working homeless.

These workers have full-time employment but are actually homeless, for various reasons - usually due to a temporary reversal of fortune. Some make it out, some do not. Sometimes they are single, other times they have family members. They live variously in shelters, YMCA, hostels, old cars, or even the streets. Because of this, they often have no recourse but to eat in a soul/ soup kitchen. (I love the term “soul kitchen”. Soup Kitchen has such a stigma.)

In my (incomplete) novelette Fall From Grace, the main character, a recently successful young New York stock broker with a conscience, loses a lot of money on the stock market. The guilt of losing other people’s money overtakes him and he quits his job.

Shortly afterwards, he sells almost everything he has, including apartment, furnishings, etc. He only keeps a backpack, a cellphone, a laptop, and some cash, and becomes a (un)wired wanderer. The rest of his money is stashed away into a bank account, but he feels loathe to touch it, so it’s almost like not having it for him.

While he sometimes has the luxury of staying at a hostel or the Y, or even a friend’s place, more often than not, he lives in the street, hiding where no one will spot his battered backpack, spending a lot of time in bookstores and all-night cafes. Being suprisingly frugal, he goes to a soup kitchen one day and later decides to volunteer while he’s deciding what to do with his life.

I wrote the initial intro and structure notes shortly after my last computer contract (little knowing then that it was my last). I wanted to take 2 months before searching for the next contract to do some fiction writing. But as I soon found out, because of the economic situation at the time, personnel agencies had no desire to look for contracts for a contractor out of work for 2 months. Trying to find a full-time job was no easier.

In an instance of life unwittingly imitating art, I soon started selling off all of my high-end belongings. While I worked part-time as a coat-check boy at a night club, I also ended up volunteering at a “Soul” Kitchen in a church, and eating there when I was cooking. It was what convinced me to borrow money from a relative to go to cooking school.

This unfortunately ended up being a wash overall, both because of my deteriorating health and due to the ageism I found directed at me from younger male cooks. Kitchen politics was just not something I wanted to be part of, having become a defacto monk only a handful of years earlier. I was much happier doing prep or even dishes rather than put up the bullshit. I don’t want to go all Kung Fu: The Legend Continues on you, but I actually found I could do standing meditation while doing prep or dishes - something that was impossible cooking on the line.

Still, of the 12 or so kitchens I worked at from 2001 to 2004, none of them was as gratifying as working in St. John’s Kitchen. The food was different everyday, and it was about giving. While the food was sometimes heavier on the carbs, it was food. When you’re hungry and poor, you cannot complain about your main source of food.

Overall, I gained a great deal of enlightenment cooking in a soul kitchen - kind of ideal, considering the name. I’m not saying that you should repeat my experience for the sake of it. What I am saying is that sometimes activities have stigmas attached purely out of fear. I mean, there are a lot of things in life you can do without, but what do you have left if you can’t afford to eat? People often talk negatively about “soup” kitchens because it scares them. Just don’t be afraid to do something you feel is necessary for you to do because of other people’s mis-perceptions or stigmas.