Speaking of food ...
We spent the afternoon with our wonderful "son," Alain. He's our almost 20-year-old son from Rwanda who is a college student. We have hardly seen him since Christmas break because he has a very demanding course load, and he got a job on campus in the cafeteria "caf." (We are his American family. He has his own very loving and wonderful family back home in Kigali).
I took him to Wal-Mart today for some supplies, which included a hair product that neither one of us knew about but another guy on campus told him to get. He found the product, then we went to another part of the store for the next item on his list and got that. The next item on his list was a hair brush ... which happened to be on the same aisle as the first item! We just laughed and got a lot of exercise and cart maneuvering experience. We learn.
Earlier today I asked him how he liked his job and whether he's learning a lot about food service. Oh yes, he said.
A few hours later he asked if maybe I knew why something was occurring that was troubling him very much.
Why do they throw out the food?
How do you answer that to a young man who comes from a country that suffers widespread poverty (hunger) ... where many families continue to cook over an open fire ... and where the basic diet consists of beans and rice and tubar vegetables? (Not pizza, chicken fried steak, dill pickles, 125 choices on a restaurant menu, and 37 choices of chips in the grocery store aisle).
While I am very patriotic and love our country (and have a little entry coming about that later), this is ANOTHER one of those instances where I am embarrassed to explain another Americanism to him.
The answer, according to me, was that basically it is way more convenient to throw out the food than to deal with it - deal with storing it, deal with parceling it out to the needy.
And, I guessed, there are so many regulations governing food, that they are likely not allowed to give away the prepared food. I don't even know that this is true, but it probably is. That too is embarrassing to explain .... we don't give hungry people our delicious cooked food because should it make someone ill ... we will be liable and have consequences.
But he understood. What a drag.
I did encourage him to ask those questions on campus, maybe to the "caf" personnel for the real answers ... maybe he'll start something positive. A movement to share the food and share the wealth.
Posted in: on Sunday, March 04, 2007 at at 5:18 PM
