Remedy for Squash Vine Borers and Garden Updates

squash vine borers

burying the stem afterwards

One of my favorite activity is to walk by the garden and admire how well the plants are doing.  I also decide then what I can pick to serve the guests for lunch for that day. Today, I noticed that a couple of the squash plants looked wilted and made a note to myself to give them more water.  Luckily, Judy Fallows of Healthy Waltham ( http://www.healthy-waltham.org/)  came by and knew the plants didn't lack water, but had squash vine borers.  She showed me the telltale signs - little piles of yellow material (see the first photo) on the stem.  Judy took a sharp knife and slit the stem lengthwise to dig out the worm.  There were three worms in each of those two plants! On closer inspection, all the yellow squashes and zucchini plants were infected.  After I served lunch, I went to the garden and  I carefully cut into the stem like Judy instructed me.  Later, I buried the vines (see second photo) and  deeply watered each plant.  I don't know if this intervention will be successful, but I hope so because the plants were very productive.

red lettuce

kohlrabi

Next,  I pulled all the arugula plants because they were flowering and the leaves were very bitter.  Some people, like my staff Karen, love the taste of bitter arugula in her salad, but after I tasted a leaf, I thought it might be too harsh for the guests' palates.  At the same time I also pulled out all the red lettuce for our salad tomorrow. This allows for more sunlight for our cabbage and kohlrabi plants.  The tomato plants towered over the other plants heavy with their fruits.  After staking them, they were better neighbors.

Check out the Swiss chard, collard, kale, tomatoes, beans, beets and carrots!

Food Memories: Are Heirloom Tomatoes Worth The Buzz-and the Money

Today, while searching for the Boston Globe puzzle, I saw this  article on why heirloom tomatoes are so popular, while according to the author Beth Teitell, "with [other] popular varieties, the power of nostalgia bears fruit."  Ms. Teirell claims it is because this variety has been passed from one generation to another, probably from grandmother's garden to her kitchen that people are willing to pay heirloom prices for them.  Since this falls within this month's theme of food and memories, I thought I'd share this article with you.  See article below.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/food-dining/2012/07/24/are-heirloom-tomatoes-worth-buzz-and-money/yigf4uOy4nBS8wnJg9T3OM/story.html

Food Memories: Tiny and Almost Impalpable is the Essence of Memory

Catherine comes from a long line of strong, talented and visionary women and is the co-creator of this blog.

Tiny and Almost Impalpable is the Essence of Memory

July 22, 2012

As far as I can remember, my first thought upon waking every morning is “what shall I make for dinner today.”  I have always cooked for family, friends, holidays, social events and large gatherings of people.  Cooking was therapy and contact sport rolled into one.   Cooking was self-identity.  However, it was only recently that I understood the centrality of food in my life. 

During a rather dark time in my life, I was working in New York City and commuting home on weekends.  One snowy Friday night, I struck up a conversation with the taxi driver who was taking me home.   The driver asked what I plan to do for the weekend and I said:  read, drink tea and maybe make a large pot of chicken soup.  He then gave me his chicken soup recipe.  It sounded absolutely delectable.  So, I said:  Do you love to cook; and he said “yes” and that he used to own a restaurant.  At which point I remarked:  Oh, business must be slow; you are moonlighting, driving a taxi.  “No,” he said, “the restaurant was doing really well.  Customers loved my cooking.  But, after a while I just realized that I don’t enjoy cooking for people I don’t know and love.  Eventually, I started to dread cooking.  That’s when I decided to give up the restaurant, so I can keep my love of cooking.”

This was my “Madeleine” moment.  A moment best depicted by Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, when the smell and taste of a madeleine dipped in a cup of tea triggered a flood (6 volumes and over 3,000 pages) of forgotten childhood memories (http://www.geoffwilkins.net/proust/).  Growing up, I spent every school vacation with my grandparents – more specifically, in my grandmother’s kitchen.   My grandmother came from Shaoxing, China, not far south of Shanghai.  She cooked with fresh ingredients, deftly seasoned with just a touch of soy, sugar, sesame oil and family lore:  How she married my grandfather (He was the only man willing to marry a girl with big feet); how she and my mother escaped Japanese occupation (Your mother carried the family bedding that was bigger than she); and how she gave birth to ten children and only three daughters lived to adulthood.

Recalling each story, I can still taste her river shrimp with petite peas -- little jade pearls, so slippery to a child’s chopsticks, safely nestled against the pink succulence of the tiny shrimps, and all are enveloped in the comfort of silky egg white pillows.  Each ingredient, each color and each flavor is so alive that they shimmered like so many dew drops in morning sun.  Later, I learned to make pastas and dumplings from my mother, who never shied away from bold flavors or dishes that depended on perfect timing and technique for their success.   Every holiday, major or minor, secular or sacred, is reason enough to put on a large feast for her students or anyone who did not have family nearby.  Eventually, I was given the exclusive right to make pies and stuff turkeys for my mother’s holiday repasts. 

These days, I cook only simple foods for those I love.  No more big parties or showing off at social events.  No chasing after food feds.  I cook by thinking about the enjoyment I am to receive from my dinner companions, instead of the requirements set out in recipes.  I make my mother’s Zhajiang Mien (noodles with brown meat sauce) when my sister visits from Australia.  And, my college-aged son makes pumpkin pies for me for Thanksgiving – a dish he learned in first grade and, even since, has declared with great conviction his unwavering refusal to divulge the secret ingredient, notwithstanding that neither he nor I ever used a recipe for pumpkin pie.   

What I learned from the taxi driver – and Proust – is that cooking for family and friends is an act of love.  And, I would add, each time they eat the food we make, they reciprocate.  I have lost count of the “compliments” from my father after eating, with great showing of gusto, the eggs I made with ketchup, the soups I made with ketchup, the rice with ketchup, and the roast with ketchup….. No matter, each small, quotidian dish of food served and consumed adds to and strengthens the bond we have with each other.  This is why I am always touched by Proust’s realization that, “the smell and taste of things ….. tiny and almost impalpable [are] the essence of the immense architecture of memory.”  Because even after memories of many novel and exciting experiences have faded in our mind, there is the taste and smell of food that stand ready to remind us of the things we treasure the most.

Food Memories: Food is more than an essential of life

This is the first in a series of blogs on food and memories from friends, members and guests of the Community Day Center that we will be posting over the coming month.  We want to encourage readers to comment and share their food memories with us. – Marilyn and Catherine

 

Food Is More Than An Essential of Life

Our garden has provided us this spring and early summer with many wonderful and nutritious meals.  The red lettuce, peas, radishes, herbs, pansies, and nasturtium and arugula flowers have provided us with six meals of fresh crispy side salads for over 30 guests. Now these vegetables and flowers are looking tired so I have cleaned them out of the beds.  Due to the intense summer sun, the broccoli, spinach and arugula have flowered early and have been removed as well.  In their places, we have a row of robust kale with its beautiful spear shaped leaves.  In the next row, we have the Swiss chard with its attractive shiny green ribbed leaves and bright red stalks; and not to be outshone, the ornamental loose leaf collard greens. Peering out of the squash plants we can see the trumpet shaped flowers and the young yellow squash and bright green zucchinis.  In the next bed, the tomatoes are bearing fruit that are slowly turning from green to juicy red.

kale

Swiss chard

collards, tomatoes and squashes

 

Food is more than just essential to life.  It is also about our relationship with nature, about the economy, about border policies, about race, culture and religious struggles, and about memories and traditions to name a few.  Probably the centerpieces of our early memories for those who live in the United States and Canada are the large festive (and sometimes stressful) meals at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

My most vivid childhood memories are also associated with food.  My family and I immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong when I was five years old.  My mother scrimped and saved on all things, but food. She would walk a mile to Chinatown to purchase chicken from a live poultry store because she felt “freshly killed” was more nutritious than “packaged chilled chicken”. We had chicken a lot because in Chinese, the word for “chicken” is pronounce the same way as “luck.”  As we sat down for dinner, my mother would pick all the choice pieces of food to give to each of her three children.  When we were full, my mother would then finish eating. On my birthday, I knew my mother would give me the drumstick, my favorite piece!  Even though we never got birthday presents, I always felt special and loved by this act. 

Mom also regulated our health by giving us “cool” foods like watercress soup when we ate too many “hot” foods like potato chips.  (In Chinese food therapy, the belief is that some foods have hot or heat properties and others have cold or cooling effect on the body.  The imbalance of these properties would cause illness).  All year round she would make medicinal soups.  It would take hours to boil down a pot of herbs, meats and liquid down to five cups of broth. She would always know what we need to eat and drink to stay healthy.

It has been over 23 years since my Mom passed and I still miss the foods she made especially for me.  I guess it is true what the American food writer M.F.K. Fisher wrote,

It seems to me our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one. (Fischer, M.F.K. The Gastronomical Me. New York: North Point, 1989, p. ix.)

Many of our guests are excellent cooks, but do not have the money nor the kitchen facility to cook. Using the vegetables that have been flourishing in our garden, like, kale, Swiss chard and collard greens they have been able to give back and show their talents to everyone.  Craig Claireborne, the restaurant critic, food writer and former food editor of the New York Times was right on the mark when he said, “Cooking is at once child's play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love. 

Here are some of the foods we have made.  They are kale crisps, bacon with Swiss chard and kale, and stir-fry collard greens.  You can get recipes from the popular cooking sites like:  www.foodnetwork.com/.

 Kale Chips

Cut kale in small pieces

 

Add olive oil and salt

Bake at 275 for 20 min.

 Bacon with Swiss chard and kale

Crispen bacon

Stir fry some Swiss chard and kale, add broth

Good to eat

 Stir-fried Collards

Brown some onions

Stir fry some collards

Delicious meal in minutes

 Balsamic Vegetables Over Pasta

Jim sliced and fried squashes from the garden, added balsamic vinegar

Eric added tomatoes, basil with salt and pepper

Fresh vegetables from the garden!

 We invite you to add your favorite memories of food!!!

 

Organic Composting

Compost happens.  It’s a fact of life, but it may not mean what you think it means!  There are many misconceptions about compost -- what it is, what it’s good for, or what it smells like -- but once you understand it, you will realize just how important it is.

We composted our garden wastes, ie. radish stems, egg shells and coffee grounds

 
Let’s get one thing straight: compost is simply decomposed organic matter. Organic matter includes many different things in many different forms, but an easy way to think of it is anything that is -- or more accurately was --alive.  Examples are: grass clippings, raked leaves, apple cores, banana peels, coffee grounds, egg shells, animal manure, and newspaper. Some of these things are not thought of as having been alive, but remember that paper is made from trees, coffee comes from a plant, and animal manure is mostly digested grass.  What about meat, dairy, and cooked or processed foods?  Those will decompose too (except in certain cases -- see this article), but they are a little more complicated so many people choose not to include those things.  Still, given the right conditions, anything that was alive will decompose and become compost.

What is compost good for?  From a gardener’s perspective, having a lot of organic matter in the soil is vital for the health and productivity of plants.  It’s not something that you can add once and never think about again.  The nutrients get used up as the plants grow and need to be built up and replenished every year.  That’s why making your own compost is such a good idea.  It recycles waste from your home and garden, diverting it from municipal landfills, and it builds healthy, fertile soil in your garden.

So far so good, but many people still turn their noses up at the idea of compost.  Many people believe that if they make their own compost they will have to deal with bad smells, mess, pests, germs, worms, and manure.  It’s time to take a closer look at what compost is and how it works.

Organic matter doesn’t decompose by itself.  It takes many different kinds of organisms, collectively known as decomposers, to break down the organic matter into compost.  Decomposers fall into three categories: fungus, bacteria, and invertebrates (you can think of them as the “F.B.I. agents”). They include worms, mold, mushrooms, insects, spiders, and many important microscopic organisms. The role of decomposers cannot be overestimated.  For example, imagine if the leaves fell from the trees every autumn and there were no decomposers to break them down.  They’d continue blowing around and piling up year after year, and meanwhile, the trees would not be able to grow anymore because the nutrients wouldn’t be returned to the soil.  Decomposers are nature’s recyclers.  

The key to producing good-smelling, nutrient-rich compost is to make your decomposers “happy,” in other words, to create conditions that are right for them to do what they do naturally.  Like all living things, decomposers need the right kind of access to air, water, food and shelter.  Compost also requires a balance of carbon and nitrogen.  Only add things to a home composter that are easy for the decomposers to break down quickly, otherwise your compost will attract unwanted pests and may start to emit strong odors. The way you make your compost pile also dramatically affects the way it decomposes.  Turning over the compost pile gives the middle part access to oxygen, which makes it decompose faster and helps prevent odors that result from anaerobic decomposition.  A compost pile in direct sun may dry out too quickly, whereas one without drainage might become too soggy and drown the organisms inside.

The composters available on the market are designed to make it easy for people to create the right conditions to make good compost at home, no matter what their living situation is.  The common backyard composters are designed so that you add food scraps and yard waste at one end and simply remove decomposed organic matter to return to the soil at the other end.  They are made of heavy-duty plastic to keep out common urban pests, like raccoons and rats.  For people who live in an apartment, an enclosed vermicompost bin is probably the best option.  It is a controlled environment that uses only a special kind of earthworm to decompose the organic matter, releasing no odor at all when done correctly.  People who live in rural areas can make large outdoor compost piles without worrying about pests or odors, but they may need to turn them over occasionally with a tractor to allow oxygen to reach the inner parts.  

 

Day Center's backyard composter

There are also many creative low-cost do-it-yourself options for making compost.  The internet is a great resource for figuring out how, but there is no substitute for experience.  Go out and meet local gardeners. Find out what they do and then try it yourself.

What to add to a home composter	What to avoid adding to a home composter
- Vegetable scraps: carrot tops, potato peels, lettuce leaves, broccoli stems, onion skins, etc. - Limited amount of fruit scraps: apple cores, melon rinds, peach pits, watermelon seeds, orange peels, etc. - Egg shells - Coffee grounds - Newspaper - Grass clippings and some yard waste	- Fatty, oily, greasy food (including salad with dressing on it). - Dairy, meat, and processed foods. - Too much fruit (it will attract fruit flies) - Garden scraps with seeds - Tree branches or woody garden scraps (they take too long to decompose) - Inorganic materials: stickers, rubber bands, plastic packaging, metal, glass, etc.

This post is written by Nina Rogowsky from Healthy Waltham. You can contact Nina at nrogowsky@healthy-waltham.org .   For more information on Healthy Waltham, check http://www.healthy-waltham.org.
  
To contact the Community Day Center of Waltham, please email Marilyn at director@communitydaycenter.org.  Our Internet site is: www.communitydaycenter.org and/or follow us on Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/pages/Community-Day-Center-of-Waltham/

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Give Me Fruitful Error Full of Seeds

The Season of Hope:  A Community Day Center Blog on Food, Gardening and the Human Spirit

GIVE ME FRUITFUL ERROR FULL OF SEEDS

May 22, 2012

Over the last few weeks, many seeds in our garden have started to sprout.  First it was the radishes, standing in a tight row and jostling each other under the sun.  Then, come the pea shoots, swaying in the breeze, looking so gangly that we thought they might topple over.  Newly sprouted spinach make lame attempt to masquerade as fat blades of grass, while the collard greens and Swiss chard competed for our attention.  Even the potatoes are stirring in their most unnatural habitat of 2 synthetic bags.  We can spend all day marveling at the infinite possibilities these seedlings represent:  the promise of long, warm summer days; visits by butterflies and bees, the sharp crunch of that first bite into a radish; the sweetness of freshly steamed peas; spinach salad with plenty of beacon bits still warm.  Then, we read about two brothers in China who buy fresh vegetables from the market and turn them into musical instruments – carrot panpipes held together by leeks, Bok choy harmonica, yam ocarina, etc. – with which they perform concerts of traditional songs and modern pop tunes.  (To watch:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17340348).  We realized instantly that we have utterly misconstrued the potentials of vegetables and the purpose of seeds.

radishes and carrots in tight rows

pea tendrils

 

spinach

potatoes

Ask any one where does a plant’s potential lie and you are likely to hear the usual adage:  that the entire fruit is already present in the seed; or that from an acorn a mighty forest will grow; or that all the flowers of tomorrow are seeds of yesterday.  We are told to Judge each day not by the harvest we reap but by the seeds we plant.  So what is a seed?  A Botanist will say that a seed is the union of male and female genetic material from flower(s) and has three parts:  the rudiment of future roots, stem and leave; an energy reserve (which is why we find seeds so nutritious) that will enable growth; and an outer coating that protects the seed before it is ready to germinate.   A geneticist will say that a seed is the message that one generation of plants pass on to the next in a game of “broken telephone.” Overtime, that message --that is, the manifested characteristics of the plant -- is no longer the same as the original one.    Because of this tendency towards genetic variation over time, an ecologist will say that a seed is the plant’s ticket to travel.  Diversity is the plant’s investment in the future and its preparation for a changing world.  Through genetic diversity, it is possible for some dispersed seeds to establish themselves under new environmental conditions.  This is how flowering plants conquered the world. 

edible pansies

The sentimentalists in us would say a seed – like a person -- is a paradox.  To reach maturity and bear fruit, a seed requires light and dark, day and night, genesis and destruction.  It must break its protective outer layer, before it can begin a new live.  The poet Mary Sarton (http://www.languageisavirus.com/may-sarton/writer_interview_with_may_sarton.php  wrote:  “… to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, [we must] know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers.”  Each day, the guests at the Community Day Center live with light and darkness:  the darkness of living with little or no resources; the darkness of disability and addiction; and, the darkness of being relegated to the margin of our society.  But, there is also light:  the light of a warm and safe place that serves a satisfying meal; the light of acceptance and friendship; and the light of the Center staff who understands that life challenges more than it accommodates, so works to foster new life from destruction, self-sufficiency from crisis.

 In darkness, Richie confesses,“ I found it easier to cope by drinking and using substances to get me through the day…my military experiences…my divorce,”. Angel wants to work, but people are not hiring.  The economy is pretty bad so it is hard to get a job. “I am an alcoholic.  Sometimes I put myself in bad shape and depression doesn’t help.”   Jay has been through detox and rehab, but said they weren’t what he needed.” That is why I come here (Day Center) all the time because I feel like this is family. I am not alone when I am here.  You did it.  You put that lump in my throat.  That is why I love this place. I keep that happy face when I am here.  As hard as this is for me, well this is my medicine too,” said Jay.

Even as our guests are taking one step in front of another to escape homelessness, they are shedding light to others.  Not with money because they don't have much, but more importantly of themselves. When a man was left at the bus stop, Patrick brought him to the Day Center and showed him where to go for food and services. Once in a while Steven would purchase deli meat and tomatoes from this food stamps to add to our grilled cheese sandwiches. Ron, Bernard, Oswaldo help us with planting and watering the plants in our garden. Others like Jay, Angel, Walter would unload my groceries, clean the kitchen or bring out the trash.  Each of our guests do this without complaints (my children, are you reading this?) because they believe and appreciate what we are doing at the Center.

Yet, if we think of light more broadly, we will see how our guests at the Center also shed light on our world.  (Just as we now see vegetables as food as well as musical instruments.) Reflecting on Emily’s blogs from the week of May 14th, we see that our guests taught us a great deal about how we make decisions under the condition of extreme resource limitation.  Our food choice is driven by a multiplicity of factors among which consideration of health must compete with the exigencies of hunger, cost, availability of free food, and accessibility to ready-made food.  Emily’s interviews with our guests revealed that how we prioritize is often a function of how we must manage our immediate circumstances; and this affects our ability to balance short-term satisfaction against long-term benefits. Importantly, Emily’s blog also points out that, absent knowledge, our good intentions may not translate into the best charitable actions we can take – e.g., donating sweet, high caloric food to shelters and soup kitchens.  With this understanding, we can begin to chart a way forward to advocate for and provide healthy food for our guests.  In a larger arena, such understanding can guide the development of policy and social safety network that has at its heart the actual experience and perception of the people to be served.   Vilfredo Pareto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency), whose development of the concept of economic efficiency is revered by generations of economists, declared:   Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.  This time, the economist is right.

Healthy Food Project: Methodology

Here Emily Mead, our intern, is setting the stage and context of the experiment to eat healthy on limited resources- so that her readers will understand the importance of her experiment, why it needs to be done and how her methodology fits in to what she is trying to find out.  We thought it was important to show you her interviews with our guests. Although it is a small sampling of guests, these interviews reveal that their food choices are made based on numerous factors.

Healthy Food Project: Interviews by Emily Mead

In embarking on the next few days where I will be experiencing the way in which an average guest at the Waltham Community Day Center eats everyday, I thought I would interview some guests to find out their perspective and facts on their eating lifestyles. Their lifestyles usually involve food stamps. People can apply for food stamps and depending on their income and living situations they are given a certain amount of money per month on a card, called a food stamp, which they can use at certain grocery stores for food that is not pre-made/hot, expect for some prepared sandwiches at particular places. Along with questions pertaining to food stamps and their daily meals, I asked questions regarding their lives in general. David was whom I interviewed first…

DAVID:

            David is living alone in elderly housing and drives his Mom’s car. Because of his arthritis and other health conditions including being bipolar and schizophrenic, he is eligible for public housing. He receives thirty-two dollars on every 8^th of the month on his food stamp. He shared that this thirty-two dollars “is gone in a couple of days.” He has not been going to the Salvation Army lately for breakfast. But, he will sometimes have a bowl of cereal in the mornings at his home. He mostly “lives off meals at the Day Center” where he is getting snacks and lunch. Today at the Day Center, he had three slices of cheese pizza and a piece of cake and some coffee. The Day Center is open from 1:30-4:30 and lunch is served at 1:30. So, David says that he usually gets hungry around noon since he has a “small breakfast and late lunch.” After being at the Center, David usually goes to the Bristol Lodge Soup Kitchen for dinner, which is about a two-minute walk from the Center.

            As for David’s grocery shopping he usually will go out shopping each month and buys a large amount of food because he has a place where he can store it. He will also go to the grocery store for snacks such as, coke and a cupcake, or a soda and a banana. He buys snacks at least twice a day and spending about 15 dollars everyday on these snacks. All of his grocery shopping will usually cost him 100 dollars per month. He receives 800 dollars per month from SSDI (Social Security Disability Income), which allows him to be able to pay for the rest of his groceries. He has been on SSDI for about 20 years and says, “If you are an alcoholic or drug addict, you should be on it.” What he means by this is that alcoholics and drug addicts should have a place where they can go to get help; if not SSDI than another sort of program.

            Besides food, it costs David $1.25 per wash at the laundry mat in the elderly housing. And he does not want to get a job because then his rent will go up and he will not receive as much money from the SSDI.

            Although David says he is usually “thinking and worrying a lot about money and food,” he was conscious that I had not had any pizza and asked if I wanted some.

PAUL:

            The next man that I interviewed was Paul. He does not have a car, and instead of the buses, he chooses to walk everywhere. He lives in an apartment and receives 57 dollars on his food stamp every month. He goes to Hannaford’s for coffee, the Salvation Army for breakfast, the Center for lunch on Mondays and Wednesday’s and the Soup Kitchen for dinner. He doesn’t do a lot of shopping, and so he does not spend much money per day on food. He says he is “sustained” by the meals that are served to him and so he doesn’t need much snacks. He does not buy much food for his apartment either. Right now, he has milk and pork chops in his fridge.

            He spends $1.25 to wash his clothes in the basement of the apartment next door. He is not worrying about food and money, because of the meals that he gets. Also, the SSDI gives him $1,367 a month. Since he has been clean and sober for 2 years and 5 months, he doesn’t spend his money on “cocaine, marijuana or alcohol.” He will have a beer occasionally, but he hasn’t had one in a long time. “Enough is enough,” he said and so he has impressively been clean and sober for a long time.

            He is unemployed, but doesn’t really mind because he says, “it’s like a big vacation.” Although he says his life does get boring sometimes, because he doesn’t have much to do. But, he is not lonely. He has a girlfriend that lives in Natick, who he sees on the weekends.

            He doesn’t feel judged and his lifestyle didn’t change what he thinks of himself or humanity. He is content with himself and goes by day instead of thinking long term.

DAVE:

            Dave was the next person that I interviewed. He lives in a rooming house in Waltham. He receives “200 dollars and something” on his food stamp each month, but doesn’t buy much food. At night, he usually goes to Tedeschi’s and buys a soda and cookies. Dave always decides to buy soda and cookies simply because he likes those things the best. He doesn’t care about healthy food because the soda and cookies “taste better.” However, he will choice some of Tedeschi’s healthy pre-made sandwiches sometimes. He doesn’t have breakfast and so he is always hungry for lunch at the Day Center. He will go to the Soup Kitchen for dinner every “once in a while.” However, he has a lot of friends including a lot of the Waltham Police officers, who will take him out for dinner very often.

            He does not have a charge for his housekeeper, who washes his clothes. He is developmentally delayed and qualifies for Medicare, MassHealth and SSDI. His family got SSDI for him and he has a social worker that manages his money. He is not worrying about the long term; he just takes his life one day at a time.

BARNARD:

            I also interviewed a man named, Barnard. He has three daughters, one son, three grandsons and nephews. He stays in touch with all of his family members and spends a lot of time with his one grandson and nephews that live in Waltham, so he doesn’t find himself feeling lonely. He has SSDI, which he says provides him with “barely” enough money. He has a car and lives in a shelter in Cambridge and receives $140 on his food stamp every month. The shelter provides breakfast, which he eats every morning. He doesn’t usually come to the Day Center for food. He usually goes to the Soup Kitchen for food (snacks and dinner). He usually spends around $10-$12 on snacks, such as subs and soda from grocery stores around the Day Center. He likes to think long term, so he “stocks up the fridge” from the food pantry where he volunteers.

            He does not feel judged in the sense that people look at him funny, but does not like all authority because they “look at you like you’re inhumane.” He finds that some people who run shelters “take advantage of their job and their power to kick you out of the shelter.” He says those that abuse their power are “evil.” But some are fine.

            He enjoys volunteering at the Day Center, Soup Kitchen, etc. He is an electrician, but because of his health he cannot do very much regarding that profession. But, he says he “needs a job.”

            After 20 years he found his son. He was an alcoholic and a drug addict and has been clean for a long time because he was “tired” and “didn’t want to be around his grandkids and children with alcohol and drugs.”

            He shares that he is “going to be alright” and said, “I’ve learned to survive with what I got.” He says that he is happy and can’t worry because since he is at his low he can “only come up.” Barnard told me to always be thankful for what I have, something that he has always kept dear to his heart.

RON: 

            I interviewed a man named, Ron, as well. Ron lives under a bridge in Waltham. He is 51 and does not worry about healthy eating. He has health insurance and MassHealth. He receives $200 a month on his food stamp. He is a war Veteran for the U.S. Navy and so he “knows how to survive.” He goes to the Day Center for lunch, but he also volunteers there. He buys coffee and tea at the convenient stores, where its cheaper. He does not get any hunger pains and so he does not buy many snacks. When he does use his food stamps he purchases juice and sandwiches. He does not go to the Soup Kitchen because he eats all the food he needs at the Day Center. He broke his hip and so he cannot do many jobs.

            He has a “game plan” for the “short term” because his fiancé is a hospice nurse in Florida, where he will be joining her in the summer. The “separation is hard,” but they are very excited to see each other.

            Because Ron was in the U.S. Navy he knows how to “sustain himself.” He says his lifestyle works for him because “he knows how to do it.” He grew up in a household that always said, “man up.”

            He does not like shelters. He did not like the Veteran shelter because he said some people there were “too needy” and that there was too much “riff raff.” He made a point that he was doing this interview out of the kindness of his heart and was not looking for any money or curious to who I was and what money I could give him, as he said some others would probably be wondering.

            He is content with his life. He goes to the library, where he reads often. He is in touch with his daughter, who is a marine biologist. He is not acclimated to the Internet and email, but he can use his phone just fine. He used to play golf and hockey. He is a big baseball fan. He is a fan of the Red Sox, but mostly of the Chicago Cubs. He says his lifestyle is “not the way a human being should live, but that he can adapt” because of his experience in the navy.

            As you can see, there are many different lifestyles of these people. I can always expect there to be food in my house, but many people have to walk a distance to get meals, or think about managing their food stamps to make sure their stomach is full. I won’t take food for granted again.