The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

by Kim Foster

Because it brings together different kinds of food—from ramen to chips to beans—it is more food than one person can eat. It requires inmates chipping in food they pick up from the commissary. It is made together. It is eaten together. And its existence creates a social gathering that is powerful and “outside” the system.

This makes her viscerally angry. “They didn’t care if she survived or starved,” Destiny says. “No one cares about you in jail. That stays with you for a long time.”

Perhaps this is the most inhumane part of incarceration: that it isn’t enough to take someone’s freedom, we are hell-bent on taking their dignity as well.

Part of the burden of being poor is having to work around the system, because the mechanics of the system are so biased against you.

Small infractions and made-up offenses, like loitering or vagrancy, allowed white people to police where Black people could be. How they lived. Where they walked.

Turns out that feeding people is love. Not the food itself. Love is the act of feeding someone.

The baby with a secure attachment, according to John Bowlby’s well-referenced attachment theory, is the baby who gets consistent reactions to their crying.

When you dig into dysfunctional families, you often find blurred lines between the oppressor and oppressed, victim and perpetrator.

How are we to think of people who are both hurt and hurt others? When we know the first hurt helped cause the second?

Disability is humanity.

The truth is that people who come from traumatic family situations, including mental illness, extreme trauma, and addiction, are sometimes incredibly difficult to love. Or like. Or even sometimes see as human. But being human is intrinsically a part of mental illness. It’s important not to lose sight of that.

We almost always love our parents. No matter what they do to us. Raffi, the boy who is settling into our lives with his baby sister, Desi, loves his mother, too. No matter what she does or doesn’t do. He will always love her. But because Estrella was severely mentally ill, Johnnie can’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t do it on purpose. So, the only place for the pain is to turn it all inward. Onto herself.

“I don’t have favorite foods because food goes away, so why bother.” This is how food and attachment mirror each other. In these conversations, you can substitute any food with love and attachment. She could just as easily have said, “I don’t have favorite people because they go away, so why bother.”

He forgets about being hungry. For a minute. Because feeding him and giving him love are the same thing. They are the same. Intertwined, and substitutions for each other.

I tell her about all his therapy appointments and doctor visits. All the things she tried. “What makes us think we will be any different for this kid?” And she says the thing that maybe is the most life-changing thing that anyone has ever said to me: “Maybe he doesn’t need four therapy sessions a week?” she asked no one in particular. “What if he needs a family where he can just be a kid?”

The desert welcomes all the parched people. They come to Vegas to hustle the streets. To blend in. To disappear.

They see her unruly, impolite behaviors and label her “dangerous.” They avoid her. Stay away. They do not help her. They leave her twisting in the tornado of her life and are not at all shocked when she cannot right herself.

I’m juggling anger and empathy as we negotiate.

hold all of that in me. Love and rage. I’m sure she has both love and rage for me, too. This is how we stay in this together. Chrissy and I are connected, irretrievably, by the most severe extremes of our emotions.

For my son and many kids in the system, fast-food restaurants offer comfort. They provide consistency and permanence in their unpredictable lives. The burger always tastes the same. The nuggets. The fries. They never change. And wherever you go, whatever family takes you in this time, no matter how many times you move, the Play Place rocks the same colors. The same netting. The same slides and tunnels. The same smell. The same place to take off your shoes and push them into the little shoe holder that is the same in every franchise.

This is where the complexity of McDonald’s as a company comes in, because in many ways it is a restaurant that offers a safe space to people not usually allowed to have safety in public spaces.

This helps folks flex the social muscle that keeps them from being and feeling isolated.

It is forcing people to sit in their powerlessness and inequity and be mindful of it.

The system is incentivized for adoption by the foster parents, not the families of origin. There is less incentive for agencies to pursue reunification.

Instead of foster families working with families of origin to get children as quickly back into their homes as possible, foster parents are given all kinds of messages that the kids in their care are better off with them.

What does this even mean—to deserve food?

But with no money, you are at everyone’s whim. You control very little. You are at the mercy of everybody. You are poor. And you feel it.

“It’s not about being poor. It’s about feeling poor, which is to say, it’s about feeling poorer than others around you.”

According to Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and the guy who coined the term, social capital is “a fundamental building block of democracy.”

The reciprocity is integral. It mitigates shame and feeling like you are poor.

Words like heirloom, organic, local may exude certain privileges, but the joy of food is not a privilege. We do not think people who are experiencing poverty should experience joy—or the full range of emotions—with their food.

Leanne Brown’s spectacular cookbook Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day, a book that anyone can access for free as a PDF. In the book, published in 2015 as part of her master’s thesis, she writes that she “designed these recipes to fit the budgets of people living on SNAP.…

“The median duration of poverty is 11 months,” Edwards tweets, quoting from the report, “meaning the majority of people who become poor, are poor less than a year.”

Being poor is not really about food or money. It is about housing. It will always be about housing. Any solution for poverty, food scarcity, and hunger that doesn’t involve housing is not a solution.

Housing is important because it soaks up a family’s income. This is what connects it to food and stability. It’s about what’s left over. If you have an affordable rent for your income, then maybe you have enough for food and necessities. If you are struggling to pay rent, then you are also struggling to feed and care for your family.

Poverty is a policy choice. We have poverty because we choose to have it.

What we really want is to maintain a compliant, silent workforce that is dutiful, does the dirty work, and stays quiet, subservient, and works for cheap.

Restaurants run, quite literally, on the charity of their guests.

We—those of us in the middle and upper classes—need a certain part of the population to stay poor, because that’s how we fill low-wage shitty jobs that we don’t want to do.

But it’s more than that. It’s how we negotiate our needs and wants. It means asking ourselves about all the luxuries we have, and what it means to keep them in our lives. We have to ask: Who is working their ass off in shit conditions for shit wages just to make sure our feet look good? Our meal is served? Our toilets are washed? Our kids are cared for?

Knowing people—really knowing them—is formed in the ugly minute-to-minute of living together. Becca doesn’t know Cecily Rose. Becca grieves her inability to care for her. To really know who she was. She grieves the loss of parenting her.

The gateway to homelessness is crisis.

I don’t know if she will ever make it back to Hawaii, except in her longing.

I am able to offer Becca the privilege of my housed status. Just by showing up in a car and appearing housed, the guard gives me respect that he will not give Becca.

The first ten years of her life, she is everywhere and nowhere. It appears to me that homelessness has been the dominating theme of the first decade of her life, something that has settled into the nooks and crannies of her brain. Instability is her stability.

The food you ate told you where you were in the strata. It marked your place. And your worth.

The connection between gut health and schizophrenia has been studied for decades. Researchers know there is a connection. But the research is still in its infancy. Still, scientists think schizophrenia could be an autoimmune disease in the same way celiac disease is an autoimmune disease.

The idea is not to sedate and create compliant people. It’s to help people thrive and be alive in their communities.

“Gursha ena feker siyaschenik naw,” is the saying she uses. I look it up later. It’s an old Amharic saying that means “love comes with a bit of discomfort.” This is an apt description of “the table” for me. Connection exists alongside the uncomfortable. Intimacy sits next to dysfunction.

If there is no tension, no discomfort or disagreement, then how will we know the ins and outs of each other? If there is no challenge. No friction. No mess or chaos. Then how can we get under the skin to the good stuff?