The Meth Lunches Quotes

“We never made caring for the most vulnerable of our people part of American culture.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“We need to think with greater complexity, more nuance, less judgment. Fewer knee-jerk reactions to punish and vilify.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“Success created more success. Not policing. Not incarceration. Not fear. Not hopelessness. Not punishment. Not behavior modification.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“We need to think with greater complexity, more nuance, less judgment. Fewer knee-jerk reactions to punish and vilify. We need to change how we see people in our communities. It is not on people in crisis, or who are struggling, to bend to us. Our role as a society is to bend for them. To make accommodations. So they can be in the world, too.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“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? How can we pry down into the things that are real between us if we are afraid of the uncomfortable? How can we have intimacy with the people we love if we can’t look into the ugliest parts of them and ourselves?”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“The United States has low social capital because we have “enormous wealth, enormous income inequality, high crime,” Sapolsky writes. Add to that: the rich in our country prefer “private affluence” and living separately while tolerating “public squalor” for everyone else.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“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.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“The misdemeanor system in the United States is a tracking device. This system has always had a fraught history. Originally it was created to monitor and police Black people after Reconstruction. Black people, after the end of their enslavement, began to work and create lives for themselves. They created wealth and communities, and that was powerfully threatening to white folks in power. The white people in charge couldn’t force people to work or stay in line. Misdemeanors were created. 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. And it helped feed a system for free involuntary labor—if you arrest someone for a petty theft, for stealing a loaf of bread, you can impose lots of fines that you know they cannot pay. They will have to work off their debt, thereby creating free forced labor.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“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.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“Trauma itself was the issue.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“As Andrew Solomon wrote in one of my favorite books ever, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity: “People who see and acknowledge the darkness in those they love, but whose love is only strengthened by that knowledge, achieve that truest love that is eagle-eyed, even when the views are bleak.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“Never give the homeless money.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“The Snake Pit, a 1948 movie starring Olivia de Havilland, portrayed the treatment of a young woman thrown into a cruel psych ward. The Shame of States, a book written by journalist Albert Deutsch, was an examination of the brutality of mental hospitals. Add to that Life magazine’s “Bedlam 1946,” a long, clearly told exposé that outlined the atrocities happening inside mental institutions.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“community care centers”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“President Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“The McKinney-Vento Act, which provides certain rights to children in precarious housing situations, stipulates that children living in motels, as well as campgrounds, cars, public spaces, substandard or abandoned housing, are considered “unhoused.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“In 1997, the Clinton administration enacted the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA).”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City

“Baby Scoop Era. I was one of two million white babies adopted out during the 1960s in the United States. This was a few years after loosened sexual rules and the invention of the pill, but before the 1972 ruling allowing unmarried people the right to use the pill. Roe v. Wade, which provided for legal abortions, would happen a year later.”
― Kim Foster, The Meth Lunches: Food and Longing in an American City