Sense and Sensibility

Soup Kitchen Chef Takes No Guff

The kielbasa floats on the surface of the boiling water and curls, like a skinny circus balloon. The caldron is big and the kitchen is hot and when the steam rises it seeps into the deep folds under Emmett Reid’s hound-dog eyes, turning them rheumy and pink. Reid sweeps a red-handled pair of tongs over the bubbling water, clamps one about the middle, plucks the sausage out of the pot and lays it gently in a deep aluminum pan, where it joins a dozen others.

Reid used 19, maybe 20 packages of kielbasa today; he lost count. When you’re cooking for 300, which Reid does almost daily at the Greater Waterbury Interfaith Ministries Soup Kitchen, you can do that. Plus, Reid is 82, and while he hasn’t lost much upstairs, he’s learned when to keep quiet.

His cooking, for instance. It’s succulent and aromatic and will stick with you for a day on the streets, or under a tent, or until the big brick shelter opens on Benedict Street in Waterbury’s South End. Reid learned it at his grandmother’s elbow [--] his grandmother who raised him after his mother moved on. He grew up in Tuskegee, Ala., and can’t remember a day of being hungry. His family raised hogs and tended a farm. You’d be surprised how ingenious you could be with food that popped out of the earth and a grandma who knew how to cook it right.

 ”Whassat?” Reid says, motioning toward a peeled potato floating in warm, creamy water. Marty Litschauer, who is 90 and has learned not to argue with Reid, lifts his eyebrows. Reid plunges a gloved hand into the pan of potatoes and yanks out a medium-sized one, marked with a black dot, about the size of a fly. Reid sneers.

“Rich, don’t do that,” Reid says to Rich Marquis, today’s potato peeler. Reid chucks the potato in the trash. “You know I don’t go for that.”

Reid can spot a defect six feet away. “If I can’t eat it, I don’t give it to nobody else,” he says, grabbing a 12-inch kitchen knife and heading toward the coils of kielbasa. It’s just after 10 on this overcast, humid Wednesday, and most of the staff in the Soup Kitchen are sweating. That includes Reid, who has worked as a cook for the kitchen for the last three years through Maturity Works, and Marquis and Litschauer, who work for Greater Waterbury Interfaith Ministries. They are supported in this by the silent, plodding labor of Diane Drankeley, a volunteer at the kitchen for nearly 20 years. Most of the men, like Reid, are paid for 15 hours of work, and put in nearly another 10 of their own time. A good 10 other workers, cobbled together from Waterbury Youth Services, Alternative to Incarceration clients and volunteers, staff this soup kitchen, a highly choreographed undertaking supervised by Barbara Dublin.

The hungry who come here [--] who have been, since the beginning, mostly single white men [--] are out of work, or in treatment, or on the streets or in some other way impoverished. Dublin, executive director here, has seen an increase of 75 to 125 new people a month [--] an appalling number of them children. The roads that led the hungry here are elaborate and simple, convoluted and tragic. Many are lonely and taciturn and stare into their two scoops of tuna salad intently, shielding themselves from eye contact, or conviviality, or pity. Others are genial and garrulous, swapping cookies donated by Sweet Maria’s or asking for loaves of bread donated by Freihofer’s Bakery. For many, like Ed White, it is their only meal of the day.

“These people are very righteous people,” White says of the volunteers. “They don’t put you down because you’re homeless. I’m not apologizing about being homeless; I put myself in this predicament…..Without this church, I’d be lost. I’d be nothing but skin and bones.”

In the kitchen, there is little contact, because there is so much work. Reid, a tall, lanky black man with a gray, die-size goatee and belted wool pants that sag at the back end, has been here since 7:30. For years he cooked at a U.S. Army base in Fort Benning, Ga. He ran a bar for awhile. He cut hair. He married [--] five times. About his cooking, he will only look wryly out of the corner of his eye, bring his index finger to his lips and shake his head. “I don’t tell no secrets,” he says. “You too nosey.”

“He follows his own clock,” says Dublin of Reid. “So he’s here two hours early. He’s here on his days off. He wants everything to be perfect.”

Nobody in the kitchen of St. John’s Episcopal Church talks about faith. They don’t talk about corporal or spiritual acts of mercy or obligation to the poor. They talk about potatoes and four-pound cans of tuna and how long the beans need to be heated up. Nobody calls Reid “chef.” Everybody knows he’s just the “cook.” And nobody, not even Dublin, needs to tell him what kind of cook he is.

“I don’t care if nobody like it. I cook it. They don’t like it; they don’t have to eat it.” He whistles slightly as the steam licks his forehead. “Everybody find out that I’m cooking, they be here all the time. When I cook chicken?” He raises his eyebrows and shakes his head. “When I cook chicken, they run over me.”

c, Republican American,2009.

Cut the Fat Out

This month, the Fox network premiered “More to Love,” a ” Bachelor”-like reality show about a 330-pound guy who tries to find love amid the pathetically portly. It is not exactly “The Fat Bachelor” [Dash] Fox uses the term “brawny” but we all know spin when we hear it.

Fox insists it created “More to Love” to give all those “average-sized” Americans a chance to elbow in on its bordello board game, but the average American woman is a size 14, which looks like a number these women haven’t seen since high school. Fox insists it wants to give the corpulent their own Cinderella moment, but its mawkish emphasis on the women’s heft is super-sized condescension with a side order of exploitation.

“I don’t want to be alone,” one of the women splutters. “I really, really,” she stops to collect herself, “want to have that love story.” Another tearfully admits she’s “never had a second date,” [Dash] all because, well, she’s fat.

Fox doesn’t use that term, of course [Dash] they refer to the women as “voluptuous” and “curvy,” but a gander at these gals and their soppy tales, and you understand that what Fox is serving up is patronizing pathos. Unfortunately, the message it is sending its viewers is that once your dress size hits the double digits, you sex life dips into sub-Arctic territory.

Fox executives know that if we wanted to see “average” people, we’d be at the mall. In the privacy of our own living room, the rears we want to see in our window had better be broad as a barn or flat as a plasma TV. Twenty-first century television is all about exploitation of the outlandish, which is why TV broadcasts only two sizes of women [Dash] greyhound-thin and Greyhound bus.

Television is gorging on the plump this season. In addition to “More to Love,” there is also Lifetime’s “Drop Dead Diva,” a “Shallow Hal” rip-off in which an airhead model dies in a car crash and is transformed into an intelligent fatso. (There’s a thumb-sucker: Which would you rather be? Skinny and dopey or fat and brainy; evidently, it’s one or the other.) Oxygen is weighing in with “Dance Your Ass Off,” in which chunky contestants attempt to bump and grind their behinds away. It is not a pretty picture.

It is not intended to be. There’s nothing more magnetizing than a freak show, which may be behind the Oxygen network’s phenomenal success with the program. It recorded its largest audience ever for a series premiere, with 1.3 million total viewers. Who would have guessed that getting a 257-pound woman to stand on a scale in a jog bra and shorts would captivate so many voters? Part of the allure is what I call the “At-least-I’m-not” phenomenon. That’s the feeling you get when you’re feeling a bit paunchy and you see someone on the street the size of an SUV. “Sure, I could lose a few pounds, but at least I’m not as big as that.”I’m convinced that the reason television traffics in extremes is because we enjoy indulging two private visions of ourselves [Dash] the diaphonous vixen and the over-upholstered frump. In self-image, as in politics, there is no middle-of the-road any more.

Just do a little channel surfing. The only shows more widespread on American TV than shows about weight loss, are shows about cooking. This country, two-thirds of whose adults are overweight or obese, has an entire cable network devoted to food. The Food Network reaches just under 100 million American homes. On most nights, the network grabs more viewers than any of the cable news channels. That does not include the $25 billion worth on food and drink advertising spent annually in the U.S., where food is the second-largest advertiser in the economy.

More than 62 percent of American women are overweight, and plenty of them have had more than one date. Some are smart; some are dumb; some are on a permanent diet; some have given up hope. Many have eating disorders, which can seem a perversely logical extension of a society that taunts you with food and then lashes you for indulging in it. Perhaps the only lesson to be drawn from these grotesque simulacra of concern is that we all need to go on a diet.

And the first thing to cut out is reality TV.

Reach Tracey O’Shaughnessy at Tracey@traceyosh.com