Day One

When Eliot Spitzer was elected governor of New York last fall, he assured everyone that things would begin to change on Day One. Many of us are of the opinion things haven't changed much.

Things changed for me on Day One. I work at a community center and, among other things, we operate a community dining room (Loaves & Fishes Dining Room). Some would call it a soup kitchen. I had to work over there today and, though we make every effort to serve nutritious food, not much of it is local. Our food choices are often dictated by what is available at the local food bank and what has been discarded and subsequently donated by local grocery stores.

When I work over there, I often check out the selection of desserts. I usually have one. Today I arrived just before we started to serve and there was this beautiful chocolate cake with cherries on top served up ready to go. I walked over ready to help myself to a piece when suddenly, I remembered this is Day One! No cake for me. Who knows where the chocolate and the flour and the cherries and the sugar and the whipped cream came from? No one in that kitchen knew. So instead, I worked through lunch and went back to my office and heated up the leftover beans and rice I had brought from home. I sure did miss that chocolate cake!

One of the things Jon and I decided before we started was that whatever we already had in the house when we started was fair game. We had already purchased it, so it made sense to eat it. Wasn't I lucky to find some potato chips in my office after I finished the beans and rice? Not many, but a few. They were followed by some raisin, sunflower seed, pumpkin seed mix. So, I was still able to have a bit of a snack mid-afternoon that wasn't local, but had already been purchased.

Things have already changed. Too bad it wasn't so easy for the governor!