A remarkable diary on Daily Kos reveals just how spiteful, vicious, and mendacious right-wingers can be.
Diarist Calouste discovered a post by Matt Yglesias commenting on a piece in the National Review Online wherein the writer, Julie Gunlock (perfect last name for a wingnut, no?), complains about poor people receiving decent food at shelters and food kitchens that receive government stimulus funds. Calouste didn't stop with the NRO piece but went on to use The Google (something apparently never mastered by wingnuttia) to discover the truth behind Gunlock's hit job.
Let's start at the beginning. Gunlock whines in her NRO opinion piece that food kitchens are throwing away food and feeding the poor gourmet meals, all this to the detriment of job-holding, wage-earning taxpayers. Relaying the shocking news that Miriam's Kitchen, which serves the homeless in Washington, D.C. and was recently visited by Michelle Obama, throws away donated donuts, Gunlock says:
All the same, that dismissal of donuts betrays an expanding food snobbery that once was confined to food magazines and ladies who lunch, but now is showing up in the unlikeliest of places, like food banks and homeless shelters.
Yes, why not let the poor eat transfat-laden donuts? Why should they get mushroom risotto (actually an inexpensive dish)? According to Gunlock, we're sending the message that donated food might get thrown away! The horror! Serving nutritious, tasty food to the poverty-stricken is "food snobbery." As Yglesias says,
It’s actually rare that conservatives get to combine their hatred of poor people with their hatred of “cultural elites” in a single argument . . .
Perhaps Miriam's Kitchen is trying to send the message that the homeless, too, deserve nutritious meals, not just junk food that's truly bad for your health. Perhaps Miriam's Kitchen is trying to raise donors' consciousness about what kinds of foods to donate. But for Gunlock, this is nonsense, because the poor evidently don't deserve good food. If they eat the kind of food she eats, then what becomes of the signifiers of class and status?
Gunlock then goes on to single out Meet Each Need with Dignity (MEND) in Pacoma, CA:
A recent meal served at the Meet Each Need with Dignity (MEND) kitchen in Pacoima, Calif., included pumpkin soup seasoned with browned butter and sage, red-wine barbecue beef on handmade puff pastry, artichoke hearts with meatballs marinara, roasted-garlic-and-turnip mashed potatoes, all topped off with fresh blueberries and sour cream. No wonder these places need a bailout.
Ah, but Kos diarist Calouste did a little digging and discovered that (1) MEND is supported strictly by private donations, not by government funds; and (2) the very creative chef there, Richard Weinroth, in five months spent only $200 of MEND's budget!
Weinroth's creations are made mostly with foods donated by local markets. Notice, too, that pumpkin, turnips, and potatoes are inexpensive, and that barbecued beef can be made from the cheapest of cuts, long-simmered and no more expensive than the ground beef that provides the basis of many a soup kitchen meal. Red wine can be purchased cheaply (Two-buck Chuck, anyone?); puff pastry, if made with donated butter, doesn't have to be costly.
No, what Ms. Gunlock objects to is poor people eating the kind of food she eats. No, wait, she's not a liberal, so she doesn't eat that "elitist" stuff (like arugula and Grey Poupon), right? Riiiiiight ...
I don't know whether Julie Gunlock deliberately distorted the facts here, or whether she is so blinded by her disdain for the poor and her horror that they should be allowed to eat "gourmet" food that she really didn't even take in those facts.
Either way, her NRO piece demonstrates that right-wingers feel that such items as browned butter and puff pastry should be reserved for the upper classes, while donuts and canned ravioli are good enough for poor, hungry people who should be grateful to get anything at all.
My hat is off to Calouste for uncovering the truth underlying Gunlock's distortions, which surely earned her a boatload of approving comments from Greater Wingnuttia. And for uncovering the ugliness and hatred of the poor that underlie the right's policies and positions.
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