ABSTRACT
Mollie Striglioni’s words draw on ideas of justice and community responsibility for those that are less fortunate in Australia. Her feelings are reflected many times over by those who have taken up the responsibility to provide one of the most basic essentials to those who are living in poverty and may also be homeless-food. Previously, those who were living in poverty or homeless, whom society labels as ‘poor’, were reliant on scavenging food scraps from garbage bins and dumpsters located in laneways behind supermarkets, fast-food outlets, and fruit and vegetable stores. The food was often either well past its use-by date and beginning to deteriorate, it had been mixed in with other waste from the outlet making it unsightly and not very palatable, or, in the case of raw chicken, meat or fish, required additional
preparation or cooking to be considered safe to consume. There are two significant challenges for the ‘poor’ in accessing food. The first is to obtain enough food for basic survival needs and the second is to ensure that the food that they obtain is fit for human consumption and does not present a threat to their health. These challenges are well expressed by Sam, a ‘new visitor’ at Our Place who states:
I was feelin’ ‘ungry so I jumped up on them boxes to ‘ave a peek in a waste bin. Ya know, that one there at the back of the chook shop. Couldn’t believe me luck, some bits o’ roasted chook. Some pretty nice lookin’ bits of the white meat, ya know the breast bits, and it had some of that stuffin. Any way, I gets the chook out and had it for ‘bout maybe two days or so. Then I gets real sick, ya know, bad pain in the tummy and I just keeps throwin’ up. It went on for days…I was as weak as a kitten’ (Kemp 2012b)
Sam had suffered food poisoning. The severity of the poisoning was most likely caused by a number of factors: the unsanitary source of the chicken (the waste bin), the food possibly being past its use-by date, the incorrect storage of the cooked chicken (no access to equipment to keep the food hot or cold at a safe temperature). Whatever health and nutritional stores Sam had were reduced by his lengthy episode of ill health caused by consuming unsafe food from an unsafe source.
