This place sucks: st Stephens in the fields Sunday morning breakfast

Coming up on the third if what's sure to be a long series of articles about Toronto's soup kitchens and the special ways in which each of them brings us all to a new low every time we use them... and it's time to shake down st Stephen in the field.

So the theme of their breakfast is finger food. They have one bathroom for each gender so there's always a line, so there's no chance to wash your hands. Just like the shepherd we got hard boiled eggs, peanut butter sandwiches, a bit of fruit... and apparently they would have to break the law in order to provide a hand washing sink in the dining room. Whether it's true or not, whether they believe it or not, that's what they're telling people. That's hilarious: the government making sure it's hard for soup kitchen users to wash our hands.

Apparently they'll renovate their bathrooms soon. In the meantime, maybe they'll start trying to force us to use antibacterial gel on our way in... you know, the toxic kind that destroys the olfactory system of anyone in a the meter radius. Makes it easier to ignore the taste of the food, I guess is the idea. United on ronces and Wright is pretty famous for being total Nazis about that, even though they're the only place where it's dead easy to wash your hands on the way in.

The other thing is, of course this is generally true for all these places, there is no signage effort on the building. It's like they're trying to keep it a secret, or make it so people don't try to come alone when it's their first time.

And then of course it sucks that it's cramped, and there's always some one sketching out, tweaking out, whatever it is, all over the place and staff can't do anything to keep the space chilled. The runoff from our society's whole human sewage system gets dumped on these poor Christians who just want to do something nice and maybe raise some money for their church. We get dumped on them because government workers sent us to them. There was never an effort to determine and provide a food budget to people in their benefits packages, and there's no plan for us eating all our meals at these sad, sketchy, far flung spots.

CONC temporarily relocates to salvation army, suspends its weekend meals

Without posting any notice on the front of the building, no note on the website, no updated phone number... even 211 had to hear about it from a caller!

They're renovating, and in the meantime, their weekday meals are apparently happening at the salvation army location at Dovercourt just north of bloor, except the weekend programming, which is cancelled (and 211 now knows to stop sending people to that.

All this happened in like August. So for the past three months, this website has had the wrong listing for those meals.

In September, as if to compensate for the new shortfall in service, the salvation army also changed their weekly meal to Saturday instead of Friday.

CONC will be removed from the map and the calendar until it reopens, and the meals at the salvation army will be under its own listing.

The salvation army also failed to post any notice on its own building about the changes. So anyone who hasn't been going to these programs regularly leading up to the renovations had no opportunity to find out that they would have to make other arrangements.

This place sucks: parc

It's like a nest. Or a pressure cooker or something. When the food is good, it's okay. That might happen once a week. Coffee is thirty cents. No seconds. The bathroom is so sketchy. If there's toilet paper and soap in there, that's amazing. Usually it's one or the other. Same with the stalls: One of them is usually working, not both. And the smell. It's always fully operational.

If there's space at a table, don't get too comfy too fast: often there's a good reason for the gap... so you can be in the piss smell section or the crazy shouter section. Either or. Or maybe it's being held down by an overtalker who's gonna keep everyone in earshot as a captive audience. If you do find an okay spot, the embedded crazies will start to come out of the woodwork. Often you realize the empty spot is there as a carefully baited trap: they left a tempting spot so they could bug whoever sits there. It's a classic trap. Same thing on the outside: gotta run the gauntlet every time you pass through or hang out in front of the place or anywhere on the block.

Their "breakfast" is even more of a joke than the good shepherd's. To be fair, they're both a patronizing slap in the face every single time in terms of food quality, but the horrendous bathroom and hand washing situation really bring the message home: you're worthless, your time is worthless, nobody believes a thing you say, your needs are a joke, you'll eat anything... etc etc. And from the looks if the crowd, we've gotten the memo! We are depressed and despondent and insecure just like we're supposed to be. Not to mention malnourished, bloated, sick to our stomachs, exhausted... it just goes to show, you can destroy people with food. Make anybody live like this for over a week straight and they'll get sick in some way. Hey, sleep apnea from congestion from food allergies is a thing. But losing sleep just makes us seem more like unstable drug addicts, so it's a great strategy to keep us out of the workforce. Just keep us sick. It's so easy: all you have to do is feed us food you'd never serve at your own table. Nobody who decided any of the budgets that define our lives has ever eaten a meal as bad as these, in a place as awful as these places. Unless maybe they went to jail... which would make sense... we all know the government harbors plenty of criminals among its workers.

This Place Sucks: The Good Shepherd

In this, the first of what's sure to be a long and wonderful series of themed articles about different soup kitchens in town, we look at our beloved Good Shepherd, and what makes it suck. Just to be clear, they're all terrible. They're mostly bad in the same ways, but each of them is their own special mix of awful. They are here to remind poor people that we are worthless and don't deserve safety, decent food, or dignity. What we need, each time we eat, is disappointment, anxiety, and inconvenience. It's the only way we'll ever learn to smarten up and turn our lives around, right? Right. Sure. Yeah. Why not. Let's just go with that. Otherwise, why would we have a massive prison-themed soup kitchen across from a school on Queen east? And why would we be told to go there by government workers when we ask why our benefits don't include a food budget? It's like, ok, shelter, yeah, basic needs, yeah, ok, where's the food budget? Oh it's part of basic needs. What? No it's not, nobody spends that on food and everything else. Well, that's what it's there for. And in case it's not enough (I love how they say that, in case), there's this handy list of places where you can get a free meal. And then you descend into the rabbit hole. You go into that hole and eventually you'll land at the Shepherd. It's brutal. They let you go through as many times as you want, but so many times, you won't want to. You won't even want to go for a little walk and come back a half hour later. And you could: they have two-hour servings. But you'll be so over it you'll just want to get out of the neighbourhood entirely. The whole area is haunted, anyway. You do not want to hang out there.

You know what you have to do in order to wash your hands before eating at this place? You have to either take your food with you into the bathroom before you sit down, or you have to do one of the following, and have the line get like ten people longer by the time you're done: A) go in the front and ask to use the washroom... you'll be escorted over there, or; B) go past the line, telling everyone as you go that you're just going to the washroom, and then do it, and leave, and come back at the end of the line, and hope nobody just randomly punches you or something. So there's that. And you can try to get someone to save you a place in the line.

If it's breakfast and you actually managed to get your hands clean, make sure you show up in the first half hour to get any protein that's not peanut butter or milk. That means getting in within the first half hour. That doesn't mean you can show up at 9am and expect some love. Maybe, maybe not. They have hard boiled eggs at the beginning and they run out right away. Nice. Try cracking into one of their eggs with dirty hands. Nine times out of ten you'll end up just eating the yolk.

Actually, their breakfast is so ghetto, they officially call it a snack instead of calling it breakfast. If you're into pastries and peanut butter, have at it. It gets old fast.

There's absolutely no way to tell whether or not the peanut butter you're putting on your bread has been smeared with fifty different hobos' used spoons. Yum. There's always a bunch floating around in there.

Anywhere you sit, some crazy must mutter at you. Or shout. Or start with muttering and slowly build to shouting. They need you to keep wondering whether they're talking to you, and also make out just enough of what they're saying to be afraid of them. Go ahead and change seats. There'll be another one waiting for you.

It's full to the brim with thugged-out thugs, thugging out another thugged-out day, yelling at each-other about violence stuff, brushing up against you and then yelling "don't touch me bro," and generally intimidating everyone, including the staff. The staff are so unprepared to deal with security issues, that the whole place just feels like waves of static are always going through it, ready to build into a shock. And it does. Some pretty bad flip-outs in there. It's so bad when you're right next to it, or in somebody's path to the door. It's so, so bad.

It looks, feels, and tastes like jail.

The washrooms are so cramped it's like they were designed to cause conflict.

If you eat there too much, your feces turns orange. Enough said.

Wow, this site gets used a lot, comments are going unanswered, and the calendar is sketchy

Wow, this site gets used a lot. 78 pageviews yesterday. Over a hundred today. Most visits to the site start with a search like "free food in toronto" or "food banks in toronto" or something like that.

But the comments are going unanswered. It's bad. Comments from a year ago are just now getting responded to. They got lost in the shuffle. Nobody was paying attention, but that's changed.

The calendar is sketchy. Google's Calendar cloud software has a weird bug with repeating events. A permanent solution still hasn't been found! So that's bad.

Great. The lunches at Evangel Hall and Good Shepherd disappeared off the calendar.

This sucks. Google Calendar has been betraying us all. It has this known glitch that removes repeating events randomly. So... who remembers what their EHM lunches are all about on weekdays? It's at 10:30am, monday to friday right? Because of course their calendar only lists when the drop-in opens and closes, not when the meals are served. DOUBLE SIGH.

Good Shepherd, of course, is easy to remember. Every single day from 2pm to 4pm.

St felix is open on labor day guys!!

K yeah it's open on all holidays but they combine it so basically great lunch, no dinner. For the next twenty minutes. The other thing that's probably open today is the shepherd... they just ignore holidays usually. Also check the TDIN holiday meaks list..  if it's up.

When do Ontario Disability (ODSP) payment actually get paid?

There's another more recent article about this, on this website. But it's pretty much the same shit.

Short version:

Apparently, for December 2015, as with December 2014, it's coming out on the 22nd. But every other month it's the last banking/business/non-holiday/weekday of the month.

Long version:

Since no government website will answer this question, here's the magic formula for divining ODSP payment dates: it's on the last day of the month, unless that falls on a weekend or holiday, in which case it's on the friday before that. Or if that friday's a holiday, then the day before that. Whichever non-holiday, non-weekend day, as in, whichever bank day is the last bank day of the month.

It's not on the last friday of every month. Just the months where the last day is not a "workday."

So that means that this page is wrong.

Welfare, they don't mind saying when the dates are. ODSP, for some reason, it's a secret. And the reason for the secrecy is also a secret!

Note: It's also hard to find out how much money people on ODSP receive. Well, a single person on ODSP, without special accommodations for care or mobility equipment etc, can expect to receive about a thousand bucks. Whoop dee doo dah day.

So, Welfare (OW) = ~ $650/mo, ODSP = ~ $1000/mo, either way, you = poor. So poor.

How poor? Well, the poverty line is about $1800/mo. So, if you're on welfare, you're like, superpoor. You're poor times two. If you're on ODSP, and your disability magically costs you nothing, then you're poor times 1.5. But since your disability does cost you extra money, you're somewhere between superpoor (x2) and uberpoor (x3, as in, two-thirds of the way between the poverty line and zero) ...and of course, if you're on zero benefits, then you are officially destitute, as in, you have zero income, and you also can't prove you're poor, so you have nothing. Those people are really the only people who should need a meal program, and then only for a couple of days, once in a blue moon.

Dundas West: the street that escaped The Stop's Food Bank's catchment zone

If you're on Dundas West, between Runnemede and Dovercourt, even if you're south of Bloor, you're in the catchment zone for The Stop's Food Bank. Even though their site says:

It's just because of the way they verify people's addresses. So, it's not like they're going to throw you out for being south of Bloor. Not if you're on Dundas. If you were on Lansdowne next to Dundas instead of the other way around, well, you'd be fucked. But you're on Dundas, and Dundas dips south of Bloor, and they just kind of didn't notice. And some of them know about that, at this point, and they'll probably change it, probably soon, so I guess what is being said here is, register before they change it.

And also, you should go. Because apart from TVFB (the Toronto Vegetarian Food Bank), this is the only place with the fresh veggies. With, like, lots of them. With Kale. With lentils, chicpeas, beans... dry ones, not just canned ones. Some of the veggies are organic. No real nut or fruit situation apart from some apples and maybe some peanut butter, but the fresh veggies are there.

$10 days

So many times I've promised myself OK I'm not gonna binge and purge again with money. I'm not gonna spend all my money and then be broke at the end of the month. Not this time.

It could be $20/day, if I didn't have to buy anything that costs more than $20. That'd be nice. But since there's bike locks to get (none of which are worth buying if they're under $40), unpaid utilities, and at some point I need a real mattress, it's going to have to be a mix. A bunch of spending at the beginning of the month, but not as much as usual, and then I have a daily budget.

On day 5, the idea that, on the day before payday, I'll have $10 to spend just like I did today, is really amazing. It's comforting.

The idea is, if I go a day without having to spend anything, I'll be ahead by $10. I'll wake up the next day with $10 actually saved. Banked. So that means I get to have a $20 day, or two $15 days, or someday, maybe, move that $10 over to my savings account. That would be pretty amazing.

The theory is that if I can deal with budgeting on a small scale like this, maybe I'll be able to actually increase my funds over time. Maybe if I know I can deal with a small amount of money, other people will get the sense that I should be paid for working. Sometimes it seems like employers can tell that I'm bad with my money, no matter how much or how little I have, and so they know not to give me any.

Oasis Dufferin Food Bank situation

It's pretty good. It's your typical Daily Bread stuff. Extra extra points for the fastest in-and-out time in the business, the least grueling signup process, and the distinct lack of sketchy, violent vibes in the building.

On their website, the hours are listed on the contact page, so you won't find them on the food bank page. The food bank is open on Wednesdays from 9:30am-12:30pm.

The building is on the east side of Dufferin and on the north side of Hallam... so that's just south of Dupont. The entrance to the food bank is on Hallam Street yo!! Not on the Dufferin side of the building. You try that Dufferin side and you never know. Rob Ford could be waiting there for you with a baseball bat, or a PowerBar snack and a smoothie and a smile... you never know what that guy's gonna be up to.

Here's the door you have to go to... it's in an embedded Google Street View thing, because this is the only site on the 'net that's not predicated on denial about homeless/poor/fucked people having internet access... right? Right? Right, here it is:

Why won't Daily Bread just publish their area finder thing like they used to?

So: there is no way to get the Daily Bread website to tell you about the different catchment areas. There's no "find your nearest soup kitchen" link. They are doing every single one of these automatically.

As with a lot of these places, paradoxically, their quick responses over email and phone make up for the lack of info on their website. It's hard to tell whether they're just trying to control the information, or having a hard time with web publishing. Either would be understandable: even this website, Toronto Meal Programs, suffers from both those problems too. Daily Bread and these other agencies are responsible to their funders, the press and the community at large, but it's hard to see how those responsibilities would get in the way of just making this info easy to access. Maybe they think their actual soup kitchen users don't use the web to find soup kitchens. Even though half the soup kitchens have computer labs in them. Maybe it's because they can't seem to allow volunteers to run their websites, and their budget for web services is limited. So even if they do get volunteer help, it's sketchy because it's volunteer help, and if they get corporate help, they have to lock everyone else out of the website, and they still can't get their company to pay attention to the site because it's a back-burnered on-spec pro-bono project.

Victoria Day 2014

Well, TDIN sent out their Victoria Day 2014 Meal List like weeks ago... sorry it only ended up here the day of, and halfway through at that.

Of course, that only covers a few of the drop-ins. Is The Stop open today? Who knows. Would they put it on their site, their twitter, their facebook or any of the other easy-to-update platforms that they do use, if they were closing or if they were staying open? Who knows. Would they put up their list of closed days somewhere? Absolutely not. Now, the last time I went there, all the staff were saying "wow it's so dead today, probably because it's a holiday and everyone must think we're closed." Now, would that little insight ever have a chance at making its way towards policy that informs clients about WHETHER THE SHIT IS OPEN OR NOT? WHETHER THAT TTC PASS IS ABOUT TO BE WASTED OR NOT? Why would they, right? Why? Hungry people don't use the 'net right? You can't even find The Stop's twitter page from their site, all you can do is share them via twitter. Same with Facebook. Would their phone be picked up when they're open? If it doesn't get picked up, does that mean anything? Would they deign to put in schedule changes on their answering machine? Would they bother to put up a note on the door like "sorry we're closed today, here's a list of the five closest meal programs which are open"? Let's see... in five years of this bullshit, I have seen that exactly twice. Most of the time it's no note, nobody hanging out with extra sandwitches and tokens, no suggestions, just a locked door with their hours of operation staring you in the face, telling you the door should be open and there should be people there. DON'T BREAK ANYTHING! Your behavior, as usual, is the only thing that matters, and you're too poor to be allowed to become angry. So just... wait 'til you have money again before getting pissed off. Just wait for cheque day, get all your cash out, go on a shopping spree so you're not poor for a day, go in there all looking and feeling all rich and shit, and THEN get angry. That's OK. But no. When you need foor or whatever, you're not allowed to be frustrated when you're treated like shit. These agencies are basically people's opportunity to have vulnerable, hungry, poor people to pick on. Anybody who wants to bully "street" people has this perfect opportunity, and a lot of those opportunities pay pretty well! And of course, as I said, they have unlimited leeway in terms of hurting our feelings, demeaning and humiliating us, etc, just like police, except they can always just say "ok we're banning you" and then one of your food sources is gone.

And, of course, will TDIN dig up the help it needs in compiling comprehensive, accurate, let's say useful listings? Well, since they're not accepting any help doing it for free, it's probably not likely it'll become the major part of a paid position anytime soon. Right now it's one of the tasks that their main co-ordinator has to bust through whenever they have the chance. The previous person who did it never found it easy to come up with something good, and the current person doesn't either. So, again, from TDIN, we do not matter - the list is for funders, not us. It's there to be there, and if it leads us to food as a side-effect, that's nice. But it exists to be pointed at and held up, not read and used.

At this point, I'm hungry, I'm frustrated, and I'm not going to bother trying to find any of these things out today. I'll just not go, hunker down and try to live off what's lying around. Thanks to The Stop, and pretty much every other place, for making sure I have no idea what I'll find when I ride up every time I visit. Thanks a fucking million. The extra uncertainty is just what my life needs. Why would I want to know whether any of the stuff I'm heading to is actually open? I mean, part of the charm of poverty is the serendipity, the unexpected, being thrown to and fro like a leaf in the wind... I mean, how could they think to take that away from us? No, poverty's gotta be kept adventurous. Where's the fun in knowing where your food's coming from? Unless you're keeping emergency rations around, you're not really living baby. So yeah, my tone comes from a place of powerlessness and hunger. I'd love to hear all about how offensive these words are to the great men and women who make The Stop a wonderful place to get food. But my own experience there has never seemed to matter to anyone there - nobody has responded properly to any of my feedback. I've told about four people, over the course of two years, that their catchment area map, which use to figure out whether they're close enough to use The Stop's food bank, is cropped in a way that makes it look like half the clients can't go there. So for two years I thought I was out of the food bank catchment area. So of all the times I got told that my feedback will be passed along and they'll print out new maps, I still have to tell every single person not to trust their map, when I'm advocating the food bank to people. So I have to disclaim it to every single person I tell. So... I'm supposed to overlook that kind of thing, and decide, oh that's not evidence of the attitude towards the clients? Right. Just like with everywhere else, right? Oh yeah, I'll just give everybody the benefit of the doubt forever, but do me this favor: somehow make sure that map never ever gets updated, so the clients know our place and that are constantly reminded that we're scum, and we're not the clients, we are the product. The funders are the clients. The only communications that get double-checked are the ones that go to them. The communications that we get are just part of the evidence that needs to be there for funders to see. So they need to see that there's catchment area maps for people to access - that's critical - but they don't have to work, they don't have to be accurate, they don't have to help, they just have to be physically there to be seen by funders.

So now I'm starting to see what a lot of poor people I know have been grumbling about in terms of being exploited and taken advantage of... that's where all the lack of client-facing quality service is coming from! Now I get it.

This is what the holidays are all about. You can't afford to be with your family, it's too late in the month to do anything with friends, so you basically hope to see the TDIN list in time and then head to whichever one of those drop-ins is closest and just pray you can deal with the overcrowding. I can't, not today, so I'm gonna opt for going a bit hungry and living off bullshit today. Just like... peanut butter sandwitches, like yesterday. Because yeah, all these places that are listed by TDIN as open are gonna get totally crushed. No point. Plus everyone's already pissed because the first place they went to was closed.

Dunn Ave. Drop-in Closed today

The drop-in at the Dunn Avenue Bonar-Parkdale church is closed today.

Family Day meal program schedule

TDIN posted a meal programs schedule for Family Day 2014 (Monday the 17th). There's a small download link on that page that you gotta use. It's a PDF file. Looks like everywhere's pretty much open.

Thanks to TDIN for maintaining these holiday lists... now what they need to do is put which programs are closed as well as which are staying open, and also include the days leading up to and following the holiday. They only ever cover the day of the holiday itself.

Meeting Place reno is finished - laundry and showers are back!

There was no laundry at the Meeting Place for a few weeks. They were renovating the bathrooms and laundry room. The bathrooms are a bit nicer, but pretty much the same. So is the laundry room. It's a time of much rejoicing all across the land.

Toronto Meal Programs (the website) passes the 10,000 visits mark

Now that the site has passed the 10,000 visits mark, it's time to release a bit more information about how people find the site.

The keyphrase at the root of most searches that bring people to this site is: "free meals toronto."

Several other keywords have revealed themselves to be important: Food, Laundry, Meals, and certain days of the week, specifically Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

The question is, are these keywords an indication of a bias towards these words in the site's content, or of the users' needs? Are we not seeing any popularity of "tuesday" in searches because there don't happen to be any articles on the site mentioning tuesdays? Or is it because saturday, sunday and monday are when people need meal programs the most, or when they're the least available? It's unclear. However, based on what little knowledge can be extracted from these statistics, a few ideas may be implemented:

Maybe some articles about food-gathering strategies for the various days of the week would be useful. And maybe expanding more into food-related topics beyond meal programs, and other services like laundry and communications access, would add value to the site. Expanding on listings of a broader range of services was already part of the plan, but the idea of articles for each day is a new one, specifically inspired by these stats. It's nice to have some stats, and for sites with no budget, it's great to have it included automatically, like it is in Blogger.

Here's some other fun stats:

This past month, the calendar was visited about 300 times. The map, not so much. It only got about 20 views. Over the whole history of the site, the map gets about one eighth the number of visits that the calendar does.

It's unclear how many individual users the site has, or how the user group breaks down in terms of how often they use the site. Stats indicating those facts are not available.

On average, the site gets between 8 and 30 visits per day. The site is probably more active during the latter half of each month. This is indicated but not quite verifiable in the available stats, and it also mirrors activity at meal programs. It's reflective of the social benefits payment schedule. Welfare recipients get paid near the end of the month, and Disability recipients get paid right at the end of the month, and both sets of benefits cover about a third of a person's monthly food needs. The tendency is to take a vacation from soup kitchens until the grocery money runs out, and then scramble to cover the discrepancy.

The site's activity has increased incrementally since it was first published in 2007:

From the looks of the chart, it really started to take off in 2011.

Well, those are some of the conclusions we can glean from Google's barebones but nicely-illustrated web stats. If you notice anything else about them that could lead to decisions on content or design, please leave a comment on this article.

CONC and St. Felix disappear and reappear on the calendar

The weekday listing for the Christie-Ossington Neighbourhood Centre (CONC) and St. Felix lunches have both disappeared from the calendar that is embedded on this site's "calendar" page. The listings have been added again.

The temporary omission was an error, caused by an unresolved bug in Google's free calendar software. The rest of the calendar has not yet been verified against similar errors. The current entries have been verified as up-to-date.

Doing your laundry for free at the Meeting Place

There are several places downtown to do your laundry. The Corner Drop-In on Augusta near College, EHM at Adelaide near Bathurst, and CONC on Bloor near Ossington all offer laundry services. But the Corner Drop-In does theirs super early in the morning, EHM makes you sign up and then wait way too long, and CONC requires you to sign up days or weeks in advance. Only the Meeting Place at Bathurst and Queen offers convenient drop-in laundry, and nobody else offers more availability each week.

At the moment, the laundry facilities are out of service due to renovations. According to staff it could be done anytime between "tomorrow" and "three weeks from now." But usually it's pretty solid. And these days, in the winter, they're open every single day of the week. They do just randomly close every once in awhile, and if you're not going there frequently there's no way to know in advance, so you have to be prepared to show up with your laundry to a "sorry we're closed today" sign, or just somebody behind their closed gate yelling "closed today come back tomorrow." So on your way to the Meeting Place, as with many service locations, you have to prepare yourself for the disappointment.

There's three washers and four dryers. They're all in good shape, and they all get fixed pretty promptly when they break. The washers are modern side-loaders. That's good because they get your clothes nice and clean, and they lock while washing your clothes, so you can leave for a half hour without risking theft of your clothes. But it also means that if you make a mistake while loading your laundry, you're screwed. You can't hit stop and change something. If the load gets unbalanced, it'll just slow way down until it gets balanced enough to continue, and you can't open it up to fix the problem, so when this happens, your load could take an hour to wash instead of half.

After putting your stuff in the dryer, unless it's worthless to you, you basically have to stay in the room and guard it. That's the worst part. The laundry room can be a freaky and dangerous place. If somebody leaves their laundry unguarded, and then finds something missing when they came back, it's a great excuse to start a fight. Many of the visitors to the Meeting Place are looking for excuses to start fights. People will ask you to watch their laundry for them. It's a trap. If you're the only person in the laundry room, and someone who seems aggressive has left you alone with their stuff, hang out in the hallway outside. You can watch your stuff through the windows, and other people can see you as they go to and from the bathrooms and stuff.

The laundry room is also a classic spot to get trapped by someone who wants to talk your ear off. Grab a newspaper from upstairs, tell them you don't feel like talking or listening, you're too tired or something, you just want to read, and just read. Don't try to participate in conversations with a pathological lecturer. It's a neurological condition. It's not a personality trait. It's common in the poor community because employers will take any excuse they can to get an overtalker out of the workplace. There are certain places that are like funnels for people with this problem, and the laundry room is one of them, because you are physically trapped there with them. Try to interrupt them to say something, and they might put some nasty words in your mouth, and that's a great way to start a fight, and a very common way that fights in these types of places are started. So watch yourself. Now we'll get back to the practicalities:

To access the laundry service, you have to sign up on the laundry list, after signing in on the main list. The laundry list is numbered, so people get access to machines according to the order in which they signed up. Because there are three washing machines, if you're one of the first three people on the list, you can immediately start your laundry. If you're 4th, 5th or 6th, you have to wait about a half hour, and so on.

The place opens at 11:30, so depending on the demand, if you show up at that time you'll either be in the first or second round of laundry, so you should be able to be finished up and out of the place by 1pm or 1:30. If it's not a super busy laundry day, if you show up between 2pm and 2:30pm, you'll likely be able to start your laundry immediately. The last load goes in at 2:30pm, apparently. Show up too late, and you run the risk of being bumped to another day. Show up too early, and you may have to wait. Show up at 11:15 and physically keep your place in line outside the door 'till it opens, and you get a stressful opportunity to get out of there as early in the day as possible, with clean clothes.

Since the Meeting Place also offers shower services that work in exactly the same way, it's convenient to wash all your clothes, including the ones you're wearing, and even your backpack and shoes, while also taking a shower. So if you're out on the street with dirty everything, you don't have to walk away with one set of dirty clothes in order to take a shower, because they have housecoats and towels that you can use for showering and laundry.

They also offer a kitchen, phone, internet, personal storage in lockers, coffee, cheap food, and a smattering of self-help programs and support groups. This is one of the few places where you can actually make a phone call, leave your name and the Meeting Place phone number, and get a call back and have the staff find you with the call. So it's a good place to get a bunch of stuff done at the same time - some government-related phone calls, some personal care, some daily necessities type stuff, and probably run into someone you know as well. It's not called The Meeting Place for nothing.

Unfortunately, it also has a telling nickname: The Beating Place. It's an environment where violence hangs in the air like the smell of mould, and depending on the nature of your interactions with the other people there, it can be a very safe or very dangerous place. It's one of the most-avoided destinations, as well as one of the most popular ones. It's part of a cluster of services for poor and homeless residents in the area, and as much a wildcard on the scene as it is a staple. And it's where you'll end up doing your laundry if you're not lucky or disciplined enough to have a laundry budget, and not organized enough to do your laundry elsewhere.

Nabbing groceries from the Fort York Food Bank

It's on the south side of Dundas St. West. A couple blocks west of Bathurst. 211 has the wrong address for it. It's got a soup kitchen and food bank. If you qualify (by being poor and in the right area), you can grab a box of groceries once a week or something like that. If you can't prove anything about yourself, then maybe you can get a box of groceries once a month or once a year.

The first part of the process is to sign up with the person in the back who's co-ordinating the food bank. If you're not in the system yet, that's when you get interviewed and signed up. The person assigns you a tag with a number for that day. The numbers get called sometime around 12:30. The place is open until 2pm. It's open most days of the week. Not Monday. When your number gets called, you've got to present the tag to the person that's calling out the numbers, so that they can initial it or something. Then you can go into the food area, grab a box, and decide what you want.

In the food area, there's a bunch of types of food, and you get offered certain things. Typical things you'll find are: dried lentils and beans, canned veggies and soups, bread, milk, butter, peanut butter, maybe eggs, fruit, junk food, chocolates and candies, frozen meals, microwave popcorn, crackers and other packaged stuff, soft drinks, chips and dips, cooking and salad oils, dressings, maybe cheese... basically typical cheap grocery store stuff. There's not a lot of nuts, health foods, dairy or meat alternatives, or fresh produce. There's a lot of bread, canned stuff, and packaged stuff. It varies a lot from visit to visit. If you said yes to everything, you could walk out of there with a couple backpacks or a few shopping bags worth of food. About a third of it needs to be refrigerated. About half of it requires a kitchen for preparation. If you're a vegan, only about a quarter of the food will worth considering. If you're trying to stay organic, you'll be lucky to walk away with one or two items. If you're a vegetarian who doesn't mind eating cheap Monsanto food, you should be able to get a few meals per week out of the place.

The total time commitment for using the food bank is probably around two hours at the most. While you're waiting, there's coffee, tea and lunch available. There's also bathrooms and probably the worst internet access of any downtown drop-in. The atmosphere is tense but subdued. The location's close proximity to the cluster of meal programs and other services in the area make this a convenient place to grab groceries on a regular basis.

Dear chefs, take it easy on the tomatoes and citrus in these cold winter months

We don't get a lot of sleep. It's not great sleep. Many of us are smokers and drinkers. Most of us are into the coffee. And when it gets cold, we're out in the cold wind for way longer than you are. That all means that our lips are dry and cracked and don't need any extra acids messing with them. Soup kitchen food, and north-american food in general, tends to be really acidic. We're really into tomato sauce, orange juice, and like I said, coffee.

We have no opportunity to care for our lips. The lip balm products that we get are cheap petroleum crap that doesn't really help that much. We're not good at protecting our faces from the wind.

So please, it sounds silly, and I know we, as the people who eat your food, are not stakeholders, we're the product, so we don't expect feedback to be considered. But still. Take it easy on the tomato sauce.