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.