It's getting serious

The calendar gets about 400 views per week. The article about ODSP payment dates gets about 7,000 views per week. That's pretty brutal. That's actual soup kitchen users and actual ODSPers looking for food. Looking for their money. Using the 'net to do so. And yet service providers, from TDIN to your corner church and their meal program, generally don't publish their actual mealtimes to the public. TDIN's not making their holiday meal program guide public this year. No announcement, no particular reason, they just never did it.

The holiday closures totally outnumber the extra holiday meals. Absolutely dwarf them. Those closures are not expressed anywhere online. There's no brochure about them distributed through the system, there's no real notification system at all. If you're not going to these programs on a regular basis, and checking up on their holiday schedule, you have absolutely no way of knowing about closures. Well, except for this website. Where it's accurate. This year won't be so bad. The calendar is mostly up to date. A lot of closures have been flagged. Some of them are pretty major. St. Felix said no more holiday closures, and changed their mind. Good Shepherd said no holiday closures, and changed their mind. Sistering and 416 Dundas are going strong, so women are covered. The ones who are close by or can travel, anyway.

We're heading into this winter with fewer shelter beds than we had last winter, not more. Way fewer. Hundreds less than we had a few years ago. Good luck out there! You'll need it. All three levels of government, and society at large, definitely want all of us dead or in jail. Or at least, totally starving.

The holiday meals, and the calendar

So... the holiday meals list from TDIN is out. And it's been LEAKED!!!! Oh my god oh my god oh my god! They stopped publishing it online, so there is absolutely no way to view it on the internet except, of course, on this site. Because somebody uploaded it to their google docs and posted it. And then it got compared to the Calendar page on this site, which got heavily updated. And then it got embedded below:



There are some clear discrepancies between this schedule and the regular mealtimes of a lot of these places. So there are some details to clear up, but the calendar is much more accurate than it was six hours ago. Many, many disappointing closures have been marked, so hopefully some heartbreak can be avoided./

It's worth noting that there are way, way more closures than extra holiday meals. Way more. Way, way fucking more.

The other thing, this is silly, but Sistering and 416 Dundas, the two major places specifically for women, weren't on the site at all, and now they are. It's pretty startling to finally be able to add a couple of programs that are just two meals every single day, at the same time. Not a few days a week at three different times, not every third and fourth sunday of some bullshit, but every single day of the week, at the same times. And the hours of the drop-in are: 24/7. It's like a whole other world, especially for women. Where you don't have to go all over the city every single day, where you can go to the same place for two or even three meals each day. And you can just go there anytime you need to. That's absolutely amazing. That must be wonderful. It makes a lot more sense why men in poverty are so much more visible: they have to stay on the move, and the women are all hidden away at the women-only programs. There's only one breakfast and lunch program that's open every single day, and includes men, and it's the Good Shepherd.

Doesn't matter until it's you: the difference between lactose intolerance and dairy allergy

Lactose intolerance is when you have digestive issues with dairy. Dairy allergy is when you're allergic to it. Like being allergic to grass or whatever. Lactose intolerance presents as symptoms of indigestion: gassiness, bloating, stomach discomfort. Dairy allergy presents in a bunch of different ways, like nasal congestion, sleep apnea and resulting insomnia, and resulting irritability, excess mucus and resulting bad breath... usually it's comparable to hayfever symptoms. Lactose intolerance is relatively rare, and dairy allergy is very, very common. It's one of the most common food allergies. Lactose intolerance is widely known, and dairy allergy is virtually unknown. So the common one is the one with the lower amount of public awareness about it.

The most important difference is the foods that will and won't cause trouble: a lactose intolerant person doesn't have to avoid as many foods as someone with a dairy allergy. If you're allergic to dairy, you can't even include foods just because they're labelled as dairy-free. Stuff without milk or dairy products listed on the label may include them. It's the difference between "may contain traces of" being okay or being not okay. If you're lactose intolerant, cocoa is okay because it only contains traces of milk, whereas if you're allergic, traces is all you need to be stuffed up or whatever.

Some stuff that contains dairy that's labelled as dairy-free: Chocolate almond milk, chocolate soy milk, etc. Any drink with chocolate in it is very unlikely to be made with cacao instead of cocoa (the key difference), because cacao is actual chocolate, and cocoa is processed chocolate, which is cheaper and more stable and, of course, requires milk to process. So those Vega chocolate covered vegan chocolate bars? Yeah, they do have milk in them. Because they have cocoa in them. If it were cacao instead of cocoa, they'd be vegan. But it's cocoa, so it's dairy. Bread is also impossible to distinguish, even if dairy is not contained on the label. There are probably some safe brands at the grocery store, but if you're not sure, just don't buy bread. It's easier to make your own dairy-free pancakes than it is to try all the different breads in your grocery store, to find the one that's magically, accidentally dairy-free.

So unfortunately the vegan dairy-free meals at The Stop aren't completely dairy-free. They're dairy-free enough for people with lactose-intolerance, because they recognize that condition. But nobody recognizes dairy allergies, so it is officially impossible to find a soup kitchen meal that will not trigger a dairy allergy. The Stop does come very, very close, closer than any of the other places, but it's still not really an option, if you're allergic to dairy.

Actually one of the few places where an allergy to dairy is recognized, and surprisingly at that, is in the ODSP and OW special diet directives. They qualify you for an extra dollar a day, just like lactose intolerance does. And if you have both, you just get that extra dollar a day. Not two. But don't worry, there's a benefit in there for involuntary weight loss, too, so if you can document your starvation with your doctor, then a few months of only having access to one soup kitchen meal, half of the days of the week, you'll probably qualify for that benefit. It's a far cry from the extra $300 or so that we used to be able to receive for those who needed an all-organic or all-vegan diet, but that disappeared as part of our cumulative 50% wage cut over the past decade. So, yeah, we have two food banks and one meal program that recognizes that not everyone can have dairy. See you at the TVFB. Don't grab the vega bars.

Please, share your meal times info... the calendar is out of date

The calendar hasn't received major updates recently. And the special TDIN holiday meal listing is so incomplete, it's hard to use it as a guide. They've also been sketchy on the accuracy of the listings in the past. The calendar is supposed to be reliable, but it's not. Not really. There's been some good feedback on meal program specifics so far, and that's been awesome. Please - keep it coming, and we need more. At some point, the calendar will be replaced with one that's easier for the public to work on without logging in and something. Like a wiki calendar, wiki map, that kind of stuff.

Trying to keep the calendar up to date, without actually using the meal programs, leads to a lot of dead ends like these:

What's the deal with Masaryk Cowan? Does anybody know if they're still doing breakfasts, or whether they have any extra holiday meals or closures? Their answering machine is full. Is there an email address for them?

The Salvation Army's Gateway website doesn't exist. They're also really bad at publishing their contact information, and promoting their meals. 211 thinks they have a saturday dinner program. Is it saturday, or is it every 2nd tuesday?

Et cetera, et fucking cetera. Every org does not communicate with its users. Exactly why this site exists. Ask soup kitchen staff why they find publishing to the net so impossible. Go ahead and ask them. They could use Blogger, they could use Facebook, they could use the sites that they already have, but no. It's all just too difficult. It's too much. Too much hassle. Too much co-ordination. I mean, the only reason they have flashy websites that are hard for them to update, with blank calendars that have never been added to by staff, is that they need a placeholder site in order to get funding. That's what it's there for. All the meal programs info that we do see, or any content aimed at their users, is a generous fucking afterthought, and one that cost them extra money.

So please, users, share your research. Share your schedule! Please. It matters right now more than usual because it's the holidays, but really, it's going to matter next month much, much more than it does this month. It's gonna matter during January, where we have to go six weeks between payments instead of four. So we're 50% poorer in January. January's the craziest month because of the lack of money, December's the craziest month because of unexpected holiday-related closures. So between those two problems, This site becomes more important than it is during the rest of the year.