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.

Happy Hungry Civic Holiday

This one hit without much warning. A holiday of some sort that's got drop-ins across the city shut down.

It's a really bad time for the Toronto Drop-In Network website to be down:

Fortunately, the holiday meals list has been hosted on the Toronto.ca website!

St. Felix and the Good Shepherd stay open during holidays, so they're the only thing that's likely to be open. Everything else is in "show up at the door and find out" mode.

There's no way for anyone to get alerts about holiday closures, so when this happens, people go hungry. So definitely hit the Sisters (St. Felix) and the Shepherd. And also, it's a great time to dumpster dive.

Good luck. Get over to the Shepherd right now.

Apologies to the 15 people that visited this site already today. The information on the calendar is misleading. A note has been added to it about closures. One meal program has been updated - the others are unconfirmed. St. Stephen's corner drop-in is probably closed.

The little things

This past week, the Corner Drop-in had cereal with chocolate bits in it. That kind of thing can make all the difference.

Happy Hungry Canada Day

TDIN really put their best foot forward this time, offering a great hilighted link on the front of their website, to the meal program holiday update for Canada Day... but of course...

1. You have to download a PDF file.
2. The PDF file has trouble downloading in certain browsers
3. The PDF file doesn't have a file extension on the end of it, so inexperienced Windows users may not be able to figure out how to open it.
4. The file is just called "Canada."

The good news: The Scott's open. EHM's open. CONC's open. The bad news: this guide is two pages and has very few listings. That is pretty sad.

But check it out: there's whisperings of a BBQ in Trinity Bellwoods Park at 1pm.

Here's their document converted so it can be viewed online: TDIN's Meal Program Listings for Canada Day 2013.

And here it is right in the page:

So once again, thanks to TDIN for doing the research, hopefully it's accurate, seems like about 1/3rd of what we'd usually have access to on a Monday, so who knows what's still happening today? If anybody knows of any Canada Day meals, any comments at the bottom could help someone.

Good luck and happy Canada Day, if that's what you want to hear.