entitlement.

my friend, rhymes with kerouac, works at a mission in canada. his blog is one i read on daily basis (as i do most of you folks, if you'd ever check my bloglines you'd see i virtually have no life apart from reading and writing, but i digress...) and while most of what he writes is poignant beyond description, his thread from last night, tossed salad, made me stop and think about what people are thinking (like i don't do enough of that already).

he said they had amazing donations yesterday of fruit juices and bags of salad. two items i would think anyone reading my words here would take for granted. just run to the convenience store and pick them up when you run out, right?

and what if that lettuce is "a little brown?" what do you do with it then?

in an effort to repeat myself here, i responded to rwk's post thusly:

you know, in my small way of collecting food at church for sister grace's in atlantic city or the number of times i've volunteered at the ac rescue mission, it always boggled my mind that people thought beets or canned asparagus were foods someone would actually want to eat. i always told my 8th graders that if you don't want to eat, don't think that simply because someone is homeless or in a bad way would want to, either.

the ac rescue mission is across the street from the atlantic city convention center. when convention lunch time is over, oft times they ship over the remaining sandwiches (in cool plastic containers) with the individual chips & cookies. the sandwiches are topped with lettuce and tomatoes. what doesn't get eaten that very day at the mission gets separated out - roast beef in one bin, turkey in another, lettuce and tomatoes in yet another - the l&t gets picked up by the area pig farmers.

nothing goes to waste. nothing.

they even think of the pig farmers.

at work, we go through a lot of salad stuff. what we don't use either goes home with my dishwasher for his bunny or with me for mine. it galls me to see the can they use out front for scraping plates prior to putting them in the buspan the amount of food, particularly pickles and chips, that is being wasted.

totally wasted.

not so much as a bite taken out - i've tried for the past month and a half, to implement a "do you want chips and pickles with that?" question with every order. the bulk of my customers - and this is no lie - feel i am trying to save a buck on my chips bill and say, "i may not want them but if they are complimentary, then i'll take them..." while the bill comes to mind when i see the wasted food, i also think it is simply a waste if my precious customers are doing it out of spite.

can you even imagine? why not say "i'll have a few chips," or "no pickle?" but because we offer them with the sandwich and sub platters as being built into the price, whether they want them or not they take them.

entitlement.

my husband doesn't want to sell them separately. thinks it makes the plates look bad. lonely. no chips or pickles? how sad for the sandwich.

before i totally threadjack my own post by hopping down some tangential bunny trail, i want to put the question out to you folks, if you'd care to respond: what, if anything, are we truly entitled to?


(i'm back :)