"Come Into My World"

Four times today people shared their food with me. The dock workers gave us one of their pepperoni pizzas this morning, At our second site someone brought us some Italian subs, at the last site one of the restaurants gave Jason and I Vietnamese subs and seasame balls for dessert. Then dropping off the days compost with our Cape Verdian friend on the way home, we were blessed with some delicious fish, beans, and rice for dinner. You may have noticed the variety of nationalities that were represented here. Boston is a very diverse community, with Cambodians, Hatians, Cape Verdians, Bengali, Brazilians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish, Russian, Portugese, Italians, and Lithuanians just to name a few. Jason speaks a little of about half of these, at least enough to haggle. Having studied Spanish all these years it is finally really coming in handy. Turns out that with Spanish I can sort of get by in Portugese and Cape Verdian for free. The different cultures lend not only to language differences, but also to differences in food preferences. At some sites, depending on the predominant nationality, we may get more requests for lettuce, potatoes, mangoes, or perhaps onions. The differences in preference help us too, since if we have a large variety, we can usually find someone who will want just about anything that we are offering.



Some folks buy a whole load of lettuce for a big salad. Some folks only want the prettiest vegetables since their kids are picky. Some folks don't mind taking the worse looking tomatoes since they are making sauce. Some folks will take a load of vegetable waste since they need it for compost. Some folks are glad to sort through a bin of slicers (potatoes chopped in half by processing machinery) to find the easiest ones to cut up for home fries. We try to find a use for everything, but without all the incredible people we work with none of this would be possible.



Jim