Soup Kitchens

Soup kitchens are community-based feeding programs whose central focus is to serve meals, generally breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner, one or more days per week. Some, though by no means all, allow the individuals to stay between meals as the dining room becomes a kind of day center. Minimally staffed, soup kitchens often function largely with the help of volunteers. They are also often the site of food banks where people can obtain a grocery bag of foods as they run low at the end of the month.

Soup kitchens fill a gap created in American society since the decline of cash welfare programs, such as General Assistance, in the 1980s. The result of this retreat is that poor people in many cities of North America are forced to use shelters as their bedrooms and soup kitchens as their dining rooms. The soup kitchen functions as a kind of oasis during the daytime, as these people meet their needs for food and shelter. Unlike city parks, libraries, and coffee shops, whose staff may be chilly to the person on the street, soup kitchens are a welcome niche within the urban landscape.

The people who eat at soup kitchens are often referred to as “guests,” a term that has religious connotations in Christian ideology. The word can suggest a down-and-out person who may be an angel, testing the wealthier person's willingness to share their food. The host-guest relationship is therefore laden, in its ideal form, with a sense of mutuality, in contrast to the worker-client relationship.

Soup kitchens are generally conducted as a barrier-free service: Anyone can come in, sit down, and eat. There are no intake forms or diagnostic interviews to endure. As long as the person is not overtly intoxicated or behaving violently, he or she is welcome. In the laissez-faire environment of a soup kitchen, guests create an ambience of sociability and acceptance. Natural leaders emerge, forming the basis of an indigenous social support network (Glasser 1988).

Many soup kitchen guests are alone in life. No longer living with their families or working full time, they are left with many hours to fill each day. Although some guests participate in lively social groups in the dining room, others sit by themselves sipping coffee or reading. They appear to be attracted to the soup kitchen in search of sociability, which Georg Simmel defined as human interaction for its own sake, without any “significant” content (Frisby 1984, 124–125). Soup kitchen etiquette frowns on asking people for many details about their past (Glasser 1988). Conversations tend to focus on the immediate, such as the meal at hand, other agencies, or a big public event in the news.

The sociability of the soup kitchen is enhanced by the breaking of bread together. The very word [Page 526]companion is derived from the Latin, by way of French, referring to one who eats bread (pain) with others (com) (Farb and Armelagos 1980). The community of the soup kitchen can also be a person's major social group. For some, that group also becomes the community of mourners at the time of their death.

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