A difficult job at TLC is feeding three meals a day to our 800+ clients. Over 2400 meals a day.
Plus, everyone has different tastes, which are hard to accommodate when feeding so many.
And the people on the front lines, those cooking and serving, bear the brunt of the complaints from the clients when meals aren't to their liking.
Much of the food we serve is donated and the cooks sometimes must be quite creative to come up with meals that are both nourishing and within our budget.
This comes up today because a group of clients in our treatment program, which has a large budget - much larger than the halfway houses - were complaining about having sandwiches for lunch for several days in a row. Because a few of them have a sense of entitlement, they thought lunch should be something fancier so they began complaining.
They were also unhappy with cereal for breakfast two days a week. They wanted steaks, barbeque, and roast beef for dinner, and so forth.
But the reality is that most of them - as we addicts are wont to do - forgot that a few months earlier eating well was not their priority. Drugs and alcohol were what they craved. Many of them ate what they could sponge from their family or friends or perhaps steal from a convenience store. Things like hot dogs or packs of lunch meat.
Once clients get really sober they start to become grateful. They begin to realize that they're much better off than many people in the world. People who would be grateful to have even one meal a day, regardless of what it was.
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