I had promised that I would bring a pizza, but apparently, she didn’t trust me, or men in general. She had also prepared a huge pot of soup and an even larger bowl of salad.
As we, purposefully working together, finished barely a quarter of each of the dishes, we came to speak about homelessness in Canada. I had seen a few representatives of this species on the short walk from the pizza shop and we, both non-Canadians, were shocked by the prevalence of poverty in this rich country. We spoke of the presumed reasons of homelessness. We spoke of women fleeing abuse. We spoke of our encounters with homeless citizens. We spoke of feeding the hungry.
At the time, I am ashamed to say, we didn’t even notice the irony.
No social problem has only one cause, nor is one remedy ever sufficient. But that the abundance of the many has something to do with the poverty of the few is something which we probably couldn’t have denied, had we only bothered to think of it.
I blame it on the excellent lemon cake, which my new friend had prepared for dessert, and which clouded my usual clear thinking. Or maybe it was her beautiful eyes, an excuse which she, staring into mine, could similarly avail herself of.
Links:
- A memorable encounter with a homeless gentleman.
- My paper on the debate about equality versus sufficiency.
- More stories of romantic dates.
- And more about food, in case this story made you hungry.
The Happy Hermit 
It is never necessary to clean one‘s plate. That is a gateway to obesity. But please don‘t throw away even a morsel of edible food. Wrap it up and eat it later. Canada is so cold that one can store food on one‘s doorstep, so long as one does not live in bear 🐻 country.
That’s a good point about the weather!
And that social pressure to finish a plate (or the self-imposed pressure when one has paid for it), is really terrible on the waistline and on health.