Turkeys?$#@!?!#^&*?

AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH! Turkeys almost prevented me from enjoying some deliocious homemade pizza for supper last night.

The weekly local rag had just been delivered, so I thought I'd sit down and enjoy supper whilst playing my weekly game of count the spelling and grammatical errors. And there it was the headline to spoil the pizza - 'Food bank cannot afford turkeys for Christmas'. The background to this is that our church is one of the local churches that together form the board of the local food bank. In the article it stated "This motion was made at our last board of directors meeting and was approved by all the churches." Whoa! What the heck! Wait a minute! Okay, so the motion was approved at the board meeting, but our church didn't agree and I made sure that the secretary minuted our disagreement.

I tried to eat my pizza, but I couldn't. I phoned the purchasing director quoted in the article and asked 'What the heck?' After some PR and backtracking he agreed to get the paper to put in a correction next week (although I fear that the damage may already be done). With this task I was able to sit down and finally enjoy my (lukewarm) homemade pizza.

So you may ask yourself what's my point? Well now we are part of a food bank that can no longer tell our clients that 'we provide a full turkey Christmas dinner'. We are now the food bank that 'provides a full turkey Christmas dinner minus the turkey'. Maybe we could tell those regular clients to think back to last year and remember the turkey they enjoyed then.

The part of the article that bothered me the most was when the purchasing director claimed that 'We felt bad that the money is not there.' In the immediate sense this was partly true, but in the big picture there were reserves that could have been dipped into to make some kind of Christmassy hamper available. I suggested turkeys only for larger families with chickens or hams for the smaller ones.

Our food bank is a Christian organisation, with only churches allowed to participate as members and volunteers. I am concerned about the integrity of the food bank and how this could affect the integrity of the churches on the board. We have already had somebody blast one of our Thrift Store volunteers about how we could send all these turkeys to New Orleans instead of keeping them in the community (the spiralling gas prices after Hurricane Katrina were given as the reason for the food bank not to be able to afford turkeys this year). Our volunteer was, thankfully, able to clear that one up. I don't think we've heard the end of this one.

Needless to say, next time we have homemade pizza on a Wednesday I'm going to leave the paper in the mailbox until after I've eaten it.