I really enjoyed this one. I got so invested in the journeys and the people. I learned a lot, it made me think differently, and I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.

Sadly this was a DNF for me.

I think the concept of this was great, but the first few chapters are leaning towards overwritten savior complex.

I do believe this is an important sociology topic to discuss, but wish it could have done without the author centering herself and her spouse’s different opinions.

As a social worker, I loved this book. I found that it did a great job of discussing food as a social determinant of health in America. It was not overly science perspective but really written from a great narrative making it easy to read.

The Meth Lunches is 1000% worth the read. It opened my eyes to a whole different perspective and gave so much amazing information on the unhoused population. This has definitely helped me to form a more solid opinion on several important issues. I was also so intrigued by how the author connected everything back to food.

The only negatives I would say this book has are the over abundance of food descriptions and the very long chapters.

This book was a little hard to read and tackles a difficult subject. Several difficult subjects including poverty, food deserts, mental illness, drug abuse, and many more. I really appreciate that the author actually talked about the Covid Pandemic rather than pretending it didn't happen like so many others do. Recommended!

I liked the premise of this book, communicating about our drug issues in the US with the metaphor and hopefulness of food. It was an interesting story, but at times the story was disjointed. Additionally the chapter on mental health and food was not evidence based and can present some concerning misinformation.

This narrative nonfiction book shows the humanistic and often difficult realities of American poverty. It explores different relationships people have with food, particularly those with less.

It's interesting that this is coming out when depression-era recipes are trending on social media: water/sprite pie, eggless/butter-free/milkless chocolate cake recipes (since eggs are so expensive now), egg drop/miso soup, and clever ways to dress up a potato. We're in a silent depression.

The stories contained in this book are combinations of people and stories. If Foster hadn't made that choice, this book would have more characters and probably be hundreds of pages longer because these stories of hunger and hope are more common than we think.

I’m not sure this book’s title does justice to the content.

This is a hard read. An important read. A tragic, beautiful, hopeful, heartfelt read.

Throughout this book, we look at generational abuse, trauma, the effects of hunger and starvation, foster children, and adoption. Within all that is one woman’s mission to help her community by supplying food and restoring dignity to those in need.

If we all cared about our communities a fraction as much as Kim Foster, the world would be a much kinder place.

I alternated between reading the ebook and listening to the audiobook. The audio production is extremely well done.

I thought this was super good. It gave me a lot to think about in terms of poverty, mental health, social justice, and food. If ANYTHING I think that the order of the book seems a bit out of place because Foster has an entire chapter about the pantry and then seems to backtrack and talk about how the pantry formed. I found myself agreeing with her and wishing that the systems and structures that she wants were real, and then realizing why they could never be, and then getting mad at myself for not having the optimism and the belief

It is heartbreaking the amount food deserts we have in the United States. Kim takes us on a journey and it is incredibly humbling the privileged I have compared to others

Thank you to the author Kim Foster, publishers St. Martin's Press, and also to NetGalley, for a digital copy of THE METH LUNCHES. All views are mine.

This is a staggeringly good book. Connecting the issues of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, and child welfare services to food, perhaps our most fundamental instinctive drive, is brilliant form. My heart was broken, reading this book, but I could. Not. Stop. Reading.

Opening Quotes:
The pantry connects us to the outside world. Loc.1966

We aren’t alone. ...We are surrounded. And in hard times, that is exactly the best place to be. Loc.2455

Three (or more) things I loved:

1. At the beginning of the book, the author shares a note about the veracity of the book, which is nonfiction. It's a quite important insight about the nature of nonfiction, whatever the approach or subject: This book is true. ...But as my seventeen-year-old daughter, Lucy, reminds me: “You can write my story, but everyone needs to know it’s your take on my life. It’s not actually my life.” ...She’s spot-on, of course. Loc.10

2. The "food" form invites some beautiful subtle points about some heartbreaking subjects, like addiction, foster care, and the racist origins of policing and prisons. Gorgeous feasts hold mixed appeal to a man whose dopamine has been sapped by a meth addiction. A McDonald's Happy Meal can be the key to building trust with a scared foster child. A steak and baked potato can be a fine food gift from someone who's never known the stability of home, who's spent months eating prison "noodle loaf."

3. I love books that talk about the pandemic like it actually happened. The next two hours are as close to a party as we will have during the pandemic. The weather has cleared. It’s sunny, not warm or cold. We have reached First Spring in Vegas, that lovely temperate period from March to May. Loc.2436

Three (or less) things I didn't love:

This section isn't only for criticisms. It's merely for items that I felt something for other than "love" or some interpretation thereof.

1. I am so jealous of this person's weekly menu lol! But seriously, it's interesting how she kind of identifies how much food punctuated so many of the relationships of abused people.

2. Dang, this author really understands broken people: This is the byproduct of abuse and neglect. Of having a schism in how you attach to people around you. It is the very definition of an insecure attachment. You want them to love you. You need and ache hard for love and attention. But when it comes, it is overwhelming, too intense. Even painful. Loc.1335

3. I don't agree with the author that providing resources to families in the system is the solution. Maybe for cases of child neglect. But upper middle class families, in which there are no addiction problems, can still be characterized by awful abuse and neglect. Sometimes, people just abuse their kids, and kids shouldn't be left with dangerous parents because they possess relatively more wealth.

Rating: 🥗🥪🌮🍗🌯 delicious lunches
Recommend? Yes!
Finished: Oct 15 '23
Format: Digital arc, Kindle, NetGalley
Read this book if you like:
☀️ nonfiction
👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 family stories
💊 mental health and addiction rep
👧🏽 adoption stories
🤝 friendship

Excellent collection of heartfelt and heartbreaking essays/stories. This book is so much more than about the meth crisis!

Book Review: The Meth Lunches - Food and Longing in An American City ✨

⁉️: Do you follow any celebrity chefs or what are you having for lunch today?

Growing up, I used to watch Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Zimmerman, and Adam Rich obsessively as a kid. All of them have spoken extensively about the subject that Kim Foster explores hunger, poverty, and addiction in America.

In short vignettes, Foster fills the pages upon pages of experiences she has had with people who are struggling with addiction, extreme poverty, sexual violence, and mental illness. And by doing so, she humanizes them although they remain on the margins of the society lacking acceptance and often viewed as out casts.

For me, perhaps, the most memorable one was the story of a Black mother-and-son, Destiny and Joseph. Her story was titled “Surveillance of Humans + Their Food,” and hooked me from the start as it explored the treatment of young mothers who are without familial and financial support and are struggling to make things work. Eventually, she gets arrested and Joseph is put into foster care and meets Kim Foster who cares for him. The story ends in an unexpected way, and I don’t want to give too much away, other than the fact that it calls attention to carceral feminism, and how due to the injustice system that places women in prisons within a vicious cycle often placing them into more precarious conditions.

This provocative, meaningful, well researched, and compelling “ethnography” (if you can call it) also made me think about how much privilege I have when it comes to accessing food, having a home, and not having to face addiction although in my own family, there was a concern due to choices made by my elders. Perhaps, that’s where being in higher education helps me to bring the issues to the forefront.

Thank you @stmartinspress and @kiminthewest for the gifted copy!

#TheMethLunches #KimFoster #SMPInfluencers #Shnidhi #StMartinsPress #CarceralFeminism #SocialJustice

This book was such a letdown. It read more like a self-aggrandizing cookbook than a book about the poverty and food crisis in America. As the author details her cooking skills and lists every ingredient and meal she makes, she also makes herself out to be the hero of every person's tragedy. It's obnoxiously elitist. She throws out random facts about crime and poverty as if she just read about them yesterday from a New York Times article.

This is not the book to read to learn about poverty and food insecurity in America. This is the book to read if you want to learn about what a savior complex is.

I received an advanced copy of this book for review through NetGalley.

In this book, Kim Foster explains a different side to the traditional mealtimes we might be accustomed to. When we think of meals together, we envision a family, smiling, and sharing stories of their day. In this book... Foster uses her own cooking and sharing of food to form bonds with different people in her community and others she and her family bring into their circle for different reasons. From workers, who needed a second chance (despite having addictions that they would return to time and time again) to people who needed continuous help from a Food Pantry. Foster cared deeply for each of the people she includes in her book and shows how through something as simple as sharing a meal, we can learn so much about each other.

This book revolves completely around food. Perhaps much more that I was really prepared for. It’s blips and jumps of scenes from here and there. At times, the writing is too flowery and poetic, at others, it’s very flat. It’s a roller coaster of emotions, which is exactly what it feels like to care for someone that is very much struggling, and learn the lesson that you can’t live someone’s life and make the decisions for them.

While I absolutely understand the tracking of time, seasons, and motions through food, the throwaway talk of all the food felt so unnecessary to me, something that about 10% though the book I started to resent seeing and skimming over. It’s just too too much - we get it, you like food, you make food, everyone says it’s great and asks for your recipes - ENOUGH!

She buried the lead - 4 chapters in, she drops the tiniest sentence to share that she was adopted. Such a tiny sentence that I had to google to be sure I didn’t misunderstand. Don’t worry though - it’s never explored again anywhere in the book.

Finally, at about 40% in, she acknowledges facts that don’t make herself and the system as saviors.

As the book progresses, Foster becomes more and more unlikeable to me. It’s like watching someone unravel. Is this “White Savior Complex” her undoing? She’s spending so much time condemning folks for their decisions, and then standing up for why they are doing them.

All in, there are parts of this book that are exceptionally important to share, but the way it’s delivered is so buried in judgement, recipe notes that add nothing to the story, and a flittering of characters that come in and out of nowhere that I can’t really recommend it as one worth spending time with. Trying to parse out what’s happening is like trying to understand a fever dream.

…and don’t get me started on her sharing intimate details of people’s lives and the somewhat predatory nature of her getting consent in exchange for food from folks that in all likelihood not in a position to give consent due to the very detailed inclusion of the mental health battles they are struggling with.

I’m relieved to be ending my time with this title - it’s taking me months to make myself get through it.

Kim Foster and her husband, David, create a food pantry in front of their house—and later, inside it—during the pandemic. It begins with the employment of one hungry handyman who’s also an addict, and from there, it mushrooms. This is her memoir of that time, and also a philosophical treatise on poverty and hunger in the United States.

My thanks go to Net Galley, RB Media, and St. Martin’s Press for the review copies. This book is for sale now.

When Foster’s family moves from New York to Las Vegas, one of the first thing she notices is the meth. It’s everywhere. Perhaps it is the milder weather; addicts in New York have to find a spot out of the weather during much of the year, but Vegas is in the desert, mild enough for the unhoused to sleep just about anywhere, warm enough that addicts don’t have to hide themselves away to get high.

The pandemic hits Vegas hard. So many people make their living from some aspect of the entertainment business, and for a while, it is a dead industry. And so, after hiring a man with an obvious dependency to do work on their property—work that he never completes—and hearing his story, the Fosters decide to convert the little free library in front of their home to a little free pantry. And from there, it mushrooms.

The pantry begins small, but Foster is a chef, and she can’t stand the notion of just putting out pre-packaged crap when she can cook food with fresh ingredients that will make others feel better. And as the book takes off, I momentarily regret taking this galley, because I generally hate stories that drop recipes into the middle of the plot. If I want cooking information, I’d rather go to a cookbook, or to a recipe website. And it was right there in the title, after all: The Meth Lunches. It’s pretty obvious from the get go that lunch is going to be juxtaposed with social issues.

But as the story continues, I don’t hate it after all. For one thing, this whole book is nonfiction. There’s no plot that is sidelined by a recipe. The whole point is that that Foster considers food, and the act of feeding others, to be a sort of therapy. She makes the point well.

Eventually, the scale of the operation becomes mind boggling. Multiple freezers to hold meat; trucks that deliver food. The pantry begins as an out-of-pocket gift from the Fosters to the down and out of Las Vegas, occasionally supplemented via Venmo from friends, when they are able to help. Inevitably, the pantry finds its way into the local media, and networks form with other food banks and nonprofits.

In between all of this, Foster develops relationships with some of the people that come by. She and her husband are foster parents—ironic, given their name, right? And we hear not only about what the children they house and love have experienced, but also about the children’s biological families. Because although it’s officially discouraged, Kim strongly feels that the children heal best if their biological parents are in their lives in whatever limited way is possible. So before we know it, she is deeply involved with some horribly dysfunctional adults as well. And it is the stories she tells about interacting with them and the children, two of whom she and David eventually adopt, that make this story so riveting.

At the outset, she intends for the pantry to be a resource for local families that have homes and kitchens, but whose finances have taken a huge hit due to the pandemic. The very poor already have resources, she reasons. But of course, the homeless find her, and she doesn’t turn them away.

And here is the rub, the only aspect of this book that I dislike. She tells us that one unhoused person in four is mentally ill, and she believes that this official figure is low, at least in Las Vegas. And then she talks about those with addiction issues.

But what she never gets around to discussing at all—unless she does it so briefly that I miss it—is the unhoused people that are not chemically dependent on anything, whose mental health is stable, but who don’t have a permanent residence because they straight-up ran out of money. To hear her tell it, you’d think they don’t exist, and you know that’s not so. So many American families live from paycheck to paycheck, even when the economy is said to be booming. And I feel that she has left these people without faces or voices. And that, in turn, perpetuates a stereotype, the one that suggests that everyone that is homeless is there because they’re either crazy or junkies or both. I use the offensive terms intentionally, because that’s how the stereotype works.

And the stereotype in turn begets a lie, the insinuation that nobody has to be unhoused. Don’t use drugs. Get mental health care. Get over yourself. And whereas I can see that Foster doesn’t intend to promote such thinking, and in fact takes a hard line over poverty existing at all in such a wealthy nation, when she doesn’t give space to the many, many individuals and families that are out there because the wage earner was laid off, or because they were just squeaking by but then the rent increased, it does distort her overall picture. I don’t come away from this book thinking that most of the homeless are not using meth or any other dangerous, life-altering street drugs, even though it’s true.

Nevertheless, this is a poignant, stirring tale that won’t be told by anyone else, because it can’t be, and bearing in mind the caveats above, I recommend it to you, both as audio and print.

The premise of this book started as an essay about hunger and homelessness in Las Vegas, for which the author won a James Beard award. The book expands on that premise. The author shares her experience with operating a food pantry out of her front yard, which turns out to be a social experiment. Addiction, homelessness, and hunger are pervasive; the author employs a handyman who is addicted to meth--her lunches with him prompted the title of the book. She also fosters and eventually adopts 2 children born to an addict. There is a lot to unpack in this book but it was an engaging and compelling read. She offers her opinion on solutions which include feeding people good, quality food. Her descriptions of the food she prepares made me hungry and also provide a much-needed distraction from the bleak tales she shares.

This book was very informative. It shows how food (and lack of it) can shape your entire life. How your well-being is directly connected to your access to essential services.

It took me a long time to get through it but I am so glad I was given a chance to read it.

This is a book that makes you think. There is so much packed into these 300 pages. I am not an annotator but I found myself underlining passages and rereading paragraphs. Kim Foster touches on so many subjects, food insecurity, the unhoused, addiction, poverty, foster care, mental illness and how people can help.

During the pandemic she had a food pantry in her front yard for those who were struggling with food insecurity. She learned that the unhoused usually are savvy enough to find food while those with food insecurity counted on the charity of others. That small things like allowing people to choose their own food is a boost instead of being given a box full of random things from a food pantry. Fresh fruit and vegetables are hard to find for the food poor.

She touches on addiction and mental illness and how meeting people where they are is an easier way to interact without causing friction. By meeting people where they are you establish trust and humanize them which in the end will help them.

Then there are the businesses that feed off the poor. How our laws keep people poor so that we have people to do the things we don't want to do. How short term apartments charge more for a weekly rental than a monthly rental would cost but don't charge security deposits and often don't have credit checks.

I feel that this book should be required reading for everyone - it helps to humanize everyone and remind us that we are all deep down the same - some just have more advantages than others.