The Meth Lunches by Kim Foster

I was on my third go-around with this book before I really started to enjoy it.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s an enjoyable book, and Foster is an engaging and talented wordsmith. But this story is an exercise in a kind of brutally-honest, hand-to-mouth empathy that hit me hard, more for Foster’s fearlessness than for the fact that I know the people & places whereof she writes. In the time chronicled by this book, Foster puts her money where her mouth is by putting food in lots of other people’s mouths. And some of those people are difficult to feed, to say the least. Feeding them becomes complicated for Foster, but it also becomes an enrichment.

Moving into a fixer-upper in downtown Las Vegas just as the Covid pandemic hits, Foster & her family are on the frontlines of the battle between the have-nots & the housed. And, by stationing a fridge in her front yard for anyone to take from, she wields food as both a salve and a bridge as she moves from encounter to encounter, sinking roots deeper & deeper into the unforgiving caliche we call soil. But, unlike those chroniclers who parachute into Las Vegas with entrenched preconceptions, Foster is both perceptive & invested in the city she’s writing about.

It’s not easy helping people. Anyone can hand someone a sandwich or a few bucks and move on. But really helping someone? It costs you. It cost both Foster & her family. But Foster makes & nails the argument that it should cost — that this cost is necessary — because paying that cost is what turns us from mere humans into people who are humane.

To belabor a critic’s cliche, I think The Meth Lunches is required reading, not only for everyone who lives in Vegas, but also for anyone who wants to learn about the complicated relationship between ideals and policy, between what it means to have good intentions and what it actually takes to produce good results.

The Meth Lunches: Food & Longing in an American City

By Kim Foster

https://a.co/d/7Rmu48g