Is anybody else feeling empty and lost now that they’re no longer getting 87 texts a day from all the political campaigns?
I’m from Arizona, so most of mine were even more annoying because they were written at the fourth-grade level and filled with grammatical and spelling errors.
Rest easy, because even though I’m about to give you a pitch, it’s for a much better cause.
But before I get to that, I want to tell you about an email I received from Ken Coker, who is a longtime Press Democrat subscriber, so you know he’s a smart guy. Either that or he has a lot of fish to wrap or bird cages to line.
In any event, he notes that my Give the Editor the Bird campaign on behalf of Redwood Empire Food Bank has a somewhat meat-centric focus, given that we’re talking about putting turkeys on the table for the holidays.
Luckily, that didn’t get in the way of his generosity. But he has a point.
I assured him that the folks at the food bank go out of their way to help people with all kinds of dietary restrictions, whether they be religious, health-related or philosophical, though they’d probably require a doctor’s note if you said you can only eat Wagyu beef and truffles.
In fact, food bank expert and all-around swell person Rachelle Mesheau tells me that more than 40% of the food they provide is fresh produce, which bumps up to 50% in the summer. They also provide staples like rice, beans and pasta, while dairy and protein combined usually only make up about 25% of what they offer.
That settled, Ken and I had a discussion on the merits of Tofurky, a plant-based turkey substitute, and quickly agreed that there are none, which just goes to show you that if people from different persuasions — vegetarian and carnivore, for instance — can come together on topics as divisive as this, there’s hope for our country.
For the record, Rachelle tells me that the food bank doesn’t offer Tofurky. Or turducken, for that matter, which took me down a weird rabbit hole on the internet (thanks, Al Gore). Suffice it to say it did nothing to dissuade me from my longstanding personal philosophy of never eating anything that starts with t-u-r-d.
Anyway, if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably waiting for the pitch I promised in the second graf, which is newspaper lingo for paragraph, in case you were wondering.
So here it is: We’re two-thirds of the way to our goal in the Give the Editor the Bird drive, meaning we’ve eclipsed last year’s total of $50,000 for Redwood Empire Food Bank. That means if we get $25,000 more, we’ll reach this year’s goal, and I’ll have to kick in $1,000 from my children’s inheritance. It also means that our PD publisher, the lovely and talented Eric Johnston, will kick in a grand from the money he gets drag racing for pink slips on Friday nights.
So if you’d like to help fight hunger this holiday season, particularly childhood hunger (which, despite the immense bounty we enjoy in the North Bay, is still rampant and growing), please consider donating.
You can donate by clicking here or going to refb.org/givethebird and following the instructions.
For those of you who don’t trust the internet (or Al Gore), you can send a check to Redwood Empire Food Bank, 3990 Brickway Blvd., Santa Rosa, CA 95403. Be sure to include that it’s for the Give the Editor the Bird drive; otherwise it won’t get credited, and I’ll have to keep writing these columns.
And lord knows my sense of humor isn’t for everybody (just ask my wife, or the Tofurky people for that matter), so I’m happy to give you a hall pass if you want to start seeing other food drives.
In fact, on Saturday, Nov. 16, a whole bunch of community groups are coming together to support the food bank.
They’ll feature a Super Saturday gathering with 200 volunteers preparing food for distribution at the food bank’s warehouse; the Boy Scouts’ annual Scouting for Food event, which involves collecting neighborhood donations and delivering them to the food bank; Cruisin’ North Car Club’s turkey run, with members delivering turkeys to the food bank; Safeway’s Nourishing Neighbors campaign launch, with volunteers at all stores encouraging monetary donations; and Cranksgiving, a bike-powered food drive and scavenger hunt organized by local cycling groups, collecting Thanksgiving-related food to deliver to the food bank. For more details, see the group’s events page at refb.org/news-media/events.html.
So dig deep, and dig often. And for those of you who like to skip to the end and not read all that stuff in the middle that I worked so hard on, here’s that donation link again: click here or go to refb.org/givethebird and follow the instructions.
John D’Anna is managing editor of The Press Democrat. Look for his multi-volume series on the history of turducken in bookstores near you next summer. In the meantime, you can reach him at john.danna@pressdemocrat.com.
