The United Saints Diet Plan: Slimming down in The Big Easy, Part 1

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Origin of a dumb idea

The last time I was here I dropped about ten pounds despite the fact that I spent most of my time in the kitchen. You meet a lot of professional chefs around here and I can't say they're a thin lot. I was considering this while reading the nutritional information on an MRE envelope and wondering if combining a volunteer service program with a weight loss regimen might interest anyone. I've heard stupider ideas: look up DigiScents "iSmell" product some time if you want to know where the bar for genuinely dumb is set.

MRE stands for "Meal, ready to eat." It's a self contained, shelf-stable, multi-component meal in a package that has a shelf-life of 3 years as long as it's stored below 80 degrees F. They have a water-activated heating element inside. I came by these on account of a British girl I met in a hostel on Felicity when I was outbound in April. She told me she was looking to join a local volunteer group for a little while. Now, I wouldn't normally send a lone woman to Central City New Orleans looking for anything besides crack-rock or victim-hood, but Elaine had just traveled through Mexico for three months on her own (including Sinaloa), so I sent her to United Saints. After her second tour with them, she left a box of MRE's behind and they wound up in my hands on my second trip. People keep coming back here over and over again.

So here I am with a box of MRE's. The curiosity got to me, so I opened one and examined it a bit. During the high season for volunteering (February through April and again October through January) all the volunteers get three meals a day, five days a week, so there's really no need for this sort of thing. Here in August, however, tales of the crushing heat tend to keep the numbers down, so there's no economy to operating the kitchen and the meal situation is a little different. There's some breakfast matter around and, thanks to Starbuck's policy of giving away their unsold product, always plenty of coffee. A local relief agency sends lunch over each day and Whole Foods donates unsold goods from their bakery once a week. Other than that, everybody's pretty much on their own, which brings me to the box full of MRE's.

In addition to entertaining instructions ("place on rock or something"), MRE packaging has a lot of nutritional information. The Army actually expects soldiers in the field to eat three of these things a day. This is a 3,200 calorie-a-day diet. This may be perfect for combat conditions but, in a civilian, it may be enough to induce the onset of diabetes. There's no way I can consume that much food and, thanks to the office staff's knack for hustling ways to get us fed, I'm only looking to fill in one meal a day. On the other hand, if I don't get in one real meal, I get just plain exhausted from the heat and the work. So here's the United Saints diet plan, in outline form:

The Diet

Breakfast

Two cups of coffee. I never have gotten the hang of breakfast.

Lunch

Usually a turkey and cheese with mustard on Wonderbread, a bag of Zaps, and an orange. Sometimes a bag of Famous Amos cookies to go with it. Not stellar, I admit, but you don't want to eat heavy in this heat anyway.

Dinner

MRE chosen at random.

Miscellaneous alcohol

This counts as a meal in New Orleans, and you have to account for it in your diet plan or you're kidding yourself. This place could make an alcoholic out of a Quaker.

The Exercise Regimen

Could be anything and often varies from day to day. Work starts with a briefing at 7:00 followed by a brief sojourn to the tool shed. Everybody’s usually loaded up in the vans and in action between 7:30 and 8:00. Work may include roofing, landscaping, carpentry, plumbing, interior finishing, cleaning an old lady's house for her, instructing a bunch of inner-city school kids about ladder safety and then trying to prevent them from pushing each other off the ladders, cleaning the bathrooms at a local church, sending email to long lists of people who never respond, patching a ceiling, demolishing a house, serving food at the rescue mission, etc. etc.

First Installment, Wednesday, August 19th.

Weather

High of 89 F, Relative Humidity 61%! (MISSING)Light rain in late morning, otherwise sunny.
The Out-working-in-it Index: Oppressive (which means not as bad as usual).

Today’s exercise: Landscaping, specifically “bush-hogging.”

One of the houses in the neighborhood was torn down after The Storm (Hurricane Katrina is "The Storm," pronounced with a slight emphasis on the definite article) and the lot has stood vacant ever since. Like anything else left unattended for even a little while in this tropical climate, it has become overwhelmed by the indigenous flora faster than you can say "Atchafalaya." Today's operation is to clear it.

The plant life of Louisiana is particularly tenacious, there's scarcely a square foot of sidewalk in town that doesn't have something green and scrubby poking through it. Every chain-link fence becomes an impenetrable wall of honeysuckle or torn down entirely by the buckwheat vine, any corner where an ounce of soil can accumulate becomes home to pokeweed, seahorse fern tendrils uncoil from piles of leaves in driveways, duckweed chokes the drainage ditches, pepper vines climb the downspouts and reach out for the balcony railings. Every place humans have carved out a foothold, they are under constant siege by foxglove, copperleaf, cross vine, heartseed vine, sorrel vine, cluster vine, vines that creep, vines that grab, vines with flowers, vines with thorns, so many vines nobody knows the half of them. The only vine I don't see is kudzu - it can't compete with the local stuff. I don't know what kind of vine has taken hold in the outdoor shower stalls, but yesterday it had just gotten hold of the soap rack. Today, it has gotten a tendril around the hot water valve and is aspiring to the shower head itself. Gardeners battle the pinweed, homeowners fight the mayweed. Today's garden is tomorrow's quagmire. Forget to mow the lawn one weekend and you won't be able to find the lawn the next, it'll be buried under bentgrass, hairgrass, oatgrass, or any kind of grass other than the one you want.

It's not that Southern Louisiana is swampland, it's that it isn't supposed to be land at all. About 65 million years ago it was under water, then the Mississippi River started smuggling bits and pieces of North America downstream and pitching them into the Gulf of Mexico when nobody was looking. The Gulf has resented this incursion ever since and will take it out on the inhabitants from time to time. Now there's a piece of land there, but I wouldn't exactly call it "dry" land. Even the parts that manage to stay above the river or the ocean are perpetually damp. Nothing ever dries out around here. Garbage cans have to be kept covered or they fill with rainwater and become self-contained ecospheres in a matter of days. Every puddle is a permanent murky water feature with a layer of brackish scum on the top. Anything left out in the rain decomposes before your eyes to be carted off in bits by the ever-present ants, even plastic gets broken down quickly. These conditions make the garden district what it is, but in parts of town where personal gardeners are not in the family budget, whole residential blocks are consumed by a tangled mass of leafy invaders.

The lot that I'm set to tackle was somebody's home, now it's a quarter-acre jungle. With the native flora comes the native fauna; it's become home to transients camping out in the brush where nobody can see them. The police did a clearing operation earlier in the week but, unless we make it less crackhead friendly, they’ll come right back.

Swamp grass laughs at a lawnmower. Don't bother bringing a gas powered weed-eater, it might as well be a plastic spoon. You can't call this stuff "underbrush," it's taller than you. Overbrush? Chet has had some success with similar situations by holding a chainsaw six inches above the ground and swinging it like a scythe, but my weapon of choice is the good old machete.

Before beginning this task, I had a flashback to a college friend named David Weddig, USMC. I say he was named "David Weddig, USMC" because most people, when mentioning his name, would automatically add the suffix as if it really was part of his name. Rarely 'David" and never "Dave," he was "David Weddig, USMC." Other Marines called him this. To give you some idea why, I once watched him chop down a tree with a shovel. His reason? The tree might give out, the shovel might give out, but not David Weddig, USMC. In the end, it was the tree that succumbed.

Anyway, besides the machete, there is some other gear I want to recommend to anyone attempting a bush-hogging expedition. First, a good pair of boots. Tennis shoes, besides getting totally destroyed in the process, do not offer sufficient protection from the kinds of things that lurk in the tall grass around here...which reminds me, tuck your pant legs into the tops of the boots. I'm using surplus Marine desert boots, they cost less than $30 dollars at an Army/Navy store and they are as tough as guys who chop down trees with shovels. I've been wearing this pair almost every day for nearly a year now and the tread looks brand new. They do tend to take a toll on your sock supply, however.

Water is not a beverage, it is essential safety equipment, and I don't mean bring along a bottle of Evian. Bring at least two gallons of water per person and drink every time you stand still. Don't worry about restrooms, it goes straight from your stomach to your skin, bypassing the kidneys entirely. Put plenty of ice in your water cooler; in case of emergency you can always dunk your head in it and $1.50 is a small investment to save yourself from heat stroke. Between sunscreen and bug repellent, if you have to choose one, choose the bug repellent. Fortunately Bullfrog makes a version of their amazingly effective sunscreen with the DEET built right in. This stuff is liquid gold; salt water won't wash it off and neither will the two gallons of sweat pouring out of you. It will arrest an existing sunburn in place. Be sure and rub it in thoroughly, if you miss a spot you will get a perfect stripe. You'll also want to cover your head, unless you like ticks. For sunglasses, Home Depot sells tinted wrap-around safety glasses for $6. They're terrific and when they get ruined, they're $6, which brings me to another point about volunteer work in general and life in New Orleans in particular: it's hard on the equipment.

Having learned the hard way, I now keep my phone is a plastic bag and never bring anything to a project site that I can't live without. Even if your MP3 player doesn't corrode from the constant stream of sweat, it'll get caught in one of the intermittent thunderstorms, covered in sawdust or gypsum grit, run over by a lawnmower, stolen by a crackhead, or stepped on by a guy wearing surplus Marine desert boots. The attrition rate for personal accessories and electronic devices is nothing compared to the devastating toll on clothing, however. You will want to hold at least one set of clothes in reserve that you never wear on week days. Everything else will get ruined. What doesn't get snagged on rusty objects will get shredded by thorns, spattered with primer, doused with thinner, dusted with concrete, coated in expanding foam insulation, covered in joint compound, chemically stripped, caulked, sealed, patched, or painted. After a week, you'll look like a refugee from a homeless shelter run by Jackson Pollock. You will also learn to wash your clothes with a little bit of white vinegar or you too will become a self-contained ecosystem.

Returning to the subject of Fauna for the moment, there are a few critters ‘round here you need to know about (in addition to the North American Crackhead). Bees, wasps, and hornets abound. The locals claim that there is a type of red wasp that, when stinging, secretes a pheromone that summons every other wasp in a five block radius to the attack. I'm beginning to doubt this chemical call for backup theory. Not only can I not find any definitive, reliable, alternative confirmation of such a creature, but there can't be anything around here that hasn't stung or bitten me by now, including the next door neighbor's pet chow, Paris, who missed the skin but tore yet another hole in my clothes. That's another tip, by the way, dogs around here are not kept as pets, they are guard dogs and will act like them.

The bug population is justifiably notorious, especially the ubiquitous palmetto bug, or cockroach. Impressive as they are, and I think I saw one coming out of the shower wrapped in a towel ("there's plenty of hot water, but it's a little cramped in there," said the roach, "and would somebody kill that vine"), they cause no immediate harm. The brown recluse, however, is my personal nemesis and if I spot one while I'm crawling under a house, I'm scuttling out of there like a palmetto bug and may not be able to go back in until tomorrow. We lay down scrap pieces of wood sheathing to crawl across when working under a house to prevent a close encounter with one of these guys, but I'd rather climb the tallest ladder in the world than crawl back under a house after I've seen one. I spotted one in Ella Mae's house and got him with a saws-all, but it was touch and go.

At any rate, the bush-hogging went well, if a little exhausting. I found some interesting things underneath all of that foliage, like a tree I didn't know was there, a stack of wooden crates that had been completely covered, the concrete slab where the house had been, and a lovely two-and-a-half bed crack den in the far back corner of the lot. The residents had moved some old cushions back there and made themselves quite at home in a spot that was perfectly invisible from the road, or even from the air. They had to camouflage their position pretty carefully as police presence in Central City is strong. The Garden District has private security called "The Garden District Security District" (so named, I can only assume, by the Department of Redundancy Department) but Central City relies on good old blue-and-whites plus a surprising number of unmarked patrols and helicopters. The blue-and-whites drive around with their blue lights flashing at all times to advertise their presence, but they're really just watching the live feed from security cameras all over the neighborhood. When their lights are on, everything's fine. When you see four units converging on the corner with their lights off, it's a good idea to go on and head inside.

These tactics seem effective. Over the past few years, the crime element that had been evacuated to places like El Paso has trickled back in and the notorious CP3 housing project isn't far away with its official signs on every wall assuring the occupants that "No animal fighting will be tolerated." Still, I've witnessed a steady calming around here since my first visit in February. Also, our presence here is turning the neighborhood a little multi-cultural and there's a lot to be said for the "broken windows" effect that is the result of houses getting repaired and painted, lawns getting mowed, and quarter-acres of jungle getting cleared with a machete. We took the bars off the windows at the church and some of the neighbors are doing the same. Young couples are starting to move in to the houses nearest St. Charles, you can spot them by the ADT Security signs on the gates. A new hostel opened its doors two blocks away in an area that used to be considered a war zone. The nearest Home Depot, however, is very close to CP3 and is a fortress complete with steel palisade, a manned police substation right in the parking lot, and riot control vehicles parked on the premises at all times. They're not taking any chances with getting stormed by a mob mad for plywood sheathing and heavy duty decking screws . I'm not kidding; this actually happened during the Hurricane Gustav evacuation. The 9th Ward is now almost entirely an empty grass plain and New Orleans is safer than it has been since the Civil War, but some things around here will never change.

I seem to have gotten a bit off the point here, if indeed I ever had one. I suppose I'll have to share my experience with my first MRE next time, along with the story of Wesley United Methodist and what happened to it. I also have another photo essay in the works thanks to Emily, who pointed out a striking difference in the pigeon populations of Uptown and Downtown. Plus a few people have asked me for pictures of the French Market and Lafayette Cemetery and the work at Ella Mae's house, so I have a lot of new material to get together.

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Photos

Aftermath
Surveying the wreckage after three hours of swinging.

Look what I found
I surprised I didn't find a car under all that.

Native fauna
Crack Den: three bed, no bath. Cosey, isn't it?

Mission accomplished
Reverse angle, crackhead point of view.

The neighborhood
Note the FEMA trailer, midground center

Flora
This is not a tree, it is a vine.

When vines go unchecked
This residential block is losing the battle.

Common hazards
This needle was recovered in the process. Remeber what I said about boots?

Something had to give
I'll give this machete a Viking funeral.

Comments

[Marcos]

Machete the superfluous MRE-piece--"The Exercise Regimen" is the story, and a brilliant one at that. Well written and well done!