

Chef Puck Delivers Food to the (Un)Needy

Celebrity Chef and Reliable Source Restaurant Owner Wolfgang Puck has a charitable message to share: With Meals on Wheels, a program that brings food to the needy, beggars really can be choosers.

In a spot for Current TV’s The Young Turks last night, Puck said “We are supposed to be the richest country in the world. So it should mean that everybody goes to bed happy and with a full stomach and nourished well. But it ain’t so.”

Puck shared an anecdote about a friend who was HIV positive and kicked out of his home by his parents. The friend sought refuge at a hospice, which agreed to take him in but let him know there were specific times that lunch and dinner would be served. “Well, he didn’t want to do that,” Puck said, beaming… “So we send him the Meals on Wheels truck with a beautiful plate of hot food and he ate at four in the afternoon his lunch and then we gave him enough so he could eat dinner at 12 o’clock at night.”

Puck said his friend was grateful. “He said ‘this changed my whole life, I feel like a real person now.’”

Not to take away from the heartfelt work Puck does with Meals on Wheels, but shouldn’t it be reserved for, say, people who can’t actually move to get food? Unless it was Puck’s friend’s last meal (in which case it’s hard to imagine a hospice denying him the time he wanted it served), not wanting to eat lunch and dinner at normal hours doesn’t seem like a particularly good excuse for needing front-door food service.

Just a thought.

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