Tsehai Publishers

Feeding the Poor

Jeff Dietrich’s Broken and Shared: Food, Dignity and the Poor on Los Angeles’ Skid Row is a collection of reports from a life of activism. It begins (after forewords by Dietrich, Martin Sheen, and Daniel Berrigan), with letters from county jail in 1979, where Dietrich was serving six months for protesting a military electronics show in Anaheim, one of his forty trips to prison for civil disobedience. Most of the essays that follow were originally published in the Catholic Agitator, the newspaper put out by the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, the community where Dietrich has lived (and worked in their Skid Row soup kitchen) for the last 40 years. The book is thus a hands-on history of poverty in our city.

As someone allergic to religion, even in what for a humanist is its most palatable, social-gospel form, I approached the book with trepidation, and the amount of faith-based reasoning in it remains on the whole too high for me. Dietrich himself suffered from similar allergies as a young man:

Father Hearn, our parish priest bought a new Buick every year. One could hardly imagine him, with his well-tailored suits and Gucci loafers, wandering from village to village preaching the good news to the poor or suffering the little ones to come unto him.

After Father Hearn, Dietrich “progressed,” he writes, “beyond mere disdain for the church to a highly sophisticated level of indifference.” He found, in the Catholic Worker movement, the cure for that indifference.

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