Sylvia Fields was on the phone, which meant I was listening.
“You gotta do a story!” said the octogenarian power broker of Ocean Parkway. “What they’re feeding us isn’t fit for a dog!”
Mmmm, that sounded like a lunch invitation to me!
Turns out, Sylvia was onto something. Dozens of her senior pals have been complaining for weeks about the allegedly abysmal quality of the Meals on Wheels lunches that they receive every day. Sylvia, who gets her free lunch from the Jewish Association for Services to the Aged (with funding from the Department for the Aging), says the problem started last year, when JASA abandoned its own kitchen in Brighton Beach and brought in a series of inept caterers.
“The food is horrible, horrible!” she said. “It looks like garbage. It’s like poison. I ate the noodles and got sick from it. I’m not the only one. Talk to Rose Zeigler!”
I didn’t need to talk to Rose Zeigler when I had Sylvia Fields herself. I may not have sources in the White House or at Foggy Bottom, but I’ve long known that if you need something in Brighton Beach, you have to talk to Sylvia.
Years ago, she was a giant in the Andrew Jackson Democratic Club, and played an outsized role in building the careers of former small-time pols.
“Chuck Schumer? Mario Cuomo? Marty Markowitz? I knew them all!” she said. “Marty, that phony bastard, still owes me!”
We were a bit off topic. Fortunately, the doorbell rang and, sure enough, the Meals on Wheels deliveryman was there. On this particular day, Sylvia received two meals: a piece of roasted chicken and a meatloaf to be reheated for the next day.
“Eat it,” she said. “You’ll see, it’s disgusting.”
Doesn’t she set a gracious table, folks?
I took my first few bites with trepidation, given how lovingly Sylvia had described the food. The chicken was powdery and bland, but I could get it down. The meatloaf had me reaching for a napkin (it’s all on our exclusive video).
The side dishes — a weird stuffing and a carrot tsimmes with the chicken and orzo pasta and vegetables so overcooked that they were almost unrecognizable with the meatloaf — were reprehensible.
Then again, Sylvia gets the meals for free (though, like most participants in the program, she voluntarily contributes $1 a day). And therein lies the problem. When I called JASA, the agency admitted that it started getting complaints ever since the city reorganized the way it doles out its meal-delivery contracts, using larger grants so agencies can serve bigger groups of seniors. It’s apparently more efficient that way.
As a result, JASA abandoned its own kitchen and shifted to Tuv Taam, a big Flushing Avenue caterer that refused to return my calls (how do they know I wasn’t just hoping to get a recipe?!).
“We are working on it,” said Leah Ferster, a JASA supervisor. “We know that people are complaining. When we cooked in our own kitchen, we served far fewer people in a much more homogeneous population. We got to know their likes and dislikes over many years how.”
I called the Department for the Aging to find out whether the agency knew that a small change in contracting had turned Sylvia Fields’s life upside-down (and that’s just her intestines!). An agency spokesman said he was unaware of Sylvia’s private hell, but he’d look into it.
A few hours later, I got a call.
“JASA will be shifting away from Tuv Taam,” the spokesman said.
All because of me?
Not exactly.
“They’re shifting because of price,” he said.
Still, this was good news for people like Sylvia, right? You’d think so, but you don’t really know Sylvia like I know Sylvia.
“That’s not going to fix the problem,” she said. “We need better food, better portions. We are seniors and we are used to eating good food. I got hives from the fish!”
Stay tuned for more on this story — if we can stomach it!
