Bobby and Amanda Herring spent more than a year providing food to homeless people in downtown Houston every day. They fed them, left behind no trash and doled out warm meals peacefully without a single crime being committed, Bobby Herring said.
That ended two weeks ago when the city shut down their “Feed a Friend” effort for lack of a permit. And city officials say the couple most likely will not be able to obtain one.
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Anyone serving food for public consumption, whether for the homeless or for sale, must have a permit, said Kathy Barton, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department. To get that permit, the food must be prepared in a certified kitchen with a certified food manager.
The regulations are all the more essential in the case of the homeless, Barton said, because “poor people are the most vulnerable to foodborne illness and also are the least likely to have access to health care.”
Bobby Herring said those rules would preclude them from continuing to feed the 60 to 120 people they assisted nightly for more than a year. The food had been donated from area businesses and prepared in various kitchens by volunteers or by his wife.
Same thing happened when I was involved with the Norfolk chapter of Food Not Bombs. We’d serve every Sunday around 6-7 PM, and one of our places to serve at was infront of this mission on this small one way road, but on the other corner was a steak house who’s owners had a problem with us being there (I guess all the people coming out on the street hardly anyone drives on caused a problem with their business). We’d serve at least 60-80 people every Sunday.
Eventually we start getting the cops called on us and there was no real reason, there was no crime, and it started getting bad and it was going on for weeks. The health department was trying to find a reason to bring us down. All the food was vegan, and was at all the temperatures it needed to be, so there was no health issues with it. Eventually they came out there and checked everything to make sure we were not violating some ridiculous law. We served everything out the back of a pick up truck on plates, but all the food was places in large containers, kept covered, and above all healthy (that seemed to be a problem). I remember the head of the health department said something about us, being strangers, feeding people on the street being a violation of something somehow without a city permit (they said it would be different if they were coming into our home on their own will to eat, I don’t see a real difference), and in our defense these people were eating out of trashcans before we arrived, and the local mission was no better than what’s on the street (a lot of people preferred not to stay on the mission, it was a slum).
After having meetings with the city we concluded we’re not going to go by their rules, and instead had to be secretive about everything. We had to put all the food in tons of little containers before hand and hand those out behind the mission and get out before the cops showed up, this caused a problem because it affected our routine and how we served, so we couldn’t just stay and serve, and our numbers went down.
People voluntary feeding those in need shut down by the City of Norfolk, Virginia. Shows how much they care. As a sidenote I was involved with the Norfolk FNB from 2006-2008, now it’s being run by some psuedo-anarchist who are trying to make it more political, and end up feeding less numbers than we did due to location problems, but I don’t blame that entirely on them.