Shocking video obtained by the NY Post shows a man at a Manhattan Whole Foods carefully spooning food into a small plastic cup, eating it, and licking his fingers, despite clear warnings to not sample food from the Whole Foods hot bar. What's more? He probably doesn't even have a permanent place to live.
"Homeless man turns Manhattan Whole Foods into his personal hot bar," the Post headline announces, presumably because they can't use the phrase "SEE IT," because the "IT" in this case would be the disgusting behavior, and that is something you do not SEE in the 59-second video.
What we do SEE is a man calmly using serving spoons to put tiny portions of food into a small plastic cup. Oh, there he is, licking his fingers, which is super gross, especially because no one else would act this way, in public, at a buffet in New York City, a city of eight and a half million people. Here's how the Post describes it:
A drooling and pungent homeless man made double-dipping look like child’s play at a Midtown Whole Foods, grabbing from the hot food bar with his bare hands to stuff his bearded face — as employees just chuckled and said they were powerless to stop him.
Fine, so the video just gives us the flavor of this guy—sometimes in the heat of committing an act of journalism, technology gets in the way. Thankfully, at least one of the three reporters that get a byline witnessed the truly disgusting behavior, and was able to record it for posterity.
We're told that the bar has "No Sampling" signs, that the man has "visibly dirty mitts" and is "grabbing food from the trays and shoving it directly into his mouth, wet with drool and framed by a scraggly beard." (The man's beard is worth two mentions.)
What does this man have to say for himself? Why is he acting this way? Are we sure he is homeless?
The story does not quote the man. The Post got close enough to label him "pungent" and film him with a smartphone, but not ask him a few questions. (We reached out to those reporters, and others from the Post, and have not yet heard back.)
Some have pointed out that these reporters are not ultimately responsible for what they publish at the Post, that they were just doing their jobs, and that they should not be unfairly singled out or maligned—it's not as if they are homeless and took some food from a Whole Foods hot bar!
Yes, we are urged to look at the bigger context here, in this contextless article about a single person hungry enough to take food from the world's biggest company, owned by the world's richest man, in the richest city in the world, where tens of thousands of families do not have a permanent place to live. Hey, in some ways, this is, uh, actually service journalism!
Vilifying New Yorkers who are experiencing homelessness is the NY Post's most disgusting cliche. Sure, publishing racist cartoons and racist op-eds and subway snuff porn and factually incorrect fearmongering is what makes some people shrug and say, "Well, what do you expect—it's the Post, it's owned by Rupert Murdoch."
But there are easier and less dehumanizing ways of pointing out how Bill de Blasio is using your Social Security check to buy Che t-shirts for every pre-K student (Drag out Steve Cuozzo to cry about bike lanes! Bring back "Deblasio.fail," the Post's delightful, short-lived de Blasio countdown clock!)
Using the awesome power of the president's favorite newspaper against the city's least fortunate human beings? It's just plain, schoolyard cruelty, and the Post does it over and over and over and over again. It's their bread and butter, spread with visibly dirty mitts and mouths wet with drool.
