You Want to Feed the Hungry? Lovely. Let’s See Your Permit.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — They unfurled colorful blankets on a grassy slope and unloaded steaming trays of corn dogs, baked beans and vegetable beef soup. Every week for the past three years, the volunteers have gone to a park just outside downtown Kansas City with home-cooked meals for the homeless. They call it a picnic with friends.

But on a cloudy afternoon this month, an inspector from the Kansas City Health Department showed up and called it something else: an illegal food establishment.

She ordered most of the food put into black garbage bags, bundled them on the grass and, in a move that stunned the gathered group, doused the pile with bleach.

Allen Andrews, who has been living on the streets for the past year, said he watched silently as the bleach was poured, thinking back to when he had a home. He remembered how he had sometimes poured bleach on trash he put out for collection, to deter rodents from getting into it.

“They treat us like animals,” Andrews, 46, said.

As the nation prepared for one of its biggest holiday feasts in a season of giving, a bitter fight has emerged in this city over who is permitted to help the hungry and how they may do it.

On one side are city officials, who say they’re merely concerned about the safety of donated food; on the other, the volunteers, who consider the city’s food-sharing regulations heartless technicalities whose real purpose is to discourage homeless people from congregating.

Similar battles have erupted in places like Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, Florida, and El Cajon, California, where volunteers have been arrested after feeding the homeless.

Kansas City officials have said their crackdown is about protecting the needy. They said that city ordinances require groups like Free Hot Soup, the one that organizes gatherings every Sunday at four parks, to get a “food establishment” permit, and that the city could not ensure the sanitary conditions of the home kitchens where the group’s food was prepared.

“Homeless folks are more at risk of food-borne illness because of the challenges they are living under,” said Rex Archer, director of the health department. “Feeding them an unsafe meal, they actually will be lucky if they’re able to get an ambulance and get to the hospital.”

But Free Hot Soup volunteers and their supporters have said the city’s cleanliness concerns are just a cover. In reality, they said, the city wanted to break up large gatherings of homeless people, bowing to the demands of some residents.

The volunteers said their model for feeding hungry people is incompatible with permitting requirements, in large part because the approximately 100 volunteers who prepare meals in their homes would be required to cook in commercial kitchens instead. The group considers its gatherings more akin to church barbecues or family reunions than to public events that require permits.

“This is about anti-homeless-people, anti-poor-people policy,” said Quinton Lucas, a city councilman who is running for mayor of Kansas City.

Andrews, who said he lost his job and has been unable to find anything steadier than cleaning bathrooms at the Kansas City Royals’ stadium during baseball season, says the Free Hot Soup meals are perfectly safe. “I’ve been eating from them a whole year, I haven’t been sick,” he said. “They cook it with love.”

No documented cases of people getting sick from Free Hot Soup’s food have been reported, but the risks of foodborne illness from charitable meals are real, food safety experts said.

During a church gathering this month in Concord, North Carolina, hundreds of people were sickened by a Brunswick stew that was contaminated with bacteria. In several cities in California, outbreaks of hepatitis A, a food-borne illness, beset homeless populations and claimed 20 lives last year. Fifty homeless people were hospitalized in Denver six years ago after getting food poisoning from turkey served at a rescue mission.

“Just getting access to food is one thing, but we want to make sure it’s handled safely,” said Mitzi Baum, the managing director of food safety at Feeding America, a hunger relief organization with food banks across the country.

In Kansas City, neither side appeared to be backing down. City officials said they would continue to shut down Free Hot Soup gatherings (although they said they would not be bleaching the food anymore, an act that made headlines and drew outrage). The group’s gatherings resumed on Sunday, but city inspectors stayed away, saying they wanted to give the group a chance to comply with the health requirements.

At a downtown park, volunteers for Free Hot Soup did things differently this time: At the urging of a Facebook post, they ordered food from restaurants to be delivered to the park, a tactic that complied with the city’s rules.

But volunteers at Prospect Plaza Park, where the bleach had been dumped this month, were defiant, showing up with home-cooked turkey casserole and fajitas.

“People over permits,” a poster read. “Access to food is a human right,” the T-shirt of an organizer, Spring Wittmeier, said. Observers from the American Civil Liberties Union were on hand, as were new volunteers inspired by the news of the bleaching. Michael Garahan drove two hours from Emporia, Kansas, where he is a chef at an Emporia State University sorority house, bringing a pot of gumbo and his food handler’s license.

Last year, a survey by the Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that nearly 1,700 homeless people lived in the Kansas City area. The department’s data suggest that the homeless population has remained steady, but officials said that increased housing and business development in the downtown area has led to increased tension between some residents and the homeless. In recent years, city lawmakers have considered adopting ordinances that would essentially prohibit panhandling and would further regulate groups that feed the homeless, but both measures failed.

Kansas City has 43 organizations with permits to feed the homeless, according to Troy Schulte, the Kansas City manager. But some homeless people have complained about safety issues and onerous restrictions at some of those operations. Schulte said he would have no problem with Free Hot Soup’s gatherings if the group obtained a proper permit, but he acknowledged that the city’s concerns extended beyond food safety.

“A lot of neighborhoods are now seeing this as, ‘Well, they’re feeding the homeless and then the homeless are sticking around in my neighborhood,'” Schulte said. “They’re calling the city, asking for us to help deal with it. We’re focusing police resources on those types of issues because it’s a huge quality-of-life issue in our neighborhoods.”

For now, much of the debate has focused on the bleaching incident in Prospect Plaza Park on Nov. 4. According to the city, after the inspector confiscated the food, volunteers threatened to take it back out of the trash bags and serve it, so that was why she poured bleach on it. Volunteers said that no such threats were made and that the city planned to use bleach all along.

“They made a big splash, and their intentions were to scare us off so that we wouldn’t come back,” Wittmeier said. “I have a right to go hang out in a public park and share food.”

As it was, the health inspector left the bleach-covered bags in the park.

Judy Smith, a homeless woman who said she has struggled with mental illness, said she rummaged through the mess after everyone else had left. She found some sandwiches that were in Ziploc bags and untouched by the bleach, she said, so she ate them.

“Why waste food that’s still good?” she said.