Chicken Deemed Unfit For Children Earmarked For The Homeless

New York City Education Department officials planned to donate chicken from Somma Foods to the homeless after students reported finding metal bits in their chicken tenders.

The Dallas-based company was told to send around 2,000 cases of the possibly contaminated chicken drumsticks to the Food Bank for New York City and City Harvest after it was deemed unfit for students to consume.

The New York Daily News reported that the charities were told that the chicken came from a vendor that the city was no longer doing business with due to other issues. Fortunately, school officials decided on Sept. 1 to dispose of the chicken instead. Dan Cinquemani, the vice president of food distribution for the Food Bank for New York City, told the Daily News that the charity never received the food.

The Coalition for the Homeless were notably out raged. The executive director of the charity, David Giffen, told the News, now a part of The Daily Meal's parent company Tronc, who announced Monday that it is acquiring the New York paper, "The DOE pulled this chicken off lunch trays and then let it be served at shelters to some of its own students, tens of thousands of whom are homeless," he told the Daily News. "It's wholly unacceptable for a city official to allow tainted food to be served to homeless New Yorkers, and we hope that something this disgraceful never happens again."

Carmen Fariña, chancellor of New York City schools, accepted responsibility for the careless act in a statement provided to the Daily News: "Even one incident is one too many, and the buck stops with me."

The Education Department should take a page out of this Chicago shelter's book and offer Starbucks to their guests.