The Chi Threw Away a Bunch of Food In One of Chicago's Most Food Insecure Neighborhoods
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Film is a resource-heavy industry, between the innumerable props required, the insane production schedules and the flurry of people constantly barking into headsets like they’re coordinating a ballistic missile launch and not another hackneyed crime procedural that will get cancelled after the first season anyway.
To their credit, many shows are conscientious about their waste, particularly cooking shows, which tend to donate their unused food to local charities. But residents in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood became extremely annoyed this week after The Chi, created by Master of None’s Lena Waithe, rolled into town, set up a fake corner deli (in a neighborhood with little by way of grocery stores) and, at the conclusion of filming, pitched an entire fake-store’s worth of packaged food and household supplies into a dumpster.
According to DNAinfo, North Lawndale residents were initially thrilled at what they thought was a badly-needed corner store opening up in their area, and subsequently disappointed to learn that it was only a set for the Showtime’s forthcoming series on life in Chicago’s South Side. In an area where many locals have to coordinate an entire day to strategize their food shopping due to the dearth of local grocery stores, the fact that many useable items—including canned tuna, snacks, sponges, cleaning supplies, diapers and condoms—were thrown in the trash came as an insulting blow.
Kimberly Camacho, a Harold Washington College student, described to the outlet how neighbors plucked salvageable items out of the dumpster once the crew departed, saying that children picked around broken glass to grab goods for their families, and how neighbors helped each other into and out of the bin to collect what they could:
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