South Siders Called Me “Butternut” for a Reason

Letter to Romans: Chicago promised “food equity” & its poor folks got empty shelves to salivate over. Having worked years ago as a Butternut Bread driver in the city’s impoverished South Side neighborhoods to help pay for law school tuition, at least folks got half a loaf …

I still recall my early 70s delivery job. My “bread route’s” predecessor had been robbed over 20 times until he couldn’t take it anymore. My Black boss probably saved my life. He taught me how to “ride shotgun style,” that is, “never carry cash, park in an alley or follow a predictable timetable.” The one time I disobeyed one of his Commandments by parking in an alley behind a store, I turned around while prepping its order to face some punk about to club me with a tire iron. Instinctively, I swung my left hand at that tire iron as if swatting a fly & was as shocked as the punk to wind up with it in MY hand. Never did I commit another delivery “sin.” Oh, there were other attempts to rob me. But, following the boss’s “market-based” rules, the attempts were forestalled. And at the end of each day, the Chicagoans who needed Butternut Bread the most GOT IT. Fast forward to 2026. Will NYC’s Mamdani deliver on his Marxist quest for a better “food justice” by changing the market-based rules via his government run stores to feed the city’s poor?

How did Mamdani’s utopian idea work out in my old stomping grounds? As Chicago Machine critic Rev. Corey Brooks told Fox News: “On the South Side of Chicago, we all know the script.” He recalled how, like Mamdani, “the government announces with great fanfare some new programs that’s going to come save us & make our lives better. Ribbons are cut and the aldermen & bureaucrats toast themselves as saviors, another notch of the ’good’ in their belts. Then, time passes, and as sure as a 30-point game used to be for Michael Jordan, the program fails and there’s no one around to own up to the failure.” And there's nary a loaf of bread on the neighborhood store shelves to buy let alone butter.

Davd Soul