The Canadian Council of the Blind (CCB) served up pasta and meatballs for its Lunch In The Dark event, but Thursday’s free homemade lunch came with a catch.
Participants - which included Mayor Christian Provenzano, Sault Ste. Marie MPP Ross Romano, Sault Ste. Marie Fire Services Chief Peter Johnson and Prince Township Mayor Ken Lamming, among others - had to eat the three-course meal blindfolded.
“You don’t appreciate how dependent you are on your vision, even while you’re eating,” said Sault Ste. Marie MPP Ross Romano. “All the other sounds you’re hearing, they become a real distraction to trying to focus on what it is you’re doing.”
“I’m fortunate that I’m not wearing the food - I seem to have done a pretty good job,” Romano added with a laugh. “I was quite worried, I wore a dark tie on purpose, thinking if I got hit we could minimize the damage.”
Provenzano, on the other hand, didn’t fare as well as the local MPP - the city’s mayor ended up wearing some of his pasta sauce on his shirt during the lunchtime event in the Pinehill Church of Christ basement - but came away with a new perspective on what people living with vision loss experience on a daily basis.
“I was really surprised today. I expected to have difficulty locating the food. I didn’t expect the challenge with communication, and how much we use our vision when we’re talking to other people,” Provenzano told SooToday. “I really learned a lot there - so a tremendous amount of respect for people everyday who overcome these challenges to live their life, and I think we have a responsibility as a community to be welcoming and to be accessible, and it helps us - when you’re in a position like mine - when you learn directly.”
And that’s exactly the type of message that Canadian Council of the Blind President Dorothy Macnaughton and members of local CCB group in Sault Ste. Marie in attendance wanted city and township officials to walk away with.
Considering that Ontario is just five years away from its target date to make the province fully accessible in 2025 through the The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, Macnaughton says, events like Lunch In The Dark serve as a way of engaging with decision makers in the community.
“We wanted it to be people who need to know what it’s like - people who make decisions, people who just need to stop and think, ‘what is it like for someone with a disability if we put this policy in place? Is it going to help, or is it going to be a barrier?’” Macnaughton said.
As part of its annual White Cane Week public awareness campaign, the local CCB chapter wanted to show municipal officials and community members that the ability to perform the simplest of tasks can be challenging when living with a disability.
“We want people to realize how many adaptations people need to make in order just to do simple things - in order to use the microwave, in order to cook, in order to do everyday things around their home, in order to travel on a bus, take public transit,” said Macnaughton. “That hit me really hard when I was not able to drive anymore, having to take public transit and figure out the public transit system, and figure out how long it took me to get places.”
“There’s so many aspects to it. We just want them to have a little glimpse and to think about people with disabilities when they’re making decisions.”