The Last Meal Program (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798176155648)

In 1968 a researcher named John B. Calhoun ran experiments to see what would happen to populations he could control through their environment. He used rats. Sixty years later, in a kitchen in Decatur, Georgia, Darius Mercer notices that the menu cards for one ward have been printed on a different color of paper:
Darius is thirty-eight, Black, a former Army logistics sergeant, the father of a nine-year-old daughter with a peanut allergy. He has spent his entire career inside federal systems that work when you file the right forms. He is about to learn what happens to those systems when somebody decides what they file is not the truth.
The patients are veterans. The contractor is invisible. The program has been running for seven years. The architects are eighteen months from rolling it into public schools.
The Last Meal Program is the story of a kitchen coordinator who notices, a psychiatrist who finally lets herself see, a nurse who left twenty years too late, and an eight-year-old girl in a third-grade cafeteria who says, of the bread on her tray, it tastes like the inside of something.
Some people pay attention. The book is for them.