People standing in line awaiting a hot meal at four Kansas City locations Sunday got bleach instead. More precisely, they got to witness city health inspectors dump hot food into plastic bags and pour bleach over it — just to make sure nobody sampled the ruined fare.

Once word got around, the Health Department seemed stunned that these brutish actions upset people. Director Rex Archer had to interrupt his vacation the next day to deal with media inquiries. Employees reported receiving angry messages. Archer said he couldn’t believe a volunteer at one of the parks threw food at his inspector.

What were they expecting — smiles and cups of coffee? Ruining food is gross. Dumping food in front of hungry people is cruel. The bleach is an especially dehumanizing touch. This was city government at its worst.

Archer tried to frame his department’s actions as a good deed. Who knows what horrors could be lurking in those pots of chili that volunteers from the group Free Hot Soup cooked up in their uninspected kitchens and brought to the park in non-insulated vehicles. With the TV cameras rolling, the man known around City Hall as Doctor Doom ticked off the possibilities: listeria, salmonella, e coli.

Threats like that could put people in hospital emergency rooms, Archer warned. People might even die.

On and on he went, as though homelessness was not a hazardous lifestyle to start with. Denied a bowl of hot soup, would the city prefer these people dive in dumpsters?

Archer used the same scare tactic a few years ago when the City Council considered an ordinance regulating “food sharing” programs like Free Hot Soup. He gravely cited the cholera epidemic that swept parts of Haiti after the 2010 earthquake there as an example of what can happen when food isn’t prepared properly. Except: this isn’t post-earthquake Haiti. In fact, when the council debated and ultimately rejected the food-sharing ordinance, no one could cite any incident of food-borne illnesses in Kansas City caused by acts of charity.

But the city isn’t really worried about the health of the homeless population. The weekend crackdown was a response to neighborhood complaints about the growing crowds of “guests” who gather in parks for meals served by Free Hot Soup.

While the group contends it is merely gathering with friends for a meal, the city’s interpretation is that Free Hot Soup is serving food to the public and therefore needs a permit. The Health Department will issue one for free, Archer said, and the department issued a list of more than 30 organizations that have a permit.

But those are mostly well-established groups with industrial-sized kitchens, like the Salvation Army and Operation Uplift. For many groups, a “free” permit could easily involve shelling out thousands of dollars to pass a food preparation inspection.

If neighbors object to needy people congregating near their homes, the city already has ordinances regulating loitering and littering. Rather than enforcing them, it chooses to limit good works.

Mayor Sly James stuck to the hard line this week in a tweet for which he was justly and brutally ratioed: “Regarding the incident involving Free Hot Soup & @KCMO Health Dept: Rules are there to protect the public’s health, and all groups must follow them, no exceptions.”

Good luck with that. People take to the streets and parks to feed the hungry because they are called to by their consciences, or their spiritual traditions, or because, in a world of need, it is one thing they can do. You can’t bleach out good intentions, and Kansas City only stains itself by trying.

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On Twitter: @bshelly.