Mike Quigley, Chicago Congressman, Works Garbage Truck, Bar, Hot Dog Stand (VIDEO)

Illinois's 5th Congressional District has a history of colorful representatives. In recent years it has elected famous firebrand Rahm Emanuel and the one-man circus that is Rod Blagojevich.

The man currently representing the 5th, Mike Quigley, is determined to make a name for himself not through off-the-court antics, but by connecting to his constituents. And he's taken that to quite the extreme recently.

NBC Chicago reports that Quigley recently spent time working as a garbage man with Streets and Sanitation to get a sense of the demands of the job. He ate school lunch at a CPS elementary school cafeteria to see firsthand what the government was doing about childhood nutrition (the answer he found: not much). He hunted for Asian carp with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to help get a handle on that impending crisis.

Plus he served up hot dogs at Super Dawg's and made drinks at Connie's Pizza in Elmwood Park.

In other words, the congressman's been busy in his home district. And he's learned a lot.

From the NBC report:

"I learned that Chicago lunches are terrible," he said. "If I was a Chicago student I would ask my mom to pack a lunch. Then the next day - this is the unique quality of this job - I got to talk to the USDA Chief and say look, our school lunches are really bad. What are we going to do about it?"

[...]

"The problem in D.C. is that everything is on paper, and it's theoretical," Quigley said during a break from hoisting trash into the back of a garbage truck. "Here the wheels hit the street. When they talk about my job being important I say 'the important jobs are the ones that you'd notice if you left for a week.' "

Watch video of the Congressman hauling trash: