Tag Archives: food insecurity

Open Door

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We have a foodbank in our town called Open Door. It’s a café where you can buy lunch for yourself, buy suspended lunches for others through a token system, or work off lunch with an hour of stuffing giveaway bags for kids at risk of weekend food insecurity.

Open Door is run by a nice guy named Mike. Although one is told not to trust a skinny cook, Mike has a way about him that belies this. And his volunteers love him.

So when Open Door needed to shut down for two weeks for an overhaul–paint job, remodel, and new equipment—Katie called.

Katie is one of the people I would literally follow into Hell if she asked. Trustworthy, kind, no-nonsense—also skinny, but well we can’t all be perfect.

Katie is the one who suckered me into the Wytheville Women’s Club, a group of kindly do-gooders who go around filling blessing boxes with canned goods, paying for kids whose parents can’t afford to send them on end-of-year field trips, and visiting homeless encampments with rainproof tarps. I think they also put a new roof on a historic building a couple years ago.

You know, do-gooders.

The do-gooders would be filling in while Open Door was closed. Katie drew up menus, which were promptly redrawn when Open Doors threw wide their walk-in refrigerator and we saw just how much fresh produce gets thrown away in Wytheville, if the food pantries aren’t there to catch it.

The homeless ate chef salad, stuffed peppers, baked potatoes with all the toppings, fresh fruit, and about a thousand of those nasty sheet cakes with greasy neon icing. We threatened people that they couldn’t have salad unless they took a dozen cupcakes.

The people coming to eat were kind, friendly, sad, damaged, mentally challenged, fighting breast cancer, dealing with a nasty divorce, reeling from the loss of a spouse who had been paying the whole mortgage, and otherwise figuring life out from the underside of the helping hand. The people offering the helping hands were kind, friendly, sad, damaged, mentally challenged, fighting two different kinds of cancer, dealing with recent loss, and owned our own homes and businesses.

It was like playing food Tetris. A bus would pull up (homeless people can get free transit from temporary hotel placements or the camp at the park) and discharge six to eight hungry passengers. They would go first to the table of free food, select salads, fruit cups, packages of bread, politely try to refuse the cupcakes. Then they would pick up the Styrofoam clam shell of lunch. One woman, when I pointed out the heat-and-serve microwave Italian meals, gave a sad smile.

“Our power’s off. I only got a gas oven going.” We loaded her up with pre-chopped celery, onions, olives, flatbread, and spaghetti sauce.

The next lady said she couldn’t cook in her living situation at all. She pointed. “I’m living over there, under those trees.”

We gave her cookies, some egg salad and ham sandwiches we warned her to eat that night or throw away, and a container of taco chips. And a half dozen cupcakes.

Some could cook, some could keep food cold, some both, others neither. As we smiled and held out items and packed food into bags and boxes, we noticed patterns. On both Fridays we were out of food 45 minutes before we quit serving. All week people had said things like “No just this will do me, give the rest to someone who really needs it.” On Friday, they accepted everything we suggested.

Making it through the weekend until the café reopened Monday.

It’s a fail good, what we did, a system put in place so nice people can take up slack that shouldn’t be there at all. But it makes a difference to the people who ate those ten days, and kept their family carbohydrate over the long, hot weekend.

The Sorcerer’s Black Beans

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We are most of us familiar with the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a 1700s poem by Goethe used in the film Fantasia. For those unaware, the apprentice is set to fill a cistern with water, and he enchants a broom to carry the water so he doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting.

But he isn’t adept enough to stop the broom once the tank is full. Hacking the broom in half to make it stop makes it turn instead into two brooms and double the rate of water flooding the house. You can see where this goes: by the time the master arrives home and sends the brooms and the water back to their proper places, the apprentice is near drowned, terrified, and much more humble about his magic abilities and the need for manual labor.

As part of ongoing work with commodity food nutrition and medical education–think doctors telling their patients to eat better and patients laughing because they can’t afford or access fresh produce–my non-profit has access to gleaned leftovers from area farms. We take the veggies and fruits to an apartment complex where occupants pay 1/3 of their income, whatever that is, for their apartments.

This week, as part of a medical education exercise, we sent two such boxes home with medical students who help staff the project and I took one. The idea is to see how long the box lasts (literally in terms of freshness and using up the stuff) and how expensive it is to pair the veggies with cheap meats or other proteins and starches, balancing meal costs and calories so you’re not hungry later with nutritional content.

All good, right? So smart professor here decides she is going to use only the foods that we have given away at the project in the past, and can the veggies as part of meals in a jar, and reckon up the costs per jar.

One of the foods we cannot pay people to take at the project is black beans. They are everywhere, in one pound bags. People are so sick of these, given them so often, that we literally use the beans as counters on bingo games, beads to glue on art projects, and other silly non-eating activities.

So I took six pounds of rejected beans, all the peppers and squash and tomatoes from the box, and started canning. I figured I had two canner loads.

That was true for the first day. Day two, I was still using soaked beans–which double in size when you overnight them in water–and had run out of tomatoes. I opened a commodity can and kept going. The huge bowl of black beans in the sink grew as I bottled them up and put them in the canner. Four loads later, the bowl looked fuller. Out of commodity vegetables, I started canning the beans in onion gravy, still a cheap way to use up food but make it tasty for later adding to chilis, tacos, and other staples.

The beans kept coming. Day three I had canned six full loads (think seven quart or 12 pint jars per) and there were still beans in my sink.

I gave up and threw the remainder to our chickens. They didn’t like them any more than the people in the housing project do. Next spring, where I threw the last handful in a desperate attempt to regain control of my kitchen, I expect a large beanstalk to spring up and head for the sky.