Soup kitchen volunteer John Bethke surveyed the edible booty donated in honor of National Hunger Awareness Day. You won’t catch him complaining, but more would have been better heading into the summer crunch.
“Everybody thinks that winter is our busiest time,” said Jeanne May (pictured below, at right), director of operations at the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK), a Temple Street food pantry and roving five-night-a-week free meal service. “Actually, it’s summer.” May explained that with shelters shuttered for summer, DESK’s nightly numbers double and approach 250 people served. At the same time, summer is the off-season for grant funding.
“This is when we’re brokest and need the most help,” she said.
So DESK cooperated Tuesday with other members of the umbrella Emergency Food Council (EFC) to sponsor a local Hunger Awareness Day food drive. Church announcements, neighborhood leafleting, and e‑outreach through the Connecticut Food Bank led up to a Tuesday morning camp-out in front of Center Church on the Green, to accept drop-offs. DESK staff was hoping for dry and canned goods to go in grocery bags with the desserts, fresh bread and veggies they hand out Wednesday afternoons, and in other emergency cases. The10 percent of stock DESK doesn’t get from the CT Food Bank comes through these donations.
John Bethke guessed they’d gotten about nine or ten donations, including two in cash ($9 each). Few enough so that the receiving crew packed it in early, heading with the goods to their Temple Street Parish House heaquarters at 10 instead of the scheduled 11. But enough for staff to feel their Hunger Awareness Day advertising effort had seen some success: all the drop-offs came from previously unfamiliar hands. And enough, in general, so that no one was complaining.
Then again, they’re not complainers. “You could give me this and I’d appreciate it,” said two-year DESK staffperson Charles Kaiser (pictured, behind May), picking a mini-bottle of green tabasco sauce off a storage shelf. “It’s not the big things, it’s the little things. Every bit helps.”
That kind of gratitude extended to their volunteers. “They’re a great help,” said May, who counted them at up to three hundred a month. “We depend on them just the same as staff. Some stay and work through a whole meal.”
“That would be me and John!” said Michael Cutler (pictured behind Bethke). For him, though, it was May who deserved the appreciation. “She keeps us fed and healthy, she takes care of us.”
But both back-patting and donations-sorting got cut short: There was the evening meal to cook. May, who likes to take full advantage of the fresh produce that comes free through the CT Food Bank, had a mouth-wateringly healthful menu designed: sweet peas, roasted potatoes, and a tomato-rich green salad, “three proteins” between grilled chicken, broiled salmon, and a tuna and onion salad, apples and watermelon for dessert.
This after an appetizer of mango salsa (pictured) on tortilla chips. “People think of soup kitchen meals as soup and stale bread.” May and her team of sous chefs obviously don’t. Click here for a schedule of where meals like this will be available through the summer, and here to volunteer.