Monthly Features:
Strike a Match, Light the Oven
Two Agencies Cook Up a Partnership
By ALBERTA LINDSEY
Take 2,500 pounds of turkey breast, three gallons of salad oil, 3¼
cups of black pepper plus 20 gallons of water and you have enough to
feed 10,000.
You say you don’t need to feed 10,000 people? Perhaps not, but soon the
Richmond area’s new Community Kitchen will be preparing meals for at
least 10,000 hungry elderly people and children. The kitchen is a joint
project of the Central Virginia Food Bank and Meals on Wheels Serving
Central Virginia.
The $4.7 million state-of-the-art kitchen in North Richmond opened in
November. Currently 2,300 hot evening meals are cooked there daily for
CVFB’s 42 Kids Café sites. Meals for children are served at after-school
programs, such as the Boys and Girls Clubs, YMCA and Salvation Army.
By spring, the 5,400-square foot Community Kitchen will begin preparing
750 individual meals for Meals on Wheels clients. Volunteers deliver the
meals to the home-bound elderly.
When it is fully operational, the kitchen will prepare between 10,000
and 12,000 meals per day.
The two agencies serve children and elderly in Richmond, Petersburg,
Hopewell and Colonial Heights and the counties Charles City,
Chesterfield, Hanover, Henrico, Goochland, New Kent and Powhatan.
More Meals on Wheels
In the long run, the new kitchen will allow Meals on Wheels to triple
its meal production, said Richard S. Schultz, that agency’s president.
In the next decade, the agency expects to double the number of people
receiving meals, he added.
“We are spending everything our budget will allow right now,” Shultz
said. “The kitchen will lower our food costs and help us meet the
growing demands.”
The average age of a Meals on Wheels client is 74, and about 41 percent
are older than 80. Eighty-one percent need financial assistance to
receive home-delivered meals. Eighteen percent of the clients were not
eating one or more days each week before receiving the home-delivered
meals.
Studies show there are about 20,000 children in the Central Virginia
area in need of food, said Fay G. Lohr, chief executive officer of CVFB.
The food bank has been feeding children for the past eight years.
CVFB and Meals on Wheels were both looking at building kitchens at the
same time. The food bank needed a larger and more up-to-date kitchen,
which was going to cost about $3 million. Meals on Wheels has no kitchen
and currently contracts with a for-profit vendor to prepare meals for
its clients. The Meals on Wheels kitchen was going to cost between $8
million and $12 million.
“It made good financial sense for us to combine our efforts,” Lohr said.
Now the boards of the food bank and Meals on Wheels are considering
merging the two organizations.
For Good Measure
As she walked through the Community Kitchen, Lohr showed off the giant
measuring cups, paddles as big as shovels and huge, shiny mixing bowls
required to turn out a large number of meals. Everything—ovens, coolers,
garbage disposal—has the word “giant” before it. There’s even a potato
peeler that can peel 60 pounds of potatoes in three minutes and pour
them into a sink to be washed.
Meals for the Kids Café sites are transported hot. The meals to be
delivered by Meals on Wheels will be cooked and individually packaged.
Then they will be blast chilled and clients will heat them, Lohr said.
The new kitchen also will allow the food bank and Meals on Wheels to use
leftover, prepared or perishable foods from manufacturers, grocers,
restaurants and hospitals, Lohr said. For example, a recent donation of
fresh basil was used in home-made spaghetti for the Kids Café sites.
Although menus are made up in advance, said Sally Pluot, kitchen
manager, they can be changed at a moment’s notice. About 90 percent of
the food used for meals is donated and most of the meals are made from
scratch, she added. The menu for that particular day was chicken,
Spanish rice and fresh apples.
A Community That Wastes Not
Leftover food cannot be accepted from just anybody, Lohr explained. “We
can only receive it from folks who have been trained in safe food
handling. The food must have been cooked by a commercial kitchen under
health department standards.”
Westminster Canterbury of Richmond, a retirement community in North
Side, is among the facilities which donate leftover food to CVFB.
“What is left over changes from day to day,” said Barbara Briggs,
Westminster Canterbury’s catering manager. “We prepare food for 900
residents. We produce however much we think will be needed each day, but
we don’t know how many residents will come to eat.”
At the end of the day, workers at the retirement community package the
leftover prepared food in aluminum pans. It is picked up the next day by
the food bank’s refrigerated trucks and used in the food bank’s meal
preparation that day.
“It’s high quality, good food,” Briggs said. “We don’t want to waste
food. This is our way of giving back to our community.”
Alberta Lindsey spent 42 years as a newspaper
reporter. Now a freelance writer in Richmond, she enjoys reading
mysteries, traveling and photography. She writes the “Faith in Action”
column for FiftyPlus.
