Photos by Caitlin Abrams
Loaves and Fishes Charity
Loaves and Fishes Executive Director Cathy Maes helps serve up meals.
If you decide to re-read Dickens’s A Christmas Carol this year, I recommend you do it with one eye on the turkey. It comes in visions; it vanishes. Now the turkey is a fake doll’s toy, now it’s walled off behind glass, now it’s almost here and now it’s vanished again, until finally it’s really, truly paid for and in the oven—phew.
One way of reading A Christmas Carol is as the story of a very hungry family, and the twists and turns that take place in the mind of a wealthy man as he decides whether it is right to feed them at Christmas.
In its last report, the Minnesota nonprofit Hunger Solutions counted 9,000 Minnesotans a day who rely on food shelves for groceries. Using U.S. Census data, the Metropolitan Council reports that 21 percent of people in the Twin Cities region live in poverty. (Close to two-thirds of all these poor households include at least one adult who works.) Of course, the good news is that on Christmas and Thanksgiving, the figurative turkey tends to get in the literal oven. As a call to charity, A Christmas Carol worked.
Yet what of the other 363 days in the year? Increasingly, meeting the needs of the hungry in the Twin Cities has become the work of groups like Loaves and Fishes. The 35-year-old Minneapolis nonprofit now feeds more than half a million meals a year from 28 sites, mostly churches, and operates four local farms. Those are numbers that make Ebenezer Scrooge look like . . . a scrooge. How do they do it?
The approach at Loaves and Fishes comes from thinking like a Minnetonka mom, explains Cathy Maes. And that’s just what she was four years ago when she became executive director of Loaves and Fishes. In that time, she has helped to expand the organization mightily, from the 10 sites it supported when she took over to the 28 (with more coming) it operates today.
First, think of the food like a mom would, says Maes, who is 50 years old. If you had a growing child, would you nourish her mostly on cookies and sweet rolls? No, but that’s the type of leftover foodstuff that Maes saw when she first started working with food shelves a decade ago. Where were the vegetables? Where were the nutritious, balanced meals?
Those questions prompted Loaves and Fishes to commit to serving only real food. Most of the raw ingredients it prepares come in as donations from food processors, food manufacturers, restaurant companies like Leeann Chin or Chipotle, food banks, and grocery stores. However, Loaves and Fishes found that fresh vegetables rarely turned up in its stocks. So, with the help of the Greater Twin Cities United Way, the group started four farms around the Twin Cities. Big teams of corporate volunteers work the harvest.
Loaves and Fishes dining room
A month ago, I visited the Loaves and Fishes warehouse near the Minneapolis–St. Paul border to see how it all works. Stacks of shelf-stable goods, like canned tomatoes and bagged cornmeal, lined vast shelves along the walls. Room-sized coolers contained boxes of locally harvested squash and other vegetables. One 1,250-pound cardboard tote of carrots looked like a tiny house.
At card tables in the front office, the staff enter the inventory into a database that the group’s paid chefs at each site can browse. Next, on a closed Facebook page, the chefs post and trade their best recipes for, say, a house-sized pile of carrots. Then the chefs drive up to the warehouse door and load out the food they need to make the meal. Back at the dining site, volunteers show up to cook, serve, and clean up.
Loaves and Fishes enlists its volunteers in a very Minnetonka way. When Maes showed up, she had been a sports mom for years, volunteering for snack duty on the website SignUpGenius. She moved all the Loaves and Fishes sign-ups to the site, which has resulted in volunteers far beyond the traditional church groups.
Now, hockey teams or Girl Scouts can find a spot to volunteer today, or in six weeks, or, say, the second Tuesday of the month—forever.
Long before Charles Dickens got to it, people have been writing down the arguments for whether we ought to feed the hungry. Our politics seethe with bills designed to restrict the choices of food stamp recipients. As of this writing, nutrition assistance stands to lose more than $150 billion in federal funding over the next 10 years.
Jesus tried to end the debate a couple of millennia ago by putting it in the starkest terms. Salvation depends on one thing: how the well-fed treat the less-fortunate. Matthew 25 gets into details: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Loaves and Fishes takes its name—and its mission—from another scene in Matthew: the miracle of the five loaves and two fishes that Jesus used to feed a multitude.
Despite the name, the group is non-religious, and Maes didn’t dwell on scripture as she led me through the warehouse, which is big enough to hold a hockey rink or two. Her attire—elegantly cut but flowy dress separates—represented the kind of clothing you could wear to either meet donors or help a chef to maneuver cucumbers into a pickup truck. And she had the polite but firm answers for the questions she’s answered a thousand times: How do you know the people are really hungry? “We just feed everyone who comes to us,” she explained. And she feeds everyone with hospitality, she added, as we peered into a meat freezer.
“We’re a free restaurant, and a lot of our guests—they’re homeless or a senior living alone, and they haven’t seen anybody all day,” she said. “Treating them like family, being happy to see them, serving healthy food—these are all parts of the same whole. Because our sites tend to be stable”—in terms of staff—“we’re able to make sure all the volunteers get the same messaging: The most important thing you can do is to make the guests feel welcome, to be friendly and communicate how valuable their presence is.”
Maes told me that last year Loaves and Fishes conducted a site survey, which found that its guests list an average monthly household income of $521.
I volunteered one night at Holy Rosary, a site on the edge of Minneapolis’s most populous Native American neighborhood. The sites tend to develop their own communities. Native American families show up at Holy Rosary, a large number of seniors at First Lutheran in Aitkin and St. Gabriel in Hopkins, homeless individuals at St. Stephen’s near Eat Street.
I arrived in the late afternoon and swept the floor and tried to make myself useful while a professional-seeming crew from St. Joe’s in Rosemount put together a plain and wholesome dinner for 150. Steamed broccoli, roast chicken, brown rice. A sign taped to the drink cart identified this Tuesday as a particularly good day: There was an option for seconds on milk.
At five o’clock, crowds streamed in, some seniors, some babies, some carrying their worldly possessions in a backpack. I helped out for a while, and eventually sat down with a mom and a toddler called Lala. She had a tight ponytail like a waterspout at the top of her head, and a big, pointy, tiny-tooth smile. The mom would tear off bites of chicken to place by hand into Lala’s mouth while she grinned and bobbed.
The nice people from St. Joe’s came by with more chicken, and Lala’s mom juggled them into her own cheeks and pockets as fast as a magician who sees the curtain is about to get lifted. In her haste, she sometimes held up a little piece of broccoli for the baby, asking, “You want a tree? Try a little tree?”
The baby waved her hands in a wiping motion at the broccoli as if to create a wind to carry it far away. I thought of what Christmas would bring for all the people here in the dining room, in the kitchen, in the farm field, volunteers at the warehouse or donating money from home, all of whom had labored to bring this baby a piece of broccoli to wave away, as babies do and always have.
To locate a dining site or sign up to volunteer, visit loavesandfishesmn.org.
