One Million Childrens' Meals. No Questions Asked.
This newsletter is devoted to our heroes during the pandemic. Some of them work at the Portland Public Schools.
SIX FEED is a weeklyish newsletter brought to you by Jonathan Kauffman and Samantha Bakall, Portland food journalists, in order to tell stories about the cooks, bartenders, and activists nourishing the community during the pandemic.
Yesica Gonzalez had been running the cafeteria at North Portland’s Rosa Parks Elementary for three years when Oregon shut down the schools. All of the sudden, the 280 kids she fed every day were gone.
In those terrifying first days, when no one outside of hospitals wore masks and we didn't know if would be fatal to touch a piece of paper on which a cough droplet had landed, the call went out to the district's cafeteria managers and staff: We will pay your salary no matter what, but if you are willing to come in to work, there are children to feed.
Yesica's husband said, you know you can stay home. We have two daughters. Be safe. But she kept thinking of the kids she knew who were homeless. "I know what it feels to not have enough at home," she says. "I don't want them to not have food. I want to be there for them." She wanted them to see her, and know she wasn't disappearing like so much of the normal world.
Her own school, she was happy to learn, would be one of the 15 public schools that serves breakfast and lunch four days a week to any child age 1 to 18, whether they're enrolled in public school or not.
On Monday through Thursday, the Woolsey Street doors to the Rosa Parks Elementary gym roll up from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and Yesica, PPS project manager Amy DeSimone, and a few assistants staff a table in the entryway, racks of lunch bags at their elbow. Young children arrive in the backs of wagons pulled by their parents. Older kids wander over from nearby houses. Some of the people stopping by are parents and grandparents. Yesica asks each one, "How many meals?" and hands over that number of bags.
No questions asked.
According to Whitney Ellersick, senior director of nutrition services at Portland Public Schools, feeding children like this is not exactly new. The USDA has simply allowed the district to repurpose and expand a summer program that the schools coordinate with Portland Parks & Rec. In a normal year, daycare classes, kids' camps, and the general public can all gather at park sites around the city for lunches they can eat while they play. Now, they’re allowed to distribute takeaway meals at schools.
Normally, the district spends months plotting out the strategy and staffing for new terms. The Oregon shutdown happened at the beginning of what would have been Spring Break, which gave them a week to put together their coronavirus meal plan. Whitney stuffed her two-year-old into her car for an epic road trip to visit every school in the city, scoping out the facilities, trying to figure out which ones would best accommodate takeaway and where she would put tables and tents. "When push comes to shove, you can make things happen pretty quickly," she laughs.
Then she put out the call to staff.
The first few weeks were chaotic, of course. The district tried repurposing some of the hot meals they normally would serve, until Whitney learned some of the families most in need didn't have the resources to reheat food at home. Then there was a repetitive run of PB&Js and yogurt bowls.
They have used Facebook pages, websites, and news stories to get the word out to parents as much as possible. And the schools have come up with creative solutions they would never have anticipated. The district makes delivery runs to a few low-income apartment complexes, and they contract with Amazon to deliver meals to individual families who are unable to safely leave the house.
By now, the program's moving relatively smoothly. Some days kids receive a PB&J sandwich with a piece of fruit. Other days it's chicken nuggets or a barbecued-chicken hoagie that can be eaten hot or cold. At Rosa Parks, most Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays Yesica and her coworkers feed 150 kids. Some of them she knows from school, but there are a lot of new faces—kids who live within walking or biking distance but may not go to Rosa Parks.
And on Thursdays, the slow trickle of kids turns into a long line. That's partly because they distribute enough breakfasts and lunches to cover the long weekend, and partly because kids aren't the only ones they're feeding on those days.
On Mondays and Wednesdays, Rosa Parks is a distribution point for farm boxes containing carrots, onions, strawberries, and other produce that the USDA contracts with Pacific Coast Fruit to provide, a program that runs through August 31. On Thursdays, the school instead distributes boxes of canned and fresh food through the food bank.
Both boxes are available to everyone who asks. Again: No questions asked.
Whitney estimates that, since March 17, the Portland Public Schools have fed 1 million meals to kids, and the summer program will run through August 21. "We want to see more families participate," she says. The more people who come to the school for lunch, the more they ease the stigma around eating school lunch.
Christopher Walters, who normally oversees the Madison High School cafeteria but is running the pandemic meal program out of nearby Cesar Chavez Elementary, says that when families pass by the school, he calls out an invitation to eat. Some parents turn him down, saying they'd rather the food go to someone in need. "That isn't what this is about," he tells them. "No one's taking food away from anyone else. Every kid is entitled to free school lunch." For some kids, in fact, it's a point of normalcy they appreciate amid the shutdown chaos.
"We've got so many parents who are working from home and dealing with kids -- let us take something off your plate," Christopher says. "I don't care if you've got 100,000 bucks in the bank or no money. Feed your kids. You've got plenty to worry about in a pandemic."
Jonathan Kauffman covers the intersection of food and culture on the West Coast. He’s a former staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Weekly, and the author of Hippie Food. Read more of his work at www.jonathankauffman.com.