Portland’s newest nonprofit: a food-cart chef who volunteers every free moment
Mark Guzman and Tuggie Roo started cooking meals for shelters a few months ago. Now they’re making it official.
SIX FEED is a weeklyish newsletter brought to you by Jonathan Kauffman and Samantha Bakall, Portland-based food journalists, in order to tell stories about our heroes in this crisis—the cooks, bartenders, and activists nourishing the community.
After four months of operating Meals On Us, Mark "Goose" Guzman and Tuggie Roo are leveling up. Their business cards have just arrived. They've applied for nonprofit status and are waiting for the government to grant them a tax ID.
Pretty soon, they might even move out of Mark's kitchen.
On March 12, Providence Park closed, and Tug lost her main job supervising concessions at the soccer stadium. Mark kept his job managing the Azul Tequila Taqueria carts, but the two best friends started talking about what they should do. "I'd love to find something to do, and I also know there are people who are way more dire situations," Tug says. When she complained to her parents, they suggested she volunteer with a food bank.
Right about that time, Justin Hintze’s cart, Jojo, which shares a food-cart pod on Powell with one of the Azul carts, shut down for a few weeks to feed unemployed service-industry workers and healthcare providers. That clicked with Mark. "I worked in hospital kitchens before, and wanted to give back to the city that molded me into being the best version of myself," he says.
Tug and Mark reached out to Mark's old supervisor at Providence as well as five other hospitals, all of whom showed interest. They bought supplies with their own money and prepared ambitious dishes like risotto and handmade pasta, delivering a carful of food to a different hospital each week. But when they noticed that restaurants and carts all over the city were doing the same, they figured there were other organizations that might need food.
Transitions Project, for one. The organization, which runs shelters around the region and helps people experiencing homelessness find housing, food, and jobs, had cut the capacity of its shelters by half. But it also had to shut down the large commercial kitchens that relied on volunteers and church groups, and the restaurants that had donated excess food had closed or shrunk their operations. Transitions needed to come up with individually packaged meals to deliver to shelters with no in-house kitchen.
Meals On Us took on breakfasts, with each of the 80 meals that Mark and Tug deliver to Transitions Project centers three mornings a week following a few rules. They have to be flavorful, simple, and cost-efficient. Most importantly, they have to be food that people can eat now or tuck away to reheat later, if they can get access to a microwave.
Mark has cooked in food carts, hospitals, trains, and cruise ships, and the kitchen of the house he shares with a few understanding roommates gives him a comparably luxurious amount of room to prep. He delivers the cooked food—French toast with fresh berries, strawberry-papaya oatmeal, eggs and veggie sausage scrambles—to the dining room, where Tug and another friend pack them up to stuff into insulated bags and Tetris them all into Tug's car. Often, Mark goes to work right after. He can't seem to manage a proper day off.
On two of the evenings he doesn't work in the carts, they also prepare 40 dinners to deliver to shelters for people who have experienced domestic abuse. Mark has seen family members make it out of abusive relationships, and he puts more care into the cooking.
Some mornings, Tug ends up with extra food, so she brings it downtown, and walks up and down the street, knocking on tents, asking if people want a hot breakfast.
The owner of Azul has donated food for their efforts. So have suppliers like Smith Family Mushrooms, Coyote Ridge, and Grand Central Bakery. Portland Pizza Peddler and Red Sauce Pizza have baked pizzas for the shelters. A member of the Free Hot Soup collective connected Meals on Us with the food bank, which is now supplying the pair with ingredients. Sometimes their friends help them cook, or bring over masks and clothes to deliver to the shelters as well.
They tag every post with their motto: #onelove#nohate#nodiscrimination, and also #sonofanimmigrant, #chaoticgood, and #feedsomeonetoday. Mark's friends and colleagues in the Portland food cart world have stepped up to publicize Meals on Us, posting to their Instagram accounts and stories. "I love how much love we're getting from them," he says.
So now Meals on Us is official. Or, rather, on the cusp of being Portland's newest nonprofit. Tug's researching grants they can apply for, and they dream about all the things that the money could help them do: rent a commercial kitchen, buy ingredients instead of relying solely on donations, get a company car, hire a few staff, cook more meals for the shelters when they return to full capacity. Sports arenas, after all, aren't going to open anytime soon, and the coronavirus isn't going to make working in restaurants and food carts any less dangerous.
Besides, this thing they've started, it's cracked something open in them. Mark says that feeling that he gets when people receive one of the meals he's cooked? He wants to keep chasing it. "It made my heart grow bigger, exponentially," he says.
But the more they cook for people who don't have housing, the more the urgency grows. "We've seen that there's this humongous need," Tug says. "More people are getting evicted. There are way more people on the streets, and they still deserve food. It should be a human right that they've been denied. And that, to me, seems a great injustice."
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.