The food cart countering isolation with burritos
Fernando's Alegria, in the Portland Mercado, saw business spiral down until a novel partnership reversed the trend
We wanted to start this week’s issue with few thoughts.
In a week consumed by rage and pain after the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, David McAtee and the countless other black Americans who have been killed at the hands of police officers, racists and white supremacists, and after endemic white supremacy at every level of society and systemic oppression has allowed for overwhelming numbers of black and brown Americans to simultaneously suffer from Covid-19, it can feel frivolous to talk about food.
Yet we’re also reminded how important it is for Portland to support black-owned restaurants, not only today or this week. These spaces are not just community hubs, they’re economic engines, bringing money and access back into black homes. They exemplify black excellence and economic self-sufficiency in a power structure built to defy and invalidate black Americans. And in the midst of two pandemics claiming overwhelming numbers of black lives, we must preserve and sustain those businesses within our own communities.
Please take care of yourselves, whether you’re called to the streets or called to resist in another way, be it organizing, counseling, educating friends and family, or simply trying to make it through the day.
— Sam and Jonathan
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SIX FEED is a weeklyish newsletter brought to you by Jonathan Kauffman and Samantha Bakall. We’re Portland-based food journalists who want to tell stories about our heroes in this crisis — particularly those representing immigrant and marginalized communities — who are making do with ingenuity and perseverance and making things better for the people around them in the process. If you know of someone we should write about, please email us at jk@jonathankauffman.com or samanthabakall@gmail.com. (If you’re a writer and you have a story that is too small to pitch to a publication, but you really wish Portlanders knew about it, hit us up!)
When Oregon's governor ordered all restaurants and bars to close on March 16, Fernando Rodriguez figured he was in good shape. Fernando's Alegria was a food cart, after all, and 90 percent of his customers picked up their orders to eat in the car or take home. Within three days, though, sales plummeted. Down 40 percent, then down again. For a few days, he was only seeing 20 percent of normal traffic. Two of his employees quit, and Fernando told the remaining workers they could stay home if they needed to. "It was scary for a moment," he says.
Fernando's Alegria is one of the original carts at the Portland Mercado, and according to the Mercado programs director Aldo Medina Martinez, all of the businesses in the complex were hit hard. Coming off of a rainy winter, when food cart traffic already slumps, few business owners had cash reserves. "The shutdown couldn't have come at a worst time," he says. Hacienda Community Development Corporation, which oversees the Portland Mercado, assigned business counselors to all the carts and helped them enroll with online delivery programs, sell gift cards and apply for emergency grants.
Fernando, who had been enrolled with GrubHub and Postmates for years, started to see an uptick in delivery, but not enough to make up for the lost in-person business. "It was a breaking point for us," he says.
Around that time, Beckie Lee, director of philanthropy at Hacienda CDC, and Brenda Kinoshita, director of development at Clackamas Women's Services, were talking about the effects of COVID-19 on their organizations during their weekly 5 a.m. walks. Beckie told Brenda about the food carts' drop in business. Brenda shared her organization's own troubles.
Clackamas Women's Services had been forced to shut down its shelter for survivors of domestic abuse, with its spacious, comfortable rooms, and scatter families to undisclosed rooms around the area. Now, families in crisis were isolated in rooms with no kitchen, only a mini fridge and a microwave. Instead of communal meals, they were surviving on Cup O'Noodles. The sense of community the shelter offered them was replaced with a deeper sense of isolation wireless access could not dispel.
On their walk, the two knocked together a plan: use some of the shelter's emergency funds to pay Portland Mercado vendors to cook nutritious meals. And in early April, Fernando's Alegria became their pilot.
Twice a week, he and his employees began preparing their burritos for the Clackamas Women's Services to distribute. They prepare a mix of fillings — carne asada and grilled onion, chicken tinga, tofu with grilled peppers — and wrap them, cold, for the families to microwave. Some days he prepares 30, other days, 50. "It's a big help," he says. "Two days a week, we feel like we made it."
In fact, the organization has doubled the meals it orders from Portland Mercado vendors. Within a few weeks of the stay-in-place order, calls to domestic violence centers in Oregon doubled. Clackamas Women's Services has doubled the number of people it's housing and feeding, too.
Every week now, the other Mercado vendors also take turns preparing meals. Kaah Market has fried heaps of chicken. Qué Bacano! has made healthy stir-fries. Empanadas from La Arepa. Bean-and-rice bowls from Tierra Del Sol. Roast pork, rice and cabbage from Mathilde's Haitian Kitchen. But burritos from Fernando's Alegria are a constant, week after week. They're a hit, Brenda says, and not just because they're delicious. They're large enough to cut into half, making two hot meals out of one.
"They're so generous with the food," Brenda says of the vendors. "There is community in meals that are prepared with love by someone who is thinking about you and how you'll enjoy the meal when you receive it."
Though Clackamas Women's Services had never budgeted for all this emergency housing and meals, they're committed to continuing the program. They have to, in fact: Even if the shelter reopens, they're housing twice as many people as it held in pre-social-distancing times.
The twice-weekly orders have allowed Fernando to keep on his remaining staff. The hot weather, and the prospect of the June 12 reopening of Multnomah County, have brought pickup business back, to a certain degree. "Right now we're at 60 to 70 percent of normal," Fernando says. People are walking up to the cart to order, instead of ordering ahead and waiting in their cars. There's no seating yet at the Mercado, but traffic on Foster Boulevard has definitely picked up. He feels a sense of possibility.
Fernando says that he'd done some catering before, but he's never been able to pull in large, lucrative gigs, even though he knows his food is good — better than restaurants, he'd wager. "People don't look at us at a serious business because we're a food cart," he says. The experience of making 30 to 50 burritos at a time for Clackamas Women's Services? That has given him ideas.
"If something is going to come out of this coronavirus, one positive thing, we learned that there are companies or people out there that want to help us," he says. "People we wouldn't have known. As a small business, it makes us feel like we're seen."
Learn more:
Clackamas Women's Services: https://www.cwsor.org
Portland Mercado: https://www.portlandmercado.org
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, winner of a few Beard Awards, and the author of Hippie Food, a history of the 1970s natural-foods movement. Read more of his work at www.jonathankauffman.com.