October

Challenges

Our mission is to serve a hot nutritious meals to anyone who wants one. We served 468 meals on September 12th and then the next week, September 19th served 711 meals. That’s a difference of 243 meals from one meal to the next! How many meals should we prepare? This is one of our biggest challenges.

Many factors can impact the number of guests that come for a meal. The weather can be a factor. Too hot, too cold, too rainy, too snowy, or dark too early can play a role in guests deciding not to come out for meals. We also know what is on the menu can be a factor in whether guests come out for a meal. Our lowest numbers usually occur when we have fish as the main dish.

Some may ask why serve fish if less people come for a meal? We want to serve a hot nutritious meal in a reasonable, responsible manner. Much of what drives what will be on the menu is the cost of the main dish, usually meat. If meat becomes available for free, we are going to take it. The main free meats from Second Harvest are chicken, fish, hot dogs and occasionally pork; chicken is the most available. Beef is hard to come by. We’ve been fortunate with reduced pricing for hamburger through Second Harvest and a local farmer who recently donated 120 lbs. for free! We’ve received donations of hamburger in the past from several people.

We will continue to be challenged with exactly how many meals to prepare. We have been blessed with grants and donations of money to purchase equipment that allows us to produce more meals more efficiently. A recent donation from a generous couple of a commercial food processor, a commercial immersion blender, and a 30-quart mixer was a huge blessing! The 30-quart mixer mashed 160 lbs. of potatoes in a matter of a few minutes versus the couple of hours it took us before the mixer.

When we have leftovers, we encourage all volunteers to take meals for themselves, their families, any neighbors, and friends that can use a meal. We also freeze leftovers as a backup for when we do run out of food. Leftovers allowed us to serve everyone the night we served 718 meals.

The nights that it is apparent we’re going to serve a lot of meals causes me to become anxious. With our main goal of serving everyone who wants a meal, when it looks like that might not happen anxiety sets in. It shows my lack of faith and trust in God. My reaction is very human, we all feel stress and anxiety in our lives for many different reasons.

We prepared approximately 600 meals the night we served 711 meals, at least by our calculations. For some reason, okay, because of God’s blessings, we did not run out of chicken, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, guacamole, fruit, cookies, and the only thing we had to make more of was the tortilla shells, which we had in the freezer. We did run out of refried beans but that was a minor issue.

We’ll continue to work on the challenge of how many meals to prepare and I’ll continue to work on having more faith and trust in God!

Casting all your care upon him, for he cares for you. 1 Peter 5:7