Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
“Twenty-five years ago a small group of friends came together to help seven people they knew and loved battling HIV/AIDS… They took to their kitchens, the heart of any home, and began to cook.” As explained on its website, that’s how Food Outreach (foodoutreach.org) got started. Today, the nonprofit provides 30,000 meals a month for 2,000 low-income people with HIV/AIDS or cancer, at no cost. Food Outreach executive chef Nick Hatfield fights the good fight in the kitchen.
• We have about 2,000 clients who get two meals a day. They come into our lobby and go to the front desk, where Melissa checks them in and we give them a sheet which has a variety of descriptions of food. I do frozen food, but we also have canned food and fresh vegetables and grains. They get 10 of this or two of that, and they hand their choices to volunteers, who collect the food and bag it and hand it to them.
• The empowerment of getting outside of your house is good, too. Coming in to get your food and interacting with people is a good thing for you. We do also have a delivery service for those unable to make it to Food Outreach, for the really ill or those who live far away. We have freezer trucks for that. About 150 need the delivery each day.
• I’ve trained in Europe and classically, and when I first started here, I was trying to do something the clients would enjoy and would still be healthy. I did a Thai dish with curry, and it didn’t do well. I’m working with a demographic that isn’t always exposed to exotic meals. It takes time to introduce new things. This weekend, I’m making a vegetarian tortellini with a butternut-squash sauce, and people love it.
• Our clients’ favorite dish is our chili, so we make it every week. Meatloaf is another great one. And they love Nick’s Mashed Potatoes. I put Great Northern white beans in there for an additional protein source. They can’t tell it’s in there!
• One unpopular dish that I still try to do is edamame with ginger dressing. I think it’s great, but some of the clients aren’t big fans. Sometimes I do a tilapia with different sauces and hope they’ll like it; it’s such a great lean protein.
• We plan out the meals we’re going to make ahead of time. We try to focus on lean protein, fresh fruit, healthy vegetables, whole grains, and so on. We don’t use trans fats, and we try to go low-fat and low-sodium and incorporate as many “superfoods,” like kale, as we can.
• We try to be cost-effective. There are always issues, like how do we get more tomatoes at a cost we can afford? We work with Produce Row in North St. Louis, where we get most of our produce, and during the growing season, I work with a local nonprofit urban farm called City Seeds, which is part of Gateway Greening. We get 8,000 pounds of produce a season from them. They grow collard greens, okra, kale, Swiss chard, green beans, and a wide variety of things. This is our third season with them.
• We rely on about 600 volunteers a year. The actual cooking staff is just me and Courtney [Miller], the sous chef. Some days in the kitchen we have two helpers, sometimes five, sometimes 20. If I don’t have many helpers, it might be one of those 18-hour days, but whatever it takes to get the job done. If I have 10 helpers, I might try to get ahead, because I never know what tomorrow brings.
• I’m there guiding everyone in everything from how to peel a potato to putting the whole dish together. Some of the volunteers have never walked into a kitchen before, and they
have that deer-in-the-headlights look. I like to use my kitchen as a teaching place, and make people feel good about themselves. The volunteers—some of whom are clients—come away knowing they did a great deed for the day, and maybe they can even recreate that dish at home for themselves.
• On a typical day, we’re working toward meeting our goal for the week and toward Saturday, which is our “large-group pack.” This week, we’re doing Salisbury steak with a mushroom sauce. The steaks are being done now. On Saturday, we’ll combine them with the sauce. Each Saturday, we pack 3,000 to 6,000 meals. On Wednesdays, we do a “mini-pack” of 1,000 to 2,000 more meals. It’s intense.
• The first six months I worked here, I said, “What did I just get myself into?” But now it’s my everyday life, I’m used to it, and I love it. It’s been a wonderful, noble thing that I didn’t know I was walking into, and now, years later, I see how lucky I am to be here. I have cards on my desk that say, "If I didn’t have Food Outreach, I would not be alive today."
• We do Monday Hot Lunches at Food Outreach. Every Monday, we do a three-course meal for 64 to 70 clients, restaurant-style, on white linen. Sometimes I like to try out a new item by putting it into the Monday lunch and seeing if people like it. Sometimes we also do a taste test in the lobby. And people are very vocal about what they like and don’t like. People come in the back and say, “I love this, but I don’t love this.” Melissa, the grocery center manager, will give me their feedback, too.
• We have guest chefs come in and help out with the Monday Hot Lunch sometimes. We’ve had chef Liz Schuster from Tenacious Eats, Cassy Vires from Home Wine Kitchen, Kelly Spencer from the Social Affair, and chefs from Orlando’s Garden, Cielo… We have a crew that’s been here for a long, long time that helps out every Monday, too.
• Yes, I am one of those Hatfields. Both my parents are from Louisville, Kentucky, and we’re directly connected to the conflict from years ago.
• I’ve seen directly how the recession and how hard times make things worse for the hungry, because I’m the one who purchases all the food. When the cost of something like corn rises, that’s used to feed chicken and beef, so it raises the cost of other foods, and then that strains our budget. The stresses are there, and that’s why we work with multiple places like U.S. Foods and Sysco to negotiate deals to better help our clients and ourselves. A year-and-a-half ago, things were really bad.
• I changed the ground beef in the chili to turkey meat, and it saved us like $12,000 a year.
• Sometimes people feel isolated in their homes. And some live on the street. Here, they can get warm for the day, they can feel safe, and they can feel at home. They know they’re gonna be taken care of here, before they go back to whatever situation they have outside of the walls of Food Outreach.
• We always need more donations and that’s particularly true during holiday time—donations of food and money, and volunteers and help.
