"There's hungry people in Africa and starving children in China."
If you were as lucky as me growing up, you had a parent that would admonish you for not cleaning your dinner plate. It's one of those guilt trips that seems to have passed from generation to generation of parents.
For me, it was my grandmother who would always give me this line. It always made me wonder, though, if I could still forgoe eating my veggies and just send the leftovers to those starving children. Of course not, I'd tell myself; it would spoil on the way. A more realistic solution would have been to give my leftovers to the local homeless, though I never acted on that impulse.
But, before the end of the year, the city of St. Petersburg might do just that.
While reporting this week's news feature "Stay Hungry," I spoke at length with St. Petersburg's social services director Rhonda Abbot about a new project put forward by the St. Pete Homeless Task Force: St. Petersburg Central Kitchen.
Modeled on the 20-year-old Washington D.C. Central Kitchen, the program would gather surplus food from area restaurants, hotels and grocery stores, bring it to a centrally-located building where volunteers would prepare meals from the donated food, and then distribute the meals to soup kitchens and homeless shelters.
As Abbott points out, food waste is the third largest portion of the U.S. waste stream, and yet, less than 3 percent of it is recovered. Food prices are rising steadily, which is putting a burden on local soup kitchens. And the number of hungry individuals is also rising; over 72,000 households in Pinellas County experience "food insecurity."
The St. Pete Central Kitchen hopes to make a dent in those three unfortunate facts.
After the first phase of the program begins (Abbott hopes to launch before the end of the year), St. Pete Central Kitchen would widen their focus by providing culinary training to homeless individuals, expanding to college campuses and creating community gardens.
“This might solve some of the issues that we have in our city," Abbott said.
Of course, as with any new homeless proposal, there are some criticisms. Don McClendon, who feeds the homeless at Mirror Lake Park four days a week, walked away from the St. Pete Homeless Task Force after this project was introduced. "Chicken Man," as he's called by the homeless, sees the Central Kitchen idea as putting a small bandage on a problem that needs some serious surgery.
“We don’t need another central kitchen,” McClendon said last week. “The real problem is not feeding the people. The real problem is homelessness. Period. And nobody has been bold enough to say, 'I came up with a plan to fix this.'”
He's says that money would be better spent creating a one-stop homeless shelter in South County that would offer a full range of services under one roof for the chronically homeless — an idea proposed by the Homeless Leadership Network last year that never materialized.
For more information on the St. Petersburg Central Kitchen, or ways to get involved, call Michael Johnson at 727-528-5763 or e-mailing centralkitchen@pinellashomeless.org.
(Photo Credit: DC Central Kitchen)
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2008.