by Bailey Basham, Messenger Staff Writer

John Hille is on scooping duty, David Goodpaster is in charge of manning the machine used to package the meals and Rick Wright is the mind behind the dishes. Together, the Monteagle-Sewanee Rotary Club, the Sewanee Dining team and the Community Action Committee (CAC) are the manpower behind Kitchen2Table, a new initiative aimed at feeding hungry people and reducing food waste.

The Sewanee community has long been a champion of combating food insecurity, and two years in the making, the Kitchen2Table program is the newest arm of that work. Once a week, the Kitchen2Table team meets in the University kitchens to portion, package and freeze meals that would otherwise be wasted. Since the program officially began in September, the Kitchen2Table team has dispersed more than 80 meals to members in the surrounding community.

“Rotary came on board to help with the funding for the machine, and then the CAC kind of became the engine and host site for the work, as well as partly responsible for finding the distribution channels. This discussion has been happening for quite some time. Right around the time I started at CAC, the grant had been approved. COVID hit and there was a bit of a transition. When I got settled in, I got the green light from Chef Rick. We started [around the beginning of September], and we meet one night a week to package unused portions of one meal each meeting. Out of those unused portions, we’ve been averaging 50 meals in under an hour. The exciting thing is this will just continue to build on itself,” he said.

Wright, director of Sewanee Dining, said the issue of food insecurity on the Mountain has been getting progressively worse over the years. And that was before a global pandemic broadened the scope of the problem.

“With a large food service program, some waste is inevitable, and we’d rather divert that to a need in the community. With the Kitchen2Table meals, we’re able to package a balanced meal and freeze it. Our desire is to use the resources we have to fill a need in the community that gets bigger every year. Since I’ve been involved with the program, we’ve done outreach with the food we don’t use,” he said. “We might have green beans leftover from lunch that wouldn’t be enough for 1,700 students, but it’s enough for 50 people. For those 50 people, that helps to fill a need.”

Wright said it is the team members’ shared hope that eventually community members will be able to take over the production.

“I had a teacher once tell me when I was young that you can’t feed everybody in the world, but you can feed one person and that makes a huge difference. There are small operations that feel like they don’t have enough to give, but even on a one meal basis, that would make a big difference in people’s lives,” Wright said. “It’s not a truly original idea, but it’s a real community effort to reach those in need. We have people from the University who work in different departments that are delivering the food and reaching people. I think the goal is to have this be community-led. We’re hopeful those who want to be involved will step up and make it bigger and take it to other areas. It really takes the whole community to make this happen. I see this as all connected.I think we have a good chance.”

For more information about the Kitchen2Table program, email David Goodpaster at <goodpdt0@sewanee.edu>.