Stone Soup at Gleaners Community Kitchen

 

By Kade Bentley –

Imagine a magical place where no one is turned away. Pass a bountiful garden where growers organize in summer months. Enter a glass door through a tremendous stone wall around the back side of a main street block. A spacious dining room and kitchen is equipped to serve nearly 100 guests – more on holidays. Local markets contribute food, local workers bring their time, local people donate funds and local people get fed.

This isn’t a fantasy. Every weekday at Gleaners Community Kitchen located in Canandaigua at St. John’s Episcopal Church, 40-50 nutritious hot meals are served to hungry guests completely free of charge. It’s a modern-day “stone soup,” a fable where villagers struggle to feed their families dinner until a stranger comes to town and places a stone in a large kettle. “Everyone put something in,” she says. The villagers each place what they have in the kettle – a few carrots, chicken, some herbs – and everyone has a bowl of hearty delicious stone soup for dinner. For the community to be fed everyone contributes. Like in the fable, everything needed at Gleaners is community sourced.

Gleaners Kitchen has seen many changes in 30 years of serving guests. When their doors opened in 1987, 3 people were served. They now serve roughly 14,000 meals a year. Tom Carter, the Kitchen Manager, a transplant from Ohio, served in the Navy for seventeen years, where he cooked on USS Eisenhower, and did finances. After the Navy, he graduated with a degree in accounting, but finds being at Gleaners much more fulfilling. Nearly five years now he’s been at Gleaners. When he started there, Gleaners was run by one person, the finances, volunteer scheduling, the kitchen. It was far too much for one person and the congregation wanted to structure things differently, to better serve the community. Now there’s a functional board of eight volunteers who oversee the project. Members are involved in other local organizations like St. Johns, other churches, and the local school. Guests serve as well. Having board members allows them to better reach out. Some have taken classes on grant writing with Foodlink, the local food bank. There’s produce to transport, administrative needs, a garden to tend, meals to cook, and of course community members to serve lunch to! All told, 60-70 local people give their time and energy toward making Gleaners’ Kitchen happen.

The Kitchen began by gleaning leftovers from local farms – a practice with a long history of feeding the hungry. Today there’s no need to search. The Kitchen partners with Tops and Wegmans to receive food donations that would otherwise go to waste. Tops offers any day-old bread, and Wegmans donates food every day, ranging from one box of odds and ends to six full boxes of fresh produce. The community comes together to provide too. Many Canandaigua community members have resources they’re happy to share. Gleaner’s receives donations from members of St. John’s as well as other local churches. Community members also host grassroots fund-raisers and food drives – even lemonade stands! Carter tells a story of a young girl who asked guests to bring canned goods or a financial donation to her birthday party instead of gifts – a few years in a row. His daughter Jessica volunteers in the Kitchen Wednesdays. He thinks it’s important that Gleaner’s helps teach young people the value of giving.

Gleaners doesn’t just serve members of the church – they serve everyone. “There’s no need to prove your need here,” says Carter, “if you just come through that door, that’s good enough for us.” They believe no one should be hungry. It doesn’t matter where you are in life or what brought you to the kitchen; everyone deserves to eat. The kitchen serves hearty staples that will “stick to you for a while.” A main entrée, like chicken stew, franks and beans, or casserole, is paired with a vegetable and a starch. Almost every day there’s a fresh salad. “If you walk in the door you get fed!” says one volunteer as she dishes out a plate of Wednesday’s meal – Chili with corn bread, coleslaw, fruit salad, and a choice of pastries for dessert. Leftovers from the meal are offered to the guests to take home. On Wednesday there was a variety of baked goods on the table to take home. In addition to offering meals, Gleaners also gives out 40-50 bags of mixed groceries each week from whatever is on hand.

It’s a large commercial kitchen where the food is prepared, and many of the volunteers have food service experience. Recently the yacht club chef started cooking on Fridays. “He’s a real chef! We’re waiting to see what he’ll do,” Says Carter, who self-identifies as a cook not a chef. The challenges are different from a restaurant, though. Unlike a venture for profit where menu items are ordered as needed, cooks at Gleaners must plan meals around what’s available that week, and organize around which foods must be used immediately, stored, or offered to guests. Anything needed to finish putting a meal together is purchased.

During the summer months a lot of produce is grown in the garden right outside. When Lou Bliss started at the Kitchen it served mostly soup and sandwiches, and she saw a need for fresh veggies. It’s been nearly ten years since then, and she still manages the onsite garden. Other volunteers work the dirt there, as well as groups like the Girl Scouts. The garden space offers not only sustenance but also a way to teach folks about growing food. It has developed into a lush space with raised beds, row crops and plastic hoop house. “We’re still pulling out beets!” said Bliss on Wednesday, as December got rolling.

Gleaners Community Kitchen serves community. Connections are made. Serving, dining, and organizing in the kitchen builds bonds. When everyone is served the volunteers sit in the dining room and enjoy their lunch as well. Bliss talks about gardening at the table with another volunteer, Rob, who helps her with trees on her property, and about a farmer who donated bales of straw for the garden from his own stores. Since the kitchen offers lunch during the school day, most of the diners are adults and seniors. During the summer a few more families with children come in. The comfortable dining room is a space to socialize and see friends. For others, it’s a welcoming group of folks and the assurance that someone friendly will always be there. Seeing folks sitting in circles and enjoying conversation is reminiscent of a family dinner. Gleaner’s kitchen will continue to serve as focal point for the Canandaigua community for many years to come, with those who counted on meals when they needed them stepping up later, to add something to the pot.

 

Gleaners Community Kitchen is open Monday-Friday at St. John’s Episcopal Church at 183 North Main St., Canandaigua.

Doors open at 11am, and lunch is served at noon.

Gleaners is always accepting donations and new volunteers!

Reach them at 585-394-4818, Gleaners@rochester.rr.com,

or www.gleanerskitchen.com

 

 

 

 

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Kade Bentley has collected experience from commercial kitchens, vegetarian and vegan collective living, organic farming, and a general love of food. They can cook for one or 100. As a “kitchen witch,” They believe that how and with what we sustain ourselves has a spiritual significance, and sees eating and cooking as agricultural acts. They support small farms, the right to whole nutritious food, generous use of butter and coconut oil, and the creation of a more just food system.