A Growing Hunger for Help

After months of discussion, city officials promised the organization a $75,000 grant. As of Tuesday, the kitchen still had not received any money. The promise came only "after some prodding" within the bureaucracy, said Deputy Mayor Neil O. Albert, a supporter who said he expects that amount to double in the next fiscal year.

"They fill a void in the city that has gone uncompensated for too long," Albert said late last week. He declined to discuss whether the city should have contributed money earlier but conceded it should better aid in the feeding of its own citizens.

"I really think it is a responsibility of city government," he said.

According to D.C. Hunger Solutions, a project launched in 2003 to improve the nutrition and health of the District's children and families, about 175,000 residents count on food banks, pantries and soup kitchens for what they eat. One in three children lives "on the edge of hunger." One in 10 households experiences "food insecurity" because of only tenuous or minimal access to nutritionally balanced food -- though that rate has fallen since the late 1990s and is below the national average.

"D.C. government allots very few dollars on food programs of its own city budget," project director Kim Perry said. "The D.C. government should put more money toward anti-hunger programs." Chief among those, in her mind, is D.C. Central Kitchen. "They do need help," she said. "And the thing about D.C. Central Kitchen is, it's not just about food. It's about rebuilding people's lives."

The organization was born in the late '80s after Egger, whose career aspirations then centered solely on opening his own nightclub, helped a Georgetown area church group hand out sandwiches one winter's night on local street corners. He asked the leaders where they got the food. Bought at a Georgetown grocery store, they replied.

In a moment he considers an epiphany, Egger realized two things: how little those sandwiches were truly improving the recipients' lives and futures, and how much further the dollars spent on them could be stretched if mixed with creativity and the vast amounts of uneaten food he knew nightclubs and restaurants regularly threw away.

He and a couple of friends secured a kitchen in the basement of a converted dentist's office and applied for grants to support the idea. Every foundation but one, the William S. Abell Foundation in Chevy Chase, turned them down. They used their sole $20,000 award on a refrigerated truck to collect leftovers and disburse meals.

And their first major donor? The January 1989 inaugural balls of George Herbert Walker Bush. (Organizers of inaugural events for his successor, Bill Clinton, also participated, but the festivities for the second President Bush did not.)

These days, food comes from restaurants high- and lowbrow. It also comes from wholesalers such as Costco, nonprofit organizations such as the National Press Club, law firms, caterers, churches and hospitals. A truck picks up donations weekly from Sidwell Friends School, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and twice weekly during the summer from Smokey Glen Farm Barbequers Inc. in Gaithersburg. In August, bushels of vegetables arrived from the National Arboretum.

Over the years, the founder's original idea has expanded to include a volunteer corps that last year logged more than 48,000 hours, a street outreach program, a healthy-snacks initiative for local schoolchildren and half a dozen "campus kitchens" that mount similar food-recycling efforts at colleges across the country.

And crucial to the day-in, day-out work at the 10,000-square-foot kitchen on Second Street NW is the Culinary Job Training Program Day. To date it has graduated more than 500 chefs, most of them men and women whose résumés once were limited to drug addictions, prison and lengthy joblessness. For many, their completion certificate represents the first success of their lives.

The kitchen hires many of the graduates. Their overall employment rate after six months out is about 75 percent, said Curtin, who knows better than anyone the demands of the operation and the current students' needs.

Bo Sims is two years past his training and in his 20th month of employment at the kitchen, where he has worked himself up to assistant chef and weekend supervisor. He hasn't forgotten how much his life once paralleled those of the men and women now eating his fixings.

"Oh, man, one day I was in that situation," he said as he tended a gigantic pot of egg noodles, sweat beading his brow. "And now I'm helping to prepare food for them. It's a feeling, a good one."

Along one aisle workers were preparing the next evening's chicken stroganoff (the poultry purchased from a supporter at 48 cents a pound and pulled apart by a contingent of volunteers from the Embassy Suites in Crystal City). In another aisle were vats of vegetable salad and turkey sandwiches, to be on their way for consumption within hours.

Despite the budget worries, or because of them, the staff is moving ahead with still more initiatives. A new consortium was just launched. It will connect the organization with wholesale food vendors and restaurants; a restaurant will pick a vendor as a partner and, at the beginning of each month, make a pledge with its usual order that the vendor will match. The kitchen will use the money to help offset its own food purchases.

"A partners' buy-cott," Curtin said with typical enthusiasm. "It could literally change how community kitchens work around the country."