On Sundays, as Milwaukee’s Fondy Farmers’ Market wraps up for the day, you’ll hear the sounds of people buying ears of corn, fresh flowers, and ladles of sweet tea.
But it’s punctuated with the overtone of rolling wheels, as volunteers with Veggie Chop Shop, a community meal program, pull empty wagons, going stall-to-stall asking farmers to donate leftover produce.
They'll hand it off to volunteers to chop it up, and then cook it into healthy, vegetarian meals for people in need.
It starts with gleaning
“Hi! Hello! Good to see you again,” Amanda McVann greets farmer Jenny Yang, who’s surrounded by piles of cucumbers, green beans, zucchini and amaranth greens.
McVann is food justice director for Tikkun Ha Ir of Milwaukee. It’s the Jewish social action organization that runs Veggie Chop Shop.
Like many of the farmers here, Yang is Hmong. She emigrated to Wisconsin from Laos. She started cultivating crops two years ago. Today, she’s sold out of squash tips, but still has mounds of other vegetables to sell.
She’s willing to hand them over to McVann. “Because I have left over, I don't want to throw trash,” she says. She also wants to help people in need. “Because right now, food is expensive at the store. So that's why I give for you guys.”
Ric Cabanatuan swings by Yang’s stall. Cabanatuan is one of two paid chefs on Veggie Chop Shop’s staff.
“This is why I love Jenny," he says. "So this is giving back to the community, gets put into the kitchen, cooked, and it's free food.”
This is food that volunteers will help to chop up in the coming days, and that Cabanatuan will cook up, along with sous-chef Brittney "Bea" Papador. Then, volunteers will deliver buffet-style meals to local childcare centers and women and children’s centers focused on recovery, domestic violence and homelessness.
Today, their haul is 466 pounds of donated vegetables – that they pile into volunteers’ cars.
Brainstorming creative ways to use vegetables
They cart the food about two miles to an insulated cool storage shed outside of All People’s Church. They use what’s called a "cool bot" that’s connected to Wi-Fi and powered by a mini-generator that allows them to remotely control and monitor the refrigeration.
McVann — the food justice director — is joined by chefs Papador and Cabanatuan and another Tikkun Ha Ir organizer, Sami Stein Avner, in the church’s basement cafeteria, where they have kitchen space.
They’re hashing out meal plans. Papador wonders if they should do a caesar dressing or one with olive oil for the cucumber salad. “Yeah, we have balsamic in the back. We have olive oil. Let's do that on stuff that we have,” says Cabanatuan.
Their job is to let the vegetables shine, while combining them with pantry staples that have been donated, like pasta, grains, olive oil, sugar and flour. They can pick up a few specialty ingredients from the store to finish a recipe, whether that’s dairy or a missing spice or herb.
Finally, after more back-and-forth, Bea rattles off the menu: “pesto primavera, apple-zucchini bread, braised greens, gazpacho, and garden herb green beans.”
Volunteers come together to chop
Everybody reconvenes the next day in the same spot, this time, joined by a dozen and a half volunteers.
They include Jewish community regulars, some new volunteers and women from a local correctional center. Sometimes students from local college nutrition programs also join in – but they’re off this week.
Participants get right to work at tables of four or five, chopping up zucchini and cucumbers. Some of the women from the local correctional center are tasked with shucking corn and slicing off the kernels. One woman has never cut corn before. “I always wondered how they get it off the cob,” she says.
Sergeant Tashiana Griffin is supervising the women today. “A lot of them have been in these types of situations before, where they haven't had enough. So seeing that this effort is coming from individuals just like them, I think it makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside. That’s amazing.”
Emily Waldoch shares what it’s like to know the fruits of her labor will provide meals at homeless shelters. “It feels amazing,” she says. “I mean, just helping out people that need it, you know, I know how it feels to be stuck and not have help from people, so it just feels great.”
A Jewish origin story in an interfaith food justice space
Susan Ellman has been in Tikkun Ha Ir, the Jewish social service organization running Veggie Chop Shop, since its inception. She says it started out with a couple of different synagogues that used to be close to each other, Orthodox and Reform, near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
“And it started out as kind of a study session, and when people decided from there, well, now that we've come together to do this, what else can we do and get the community involved in this ‘tikkun olam,'” she says.
Tikkun Olam in Hebrew means to “repair the world.” It’s a Jewish principle of committing to kindness, social action and social justice to improve society.
These synagogues named the joint organization Tikkun Ha Ir. Or “repair the city,” so that they could emphasize having a local impact. It’s been in action for 20 years.
Ellman says Veggie Chop Shop started out as something for people to do with extra vegetables in their gardens. “And then they started moving into collecting from farmers' markets and stuff and donating the stuff to the food pantry. And then they came up with the idea...of making things user-friendly, taking the vegetables and chopping them up into something people could actually eat.”
She says that people get more excited about a prepared meal than they do about raw vegetables.
Ellman says the project is good for her social health. “It's nice to sit down with people and just talk to them as people and not stereotype them and to get to know people. And also, a lot of these people are my friends because we've been working together for years,” she explains.
And she says working with the vegetables is also good for her physical health, “because it reminds me that I have vegetables in the refrigerator that I could be doing something constructive with.”
Prepared with love for those in need
Over in the kitchen, chef Ric Cabanatuan is making what’s become a signature dish: his famous smothered greens. He’s using raw greens that came from farmer Jenny Yang. “And we're just doing a really nice low sauté on these guys, it's got smoked paprika, onion, garlic, and it's a little bit of vinegar that's in here. And we just gonna slow-cook this, keep it turning until it gets nice and soft and then we're gonna cool it down.”
Bea Papador is blending together lemon balm, pecans, almond slivers, lemon juice, garlic and olive oil for a creative pesto sauce. “It needs a little bit more love, a little bit more love,” she laughs.
By the end of the morning, the chefs are able to serve up a buffet-style meal to the volunteers, so they get to taste first-hand the meals that will be going out to people who need them. “It’s great!” one woman says. “I can taste my effort,” says another.
Since 2015, Veggie Chop Shop has served more than 51,000 community meals out of more than 93,000 pounds of produce that would have been wasted.
One of the places that gets the meals is Cathedral Center, an emergency shelter for people who have become homeless. They get a 90-day respite from sleeping in their car, in a park or in other unsafe circumstances, says Donna Rongholt-Migan, the organization’s executive director.
“And the meals that we get are provided by community partners because we don't have a fully-functioning kitchen, so we don't have a stove, we don't have an oven. Cathedral Center, you know, all those years ago we were not intended to be a long-term shelter like we are now,” she says.
She says if they’re not getting a meal like this from Veggie Chop Shop, they’d probably order subs or pizzas, “it might be a nice little treat every now and then, but it's not as healthy for someone as having fresh vegetables made into a nutritious meal.”
Veggie Chop Shop’s meals cover food for 60 to 65 people at Cathedral Center four times throughout the summer season. The remaining months of the year, volunteers from Tikkun Ha Ir bring that amount of food monthly, but out of their own kitchens.
During the summer, Veggie Chop Shop also delivers to childcare centers and other organizations serving vulnerable communities, places like Nia Imani and the Grand Avenue Club. Veggie Chop Shop has also started offering Asian greens to a clinic that serves refugees who are familiar with preparing them.
A solution with some important takeaways
The project is covered by grants and donations.
“We don't receive any payment for the meals,” says Stein Avner. “Which allows us to be under the good Samaritan law and not licensed by the health department.”
Stein Avner says this allows Tikkun Ha Ir to support organizations that are feeding people in need every day. “So in a lot of ways, we are that business-to-business model. But it allows us to know a little more predictably how many people we're feeding and to get feedback, to have a dedicated place to deliver the food so it doesn't go bad, and know that it's really getting to folks who are able to enjoy it and eat it.” she says.
She says people who’d like to replicate the Veggie Chop Shop in another city or state should make sure they have access to temperature-controlled storage, a kitchen space, enough volunteers, and time.
“We only have the funds to cook for two days,” says Stein Avner. “We don't cook five days a week, so that's [a] limiting factor. And then the number of hands, it makes a huge difference when we have 20 people who can be here chopping and cooking. Wow, it seems like it whizzes by, but if there's only four of us, five of us, it takes a lot more time.”
Ending up on the forks of people who could benefit
The Veggie Chop Shop also provides meals at The Gathering Table. It’s a fresh produce pantry on Mondays and Wednesdays outside All People’s Church in Milwaukee’s Harambee neighborhood — widely considered a food desert.
They offer what’s called “farmstand family meals” – a family-sized portion of some of the dishes Veggie Chop Shop has whipped up for the week.
Antonio Felder is there. He lives in Harambee and volunteers at the pantry. He appreciates the accessibility of the Veggie Chop Shop food.
“You're bringing it to the people — some things that people probably never tried before,” he says. “This is pure. This is good for you. This is wholesome and it gives the opportunity for the people to just try something new.”
He’s eyeing a boxed-up container of braised greens, but ends up going for the green beans seasoned in butter, garlic and onions. He takes a bite. “Delicious,” he says. “Delicious. Thumbs up to the chef!”
It’s a full-circle moment: taking healthy vegetables from farms to the forks of people who may otherwise find them hard to find.
Support for Seeking Solutions: Food Access is provided by Jon E. Sorenson, Christine Symchych and Jim McNulty, Forage Kitchen, Capuchin Community Services and Antonia Foundation.
