Abby Connolly
We recently discovered an amazing organization that kept families fed and restaurants in business during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The residents of Sacramento, California, were some of the people who found themselves at a loss for what to do when everyone in the state was ordered to stay at home for their health and safety in the middle of March of 2020.
As many can recall, the stay-at-home order led to the hospitality industry, especially local restaurants, entering panic mode.
Clay Nutting, owner and operator of multiple Sacramento restaurants, wrote in a Medium blog post about how the day after the order, a small group of restaurant operators met to “brainstorm ways to save their businesses, take care of their employees, and as the need became more apparent, be of service to the community during this extraordinary time.”
That was when they came up with Family Meal. Family Meal is an organization that turns local restaurants into “micro-commissaries” to provide food for at-risk populations while also benefitting the restaurants, their staff, their local purveyors and farmers.
The model of their mission is similar to the one proposed by Chef José Andrés of World Central Kitchen, who wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times claiming that these kinds of approaches would help economically benefit the industries that have taken a hit due to the pandemic, and feed people who are in need.
So how exactly does Family Meal work?
Multiple restaurants are hired to create meal kits, which cost $40 to create. The kits are carefully designed so that one can feed four people or one person for four days.
The kits are also crafted to ensure that they are efficient both logistically and economically. The food in each kit is sourced by a local network of farmers and purveyors.
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