St. Anthony’s Serves 36th Million Meal On Earthday
April 22nd, 2010by Frankie
San Francisco’s Historic Dining Room Exemplifies sustainability for the environment and the poor
| SAN FRANCISCO, April 22nd 2010 In any economy, San Francisco’s landmark St. Anthony Dining Room for the poor has no choice but to carefully utilize every resource it has. This year St. Anthony’s will celebrate Earth Day and the 36th Million Meal served by the historic Dining Room on Thursday, April 22nd at 11am with a healthy meal of Chicken with Pasta and Mushrooms with dinner rolls and a serving of salad. In true recession-style cooking, it took many hands to get the chicken in the pot for this meal. The chicken was donated by Del Monte; the rolls provided by Full Bloom Bakery through Greenleaf produce; the salad from the San Francisco Food Bank; and St. Anthony’s trained chefs to pull it all together. |
St. Anthony Dining Room has been serving free meals to the poor since 1950. Today, as the San Francisco unemployment rate soars to 12.5% and more people are in need of a hot meal, St. Anthony’s continues to offer sustainably managed, healthy and filling meals 365 days a year at an average food preparation cost of 44 cents per serving. This conscious recipe of food reclamation and resource management, recycling and composting is essential to St. Anthony’s everyday sustainability, and exemplifies a sustainability
More than 75% of the 6,000 pounds of food that is prepared and served each day to San Francisco’s hungriest residents is reclaimed food, such as second-harvest fruits and vegetables or day old baked goods from bakeries, which would otherwise be thrown away. To continue the cycle of local sustainability, 70% of the waste matter (from preparation scraps to unfinished meals) from St. Anthony Dining Room is composted or recycled, which is then used as soil amendment for local farms.
“Earth Day is really about bringing awareness to responsible utilization of our resources, which the poor have always had to do. At St. Anthony’s we feed a lot of people every day, but we do it with serious consideration of the resources at hand. Food gets transformed to nourishment, waste gets transformed to compost, compost gets transformed to food. And lives get transformed in the process.” Noted St. Anthony’s Deputy Executive Director, Linda Pasquinucci.
St. Anthony Foundation’s programs help heal individuals and families with programs that provide a gateway out of poverty, including a Dining Room which serves 2600 meals every day, a free clothing program, a technology lab, residential drug and alcohol recovery program, and a free medical clinic. St. Anthony Foundation does not accept any federal, state, or local government money for its programs, and is entirely funded by private donations.
Tags: dining room, earth day