VIV Moments

Hometown

A suitcase moving across America

Joie de VIVre

My passion is connecting community’s resources to community’s needs. Blending diverse professional skills with volunteer experiences, carefully stirred, allows me to make a difference.

VIV Moment

As director of Yale University’s Community Soup Kitchen in New Haven, CT, in 1980, I struggled feeding our 100-plus hungry people lunch while smartly managing donated money.

Soup kitchens in America could only afford soup and bread as the meal. After one intense day, I relaxed at Fitzwilly’s with my margarita and a potato-skin appetizer. Suddenly, I wondered, “What happened to the insides of this potato?” That flash of inspiration changed my life.

The chef explained that, while selling various potato dishes, they still had leftovers daily. I told him our soup kitchen across the street could really use whatever they wanted to give. He smiled.

The next day 30 gallons of cooked potato insides thickened our soups! Later, 10 perfect quiches arrived. “Why?” I asked the chef. After printing the “Daily Specials” with a ham-and-cheese quiche, he had forgotten the ham. He made a business decision to donate the hamless quiches while the new ones were baking.

I wondered if other food companies would periodically have good perishable food left over that they chose not to sell. Maybe food was thrown out and wasted all over town, nourishment that my guests really needed every day.

Three months later, our gourmet soup kitchen served appetizers, salads, beef, chicken and seafood entrees with desserts — all donated by local retailers, restaurants and Yale.

My epiphany came when I realized we should use all this good food from every city in America and the world! From Yale’s Food Salvage and New York’s City Harvest, which feeds 53,000 hungry people daily, to 122 Harvests in America and 818 around the world — that today will pick up and deliver enough food for another 900,000 meals today for the hungry men, women and children of each community, and another 900,000 meals tomorrow — the best food in each city would otherwise go to waste without these programs.

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