The Food Fighters: DC Central Kitchen's First Twenty-Five Years on the Front Lines of Hunger and Poverty
272
The Food Fighters: DC Central Kitchen's First Twenty-Five Years on the Front Lines of Hunger and Poverty
272Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781491727911 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | iUniverse, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 03/28/2014 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.61(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Food Fighters
DC CENTRAL KITCHEN'S FIRST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ON THE FRONT LINES OF HUNGER AND POVERTY
By Alexander Justice Moore
iUniverse LLC
Copyright © 2014 Alexander Justice MooreAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-2791-1
CHAPTER 1
Grate Expectations
The heavy rubber bottoms of Robert Egger's boots clomped along a tired tile floor as he headed into his office for the final time. 'Office,' perhaps, is a generous label. Almost 24 years after he founded DC Central Kitchen (DCCK), Egger and his nonprofit organization had developed a reputation for redefining some less-than-glamorous things. There, windowless mop closets became executive offices, wasted food became balanced meals, and homeless ex-convicts became dedicated employees. Robert's six-by-six foot room, with its sagging, dropped ceiling and white cinderblock walls, had little in common with most workspaces belonging to people with titles like CEO or President. A clunky metal desk sat to the left and those white walls were nearly papered over with pictures and posters of his heroes, from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen. The cramped closet hid its significance well. In Robert's desk drawers, Kodak prints and press clippings told a grander story. Bill and Hilary Clinton toured the Kitchen twice. Barack Obama brought his whole family. George H.W. Bush named Robert his 275th Point of Light. Oprah gave him an adoring hug on national television.
Robert was a young man when he started the Kitchen. His hair, once wavy and parted, eventually grayed and thinned slightly. He decided to crop it short. The angular jaw he used to shave daily was eventually covered, in part, by a silver goatee. After packing away his picture of The King and an oversized cardboard check from The Boss, Egger picked up his iPhone and handed it to a colleague, who snapped a photo of him standing in front of the stripped-down walls spotted with masking tape. Egger posted it to Facebook. Twenty-four people liked it instantly.
In the photo, he leans on a chair, smiling slightly. Aside from his pale skin and light hair, his figure is all black, from his tight t-shirt and jeans to his leather belt and biker boots. Robert has worn black for almost as long as he can remember. It was the appeal of a black robe that first inspired him to become an altar boy.
"Back then," he recalls, "the altar boy uniforms were really cool. Black with white trim. It was a great costume." Waiting in line before class began at his California Catholic school, Egger got a tap on the shoulder from a teacher, who asked him if he was interested in helping out at the poorly attended 6 p.m. mass. "Next thing I know, I'm up on the altar, with no training." His audiences, one earthly, one celestial, wracked him with nervous emotion. It was a young Robert's first experience with a stage, a high-stakes show fraught with complex implications for right and wrong, good and evil. He was part of a production that was designed not to entertain, but to enrapture, to make an audience think along life-changing lines.
Despite his gig moonlighting at church, Egger was never much for authority figures. As a third-grader, he and his friends had ambled into a nearby canyon, away from prying adult eyes, to screw around with some matches. The dry brush caught fire quickly, and soon a good swath of the canyon was ablaze. By the time the boys emerged from the smoke, a row of disapproving parents and firemen had assembled, alerted by the flickering lights on the horizon. "We were so busted," he says, chuckling. The local fire chief visited Robert's school the next day and summoned the boy to the principal's office. Dressed in full regalia, the chief told Egger he was to write a three-page report on the dangers of playing with fire. "I went home, grabbed the pencil with both hands, and wrote this report. I saw that this authority figure wanted it, so I wanted to do a really good job. I made a cover for it out of construction paper and everything. I was so ready for this fire chief to say 'Son, you've done great work.'" The fire chief never came back. The experience of having a good idea, working hard, and, in return, receiving nothing but disregard "really pissed off" Robert. "That was the first time I questioned authority," he says.
A military brat, Egger found himself periodically hauled across the country by his parents. After California, he attended middle school in Quantico, Virginia, began high school in Louisville, Kentucky, and finished it outside Washington, DC. Egger found stability in two great pillars of pop culture: movies and music. His favorite film was Casablanca. Robert idolized Rick Blaine, the coolest dude in the coolest nightclub on Earth. Rick never had to advertise his American Café. Everyone knew it was the place to be, whether it was for the show that happened out front, or the shady deals and sultry indulgences that took place in its backrooms. The more he watched Casablanca, the more Egger began wondering about the backrooms in his own life. The killings of two Kennedys and a King during his formative years only fueled his irreverent sense of inquiry. His favorite music liked to stick it to the status quo as well. He loved the later work of the Beatles, the music of Woodstock, and, later on, the "Fuck this, fuck that," mantra of the Sex Pistols.
Egger graduated high school in 1976, but says that he "was always the worst student. Organized thinking was not my bag." His parents moved to Indiana shortly thereafter. Robert followed but quickly tired of the place. Six months later, he was back in DC, learning to tend bar across the Potomac River at the Fish Market in Alexandria, Virginia. After a year of building up his skills, he nabbed a gig at the legendary Childe Harold in DC's Dupont Circle neighborhood. "This was the place where the Ramones played their first show in DC, where Springsteen played, Emmylou Harris, man," Egger says, still awed by his proximity to history. Beyond the names that showed up on stage, one of Childe Harold's most popular regulars was the cocaine on its bathroom counters. Egger followed its savvy, short-tempered manager like a shadow, taking notes for his own club, modeled on Rick's American Café. He bought a motorcycle and leased a one-bedroom apartment. "I was 22 and felt like I was on top of the world."
In the spring of 1982, Robert was enjoying another average day of the high life. He slept late, strolled down the sweeping green space of the National Mall to play a round of pick-up soccer, headed home for a nap and a bite to eat, and then hit the Childe Harold early to set up. The Clovers, an R&B band, were about to perform. A small contingent of especially eager fans trickled in, and while Robert handed them a few clinking glasses filled with gin, tonic, and ice, his head snapped over to the doorway on his right. "I looked over to the door and there was a silhouette, surrounded by light." In walked a lithe blonde woman, dripping with self-confidence. "I had this weird sense of 'I know you,'" says Egger, but they had never met. He went about learning everything about her he possibly could, starting with her name: Claudia.
"Claudia was exotic, and had that beautiful blonde hair. She was from Albuquerque. She drove a silver Camaro and wore a leather jacket. I thought she was righteous." They were both smitten, but seeing other people. "We didn't see each other for nine months," Robert recalls. After their respective relationships had ended, the two bumped into each other at an art gallery and have been together ever since. To this day, whether he is chatting with close friends or total strangers, Egger almost exclusively refers to her as his "beloved Claudia."
With the blessing of Claudia's mother, June, the pair moved into an efficiency apartment in Georgetown. Robert phoned his mother, and asked her to mail him his grandmother's engagement ring. "It was so weird going to pick it up at the Post Office," he says. Robert and Claudia set about painting their new place one evening, working on a bottle or two of champagne while they were at it. Robert dropped to one knee and proposed.
Once engaged, Robert and Claudia had to pick a place to get married. Dismissing the church down the street from their apartment as "too snooty," the couple found an Episcopal church around the corner from Robert's latest place of employment, a high-end jazz club called Charlie Byrd's. The two decided they liked Grace Church's priest, Father Steve, and his $100 price tag for a marriage ceremony beat the hell out of his sacrament industry competition. Robert was also impressed by the church's participation in a program called the Grate Patrol. Seven local churches took turns preparing 125 nightly meals, driving to a number of spots across the city, and serving soup and sandwiches to homeless people. The program got its name from the sidewalk grates where homeless people slept, trying to capture some of the heat rising up through their metal slats. "It was the first time I'd seen a church do something besides talk," he says. Robert and his beloved Claudia had found their wedding venue.
"I hadn't been to church for years, and I was Catholic. But I was impressed. They were so open," Egger remembers. Robert and Claudia became dutiful attendees, and the Grate Patrol seized on their new faces. "I liked the church, but I wasn't about to go out on Grate Patrol," declares Egger. "It scared me to death." For years, he dodged their requests, always grabbing his wife and whispering "C'mon baby, time to go."
At the time, Robert was totally invested in preparing to open his own nightclub. He treated his time at Charlie's "like college," sponging up every drop of industry knowhow he could. He even bought a white sports coat, hoping that looking a little more like Rick Blaine would speed along the process of actually becoming his Hollywood hero. "I was 27 years old, and spent two-and-a-half years of my life trying to raise $3 million to start up my nightclub." Egger wanted his club to revitalize a fading and increasingly tired, corporate scene. Once built, The Blue Circle would be romantic, mysterious, classic, and unpretentious all at once. "We had seen the end of the big band, and then the end of the rock combo. The DJ set was king, but I knew there was all this undiscovered musical talent on the B and C lists of DC. I wanted to reveal all that local talent and turn it into a scrappy little team that'd take the pennant," he says. The planned décor was "straight deco," right down the glass brick bar. And as it was at Rick's, the audience would be a primary part of the show, as Egger eschewed the usual central stage for a series of "performance niches" throughout the venue. He hoped the club's "air of savoir-faire" would eventually speak for itself. "I wanted the sign out front to have no words—just a big granite slab with a blue circle on it, so people could hop in a cab and say 'take me to the blue circle.'" He had crafted a detailed vision, but found no backers.
Finally, in the spring of 1985, the Eggers found themselves backed into a corner by their fellow congregants at Grace Church. Robert reluctantly agreed to commit one of his evenings off to the Grate Patrol. That Tuesday night, they headed into the basement of their church, finding four batches of lentil stew simmering atop an electric stove. Along with two other regulars, Robert and Claudia dumped the stew into one big pot and loaded it into a well-worn step van along with some loaves of white bread and a few cases of oranges. Egger asked the Grate Patrol veterans where they had gotten the food. As someone who had managed the food costs of restaurants and clubs, Robert was shocked to learn that the volunteers shopped at a ritzy Georgetown supermarket, better known for its social scene than its savings.
"Why oranges and not apples?" asked Egger.
"Because many of the people we serve have bad teeth and can't chew," one of the regulars responded. The choice made obvious sense to Robert once he took a second to think about it. He had just never taken a second to think about anything like that before.
At dusk, the van departed. Along the way, Egger could not see out the van's windows, and he realized he had actually never noticed where DC's homeless people congregated. As the van approached its first stop, Robert contorted himself to finally catch a glimpse outside. In the drizzling rain, a line formed before the vehicle came to a halt at the corner of 21st Street and Virginia Avenue, near the US Department of State headquarters. "It was a bizarre, Pavlovian reaction, like a bus stop," he remembers. Nervous, Egger suggested Claudia take off her gaudy hoop earrings. His streetwise wife curtly told him where else he could put his energy. Grabbing some Styrofoam containers, he began serving food and surveying the crowd.
"When we got there," he recalls, "it was a long line of men, with a few women. Some were clearly mentally ill, but there was an equal number of men who, outwardly at least, looked like everything was okay. In a prophetic moment, I told Claudia, some of these guys look like they can work."
"It's none of your business," responded Claudia, out of the side of her mouth. "You're here to serve a meal. You shouldn't judge over a cup of soup." Egger went back to ladling lentils, but continued to process what was happening in front of him. The Grate Patrol team never got down from the van, staying elevated above the people reaching up to them for cups of soup until they drove on to the next stop. Whenever the van pulled away, several piles of trash were left behind by clients who had cast aside their cups, utensils, and orange rinds.
At the third and final stop across from the World Bank, a few of the men from the first stop on Virginia Avenue had caught up, looking for another round of food and coffee. Handing out seconds caused the Grate Patrol to run short on supplies. One man snapped at Egger, "You shouldn't come out here if you're not prepared."
In fact, Egger had really not been prepared for that evening. He had swallowed the peace and love rhetoric of his Sixties-era upbringing whole. Racism repulsed him. Robert had become a faithful attendee of the ultra-tolerant Grace Church. He called everyone he met at Charlie's 'friend' and 'brother.' Yet when it came time to help people who were different in so many ways from himself, he had proven to be uneasy, suspicious, and even fearful. "That's where I drew the line, and became aware that if I wanted to know the true meaning of friendship, I had to go out there and experience it first-hand." That night, Robert realized he had been more or less full of shit for as long as he could remember. Each day since, he has described himself as a "recovering hypocrite."
As he stewed on the experience, Egger did not limit his criticism to himself. "On one level, [the Grate Patrol] made sense. It was very compassionate and very real. What they were doing, they were doing for all the right reasons, but they weren't doing it the right way." Claudia was less conflicted, seeing significant value in a group that wanted to do good going out and actually doing it. She went to bed and suggested he do the same. Egger kept running through the experience over and over in his mind. "Looking out at that rag-tag line of people, I thought, 'there's got to be more than this,' but there wasn't."
Robert was troubled most by two things. First, he recalled the men who seemed like they could, under the right circumstances, hold a job. "I still believe that you shouldn't judge that because someone looks a certain way they should be working," says Egger, "It was more that I was curious. Was this all we did? No partnerships, no social workers?" Second, he hated the inefficiency. Each week, this tiny operation was buying groceries at expensive retail prices and spending hours in a church basement to prepare a limited number of low-quality meals. "There had to be a better way." That night, he drew his first distinction between the concept of 'doing good' and 'doing right.' The Grate Patrol was unquestionably good in its intent and purpose, but, in practice, what it was actually doing did not seem to be what was right for those it served.
The next day, Egger threw on his white jacket and headed to Charlie's. He couldn't shake the memory of his night on the Grate Patrol, though, and even his favorite distraction—planning for his nightclub—could not keep his mind occupied. Robert decided to become a regular at the Grate Patrol until he could figure out how to make it better. He agitated for the program to think bigger and sat down with volunteers from other churches, trying to get them to do the same. What if there was a central kitchen that the groups could share, creating some sort of economy of scale?
The response was not promising. If the operation grew and became more professional, the church members feared they might lose the fellowship of cooking together. The social atmosphere of the Georgetown grocery store was appealing and fun. They liked things just the way they were.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Food Fighters by Alexander Justice Moore. Copyright © 2014 Alexander Justice Moore. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse LLC.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Dedication, vii,Acknowledgements, ix,
Introduction, xi,
Part I: Robert Egger and the Rise of DC Central Kitchen, 1989-2004,
Chapter 1: Grate Expectations, 3,
Chapter 2: Scraps, 22,
Chapter 3: The Seeds of Social Enterprise, 46,
Chapter 4: The Ones who Could Work, 64,
Chapter 5: Money Matters, 92,
Part II: Mike Curtin's Kitchen, 2004-2012,
Chapter 6: Broke, 121,
Chapter 7: Stella, 147,
Chapter 8: Crops and Convicts, 167,
Chapter 9: Ripples, 207,
Author's Note, 241,
References, 247,