Fighting Hunger with Local Fresh Food

Pam Johnson was a teenage mom addicted to crack and heroin. She lived on and off the streets of New Brunswick and ate at Elijah’s Promise, a soup kitchen turned  thriving food business. Then she embarked on the rocky road to recovery. She enrolled in Elijah’s Promise culinary school, became a chef and came back to the soup kitchen as the Head Chef. She has been clean and sober for years.

Pam's life is just one of many that have been transformed at Elijah’s Promise, whose motto is, appropriately, Food Changes Lives. It has created a new model of a food bank/soup kitchen - a do-good business that serves its patrons by empowering them and offering many opportunities to break the poverty cycle. One of the most amazing things about Elijah’s Promise is that they do all that while serving locally sourced, made from scratch, fresh food -- the kind of food we’ve grown to believe is meant only for the “haves.”

The driving force behind Elijah’s Promise is our featured Jersey Trailblazer, Lisanne Finston. A minister and a social worker, she can teach seasoned chefs how to run a food business. Lisanne grew up in New Jersey and went to college in Washington, D.C. There, in the early 80’s, she first encountered the homeless population that was mushrooming across the country. That experience ignited her passion and set the path of her life's work. She decided to become a minister and get involved in urban work. She attended the Princeton Seminary and after a few years as a community organizer, she joined Elijah’s Promise. In 1993, Lisanne became the executive director. In this role, for almost 20 years, she has been striving to revolutionize the prevailing “revolving door” model of soup kitchens.  

“Hunger is the symptom of poverty and not the disease itself,” she says. “Providing a person with food won’t cure the problem. So we help people unlock their abilities and potential. We give them resources to feed themselves.” The soup kitchen therefore offers many additional services: addiction intervention, a health clinic staffed by med students at Robert Wood Johnson, even help in tax preparation. It offers full-fledged professional culinary training, where people can gain a new skill set and turn their lives around. Elijah’s Promise also provides employment through a catering business that serves lunches to local schools and businesses (check out the pictures to whet your appetite). To top all that, the school doubles up as an incubator for budding local food businesses who uses the fascility and its services until they can stand on their own feet.

Generating income through food is just one way in which food changes lives at Eijah's Promise. “What other ways?” I asked Lisanne. “Well, it’s really people who change lives,” she said, “but food is the vehicle.

“First and foremost, food changes lives by creating health, and health enables a more productive life.” The realization that healthy food is an essential tool in helping people thrive struck her after a serendipitous chain of events in early 2000’s: “We conducted a survey and found out that ⅓ of our people had food-related health problems. At the same time we were running out of storage because our walk-in was filled with Entenmann’s cakes. Our truck was breaking down because it delivered heavy juice boxes. And then, one day, a woman walked into my office with her four-year old son who had diabetes. She had just got a food bag from the pantry and said that there was nothing in it that her son could eat. The entire bag consisted of processed white food.

“That was a major ah-ha! moment for me. I realized that by feeding people junk we are part of the problem, not the solution.” And revolution ensued. “We decided to become part of the solution,” she says. “We purged our organization from processed foods and juice and freed our storage from Entenmann’s cakes, so now we had room for fresh produce. We are totally committed to serving minimally processed, fresh food and our goal is to never open a can again!”

“Good food is a right,” she adds “not a privilege.”

Serving fresh local food is expensive and labor intensive. Doing it on a budget takes diabolic organizational skills. But Elijah’s Promise proves it’s possible and basically leaves every food professional who visits them in awe. In the past growing season they processed thousands of pounds of fresh local food. The result landed on my plate when I visited in the dead of winter: delicious locally grown zucchini “cutlets” with Jersey tomato sauce. Both the zucchini and tomatoes were harvested in the summer, cooked, preserved and stored for the winter. I’m tellin’ you, there are very few for-profit food businesses who can do that.

Another way in which food can change lives is by forging connections between people and thus creating a community. One of Lisanne’s goals is to integrate soup kitchens into society, and by that empower their patrons. Having a wholesome meal served in a nice setting creates dignity, and dignity creates hope, “and this is really what it boils down to: hope.” Hope is what gives people the strength to change their lives.   

A Better World Cafe is an attempt to do that - to forge connections between people from all walks of life. It is a community restaurant where patrons pay as they can or volunteer in exchange for food. The location, Rutgers professors-inhabited Highland Park, brings people together to share a meal. “We know a homeless who walks from New Brunswick to Highland Park and eat side by side with university professors. It helps him feel normal again.”

“Community is a term we use to speak about groups of people who share common location, interests, values, risks, intents and the like,” writes Lisanne on her blog. “Elijah’s Promise soup kitchen has been serving our community for nearly twenty-five years.  We are a community of people who believe that no one should go hungry...Over these years and through our building of community...we have also created a place where people have connected and found not only food, but support, services and social connection. Elijah’s Promise really is a community soup kitchen.”

The fight to end hunger and improve people’s health is long and hard but there are many little victories and lessons to be learned. “Success is a journey, not a destination,” says Lisanne. “I really love and value the process of change. I love looking at how to make something work better. To focus on how we can serve our patrons more. There is no perfect solution to anything. You have to keep working and strive to improve. If you settle you fail.”

Supporting Elijah’s promise is a very delicious endeavor. Just have lunch at A Better World Cafe - friend them on Facebook to learn about their daily offerings, sign up for the Raising Dough bread CSA (CSB, actually, Community Supported Bakery), or order a catering or Volunteer at the cafe of the soup kitchen. Check out more ways to get involved here.