SANDWICHES FOR THE NEEDY
Ex-caterer helps Share the Warmth
As a cooking-school graduate and a former professional caterer, Karen Etingin has always loved to feed people.
She is also a longtime volunteer with Share the Warmth, a Pointest-charles-based community organization working to fight hunger and poverty. It serves Montreal’s southwest sector and Verdun and, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, has seen a 45-per-cent increase in requests for emergency food baskets.
Now that social distancing prevents people from picking up the baskets, they are delivered. Of the 230 food baskets delivered last week, 107 were to new members. One-third of the 586 recipients were younger than 18.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” Share the Warmth executive director Stéphanie Taillon said this week.
Like many during these strange and dark times, Etingin wanted to help. And she wanted to help through food. She offered to provide sandwiches for Share the Warmth’s food baskets, which contain non-perishable ingredients as well as produce, dairy and meat products and prepared meals when they are donated by restaurants, and desserts.
Donning a mask, she headed to Aubut near the Atwater Market and purchased enough fixings for 300 sandwiches: eggs, canned tuna, mayo, processed cheese,
peanut butter and jelly and sliced bread. She also bought plastic sandwich bags, labels and markers and delivered everything to family members who offered to help last weekend. She herself boiled and peeled 15 dozen eggs and made 150 egg salad sandwiches.
On Monday morning she picked up the 150 or so sandwiches her mother, sister-in-law and nieces had made. When a courier she deals with for her Old Montreal vintage poster gallery L’affichiste arrived to collect the 300 sandwiches, she told him they were for Share the Warmth food baskets going out that day — and he waived the charge.
Later that morning, Etingin emailed a pitch letter to a group of friends: She would buy the ingredients and deliver them, along with sandwich bags and labels — then pick up the prepared sandwiches from them. She asked participants to commit to at least 50 sandwiches. That way, she figured, there would be enough for about 300 sandwiches for the baskets on two of the five daily deliveries.
“It’s easy, takes no time (you can watch Netflix while you make sandwiches), and is a good deed that will go a long way,” she wrote. “I’d like to keep doing this until it isn’t necessary anymore — a month or two, depending on how things go.”
In short order, several friends responded. Then someone posted about the sandwich project on social media and, in no time, Etingin had more help than she needed.
While dropping off ingredients on Wednesday for her friend Clarence Epstein to make cheese sandwiches with his daughter Marlo, she told the Gazette she hopes others will be encouraged to come up with their own ways to help.
“The need is so huge,” Etingin said. “Share the Warmth is the organization I know. But there are other organizations in need of volunteers to do the same thing.”
Resilience Montreal, for instance, a day shelter near Cabot Square responding to the needs of the homeless population, accepts donations of sandwiches and of cooked meats such as cooked ground beef or cooked chicken, every day between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. at the back door of 4000 Ste-catherine St. W.