Restaurants find hope in delivering donated meals
began to pick up.
What has happened at FieldTrip is playing out at restaurants and hospitals around the country. Delivery orders for health care workers have begun coming in, ranging from bags of sandwiches paid for by small pledges on GoFundMe pages to multicourse meals subsidized by the philanthropic arms of major companies.
Chefs say they are grateful for these new delivery routes. So are hospital administrators, who say their employees have been too busy to run out for coffee or place delivery orders.
Neither group foresaw this surge in food donations two weeks ago, when it was still possible to believe that closing restaurant dining rooms might be enough to keep new coronavirus patients from overwhelming hospitals. That was before doctors began learning how to keep two patients alive on a single ventilator, before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised health care workers who had run out of N95 masks that they might tie bandannas and scarves around their heads “as a last resort,” before nurses were cutting arm holes in plastic trash bags and wearing them instead of standard protective gear.
Hearing about all of this inside the homes where they have been ordered to stay, people have come together to send food to health care workers.
In Los Angeles, New York, Washington, and Oakland and Ventura County, California, chef José Andrés has converted dormant restaurants, including several of his own, into commissaries for World Central Kitchen, his nonprofit disaster-relief group. As of last weekend, the commissaries had sent meals to workers at 10 medical centers, with more on the way, Andrés said.
A well-funded version of the same idea has been running in Atlanta since Friday. The Atlanta Hawks basketball team and State Farm are paying two Westside restaurants, Miller Union and Forza Storico, to cook and pack complete dinners that can feed two people. The packages, 200 from each restaurant five days a week, are parceled out to workers at the six hospitals in the Emory Healthcare network.