Food provides more than one kind of nourishment

Jennifer Caraway is a chef and when her friend, Joy Seitz-Butz, underwent treatment for ovarian cancer, Caraway visited regularly, taking along hot, home-cooked meals.

It’s one of the ways people who cook show their love.

Her friend was just as hungry for company, Caraway realized, someone who wasn’t a caregiver or wearing a white coat.

So she started a nonprofit group in 2011 to deliver meals to cancer patients at home. She called it “The Joy Bus,” after her friend, who died not long afterward.

Caraway asked her board to lease a commercial kitchen and then proposed they start a restaurant to help fund the charity. In 2016, Caraway opened The Joy Bus Diner near 32nd Street and Shea Boulevard in Phoenix.

Now she delivers 100 meals each week.

Caraway and her restaurant’s chef, Chris Fregozo, make most of the meals. Other chefs also volunteer. Recently, Charlene Badman, chef at FnB, made chicken pot pie, salad, and butterscotch pudding for patients.

Those same chefs collaborated with Caraway to produce a cookbook, “More Than a Meal.” The $25 cost supports The Joy Bus.

Crooked Sky Farms donates produce. Periodyc Baker makes pastries. Wild Things Botanical gives flowers to go along with each delivery.

More than 80 volunteers, including Joy’s family and friends, prep ingredients, work shifts in the diner and deliver meals.

Sometimes, they sit with patients; sometimes they call. One volunteer golfs on Sundays with a former patient.

It is about more than home-cooked meals, pastries and flowers, Caraway said. It’s bigger than having one fewer thing to worry about.

“It’s the knowledge,” Caraway said, “that people care about them.”