Gobble Gobble Give to distribute Turkey Day meals
VISTA — Hundreds of people will cook a little extra this Thanksgiving and surprise homeless people with a meal as part of a nationwide project that includes Vista and several other cities.
Participants in the annual Gobble Gobble Give are asked to bring a casserolesize dish to the cannabis dispensary Tradecraft Farms, 732 E. Vista Way, at 9 a.m. Thursday. Volunteers there will assemble packages in Thanksgiving meals that will be delivered to people living without shelter in the area.
Tradecraft Farms owner and Gobble Gobble Give founder Barry Walker said the event is returning after a one-year hiatus because of the pandemic, but it remains scaled back to just seven cities rather than the usual 23 in 11 states. The annual event grew out of a spur-of-the-moment giveaway about 23 years ago in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake, he said.
“I was squatting in an abandoned place,” he said. “There was power, so I had a hot plate. I was a few months sober and feeling pretty down on myself and just needed to concentrate on something else.”
Walker, who lives in Topanga, said he had $9 in change and walked to a liquor store to buy bread, beans and canned turkey. He heated up the food and planned to give it to a homeless family who had been living just outside his window, but they were gone when he went outside.
Instead, he hopped on a bike with some of the food and rode to a bridge, where he met a homeless man who appeared very frail, injured and afraid.
“He looked at me like I was going to pull a knife on him, and I handed him a meal,” Walker said, choking up as he recalls the event more than two decades later. “It changed my life.”
Walker went home and retrieved the rest of the food and rode back to give away more.
“People looked at me like I was a superhero,” he said. “To this day I get way more out of feeding the homeless than they get out of me.”
Besides giving out food each year, Walker said he usually distributes 20,000 socks, shampoo and soap to homeless people on Thanksgiving as part of Gobble Gobble Give.