One meal or more, no questions asked: Manna Community Kitchen feeds the Pioneer Valley, stigma free - MassLive.com

The Manna Community Kitchen in Northampton, where volunteers prepared ham grinders to serve to anyone who arrives in need of a meal, Aug. 29, 2022. The kitchen serves 1,200 meals weekly. Pictured is Kaitlyn Ferrari, the organization's development director. (Will Katcher/MassLive).
Take one meal, take two, take four, but rest assured — no one at the Manna Community Kitchen will question or judge you.
Six days a week at a Northampton church, volunteers spend the morning preparing a restaurant-quality dining option for anyone who could use it. Lunch approaches and a crowd queues, and the meals are there for the taking, whether a person has a roof to sleep under or not, whether they have a job or not, whether they came for a meal yesterday or the day before or never before.
The food is offered free of charge and free of shame. This is not a soup kitchen, Manna treasurer and cook Lee Anderson said. The organization dropped that designation years ago, preferring to ditch the connotation it brought of Oliver Twist and gruel dropped in buckets.
“I have friends who are single parents. They would just say, ‘I don’t want to take from somebody who needs it more,’” Anderson said. “But it’s for all of us. We’ve got plenty. We’re in a valley full of abundance.”
Food insecurity has a way of hiding in plain sight. When their child wants to play in the local basketball league this season or needs school supplies, parents may feel inclined to cut from the food budget for a few nights.
“You don’t have to do that,” Anderson said. Come here, free up that money and go to the movies with your kid. Food is the first thing that gets pushed off the table when your finances get compressed.”
Manna Community Kitchen
From Monday through Thursday, Manna serves meals out of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Elm Street. On Fridays and Saturdays, they relocate to Edwards Church on Main Street. Doors open at 11:30 a.m., except for Wednesday’s 6 p.m. meal.
Manna has been running 35 years strong, said Kaitlyn Ferrari, the organization’s development director. Today, they average about 1,200 meals a week, serving dozens of guests in person each day and dozens more by delivery — all with however much food they need.
“We’re no questions asked,” Ferrari said. “If someone asks for four meals, we’ll give them four meals.”
About a quarter of the meals are for delivery to people who are homebound or simply unable to be at the church in person to pick up food.
Finding volunteers to deliver can be challenging, and the cost of transportation does not help, even as more people than ever are asking for food deliveries.
The Manna Community Kitchen in Northampton, where volunteers prepared ham grinders to serve to anyone who arrives in need of a meal, Aug. 29, 2022. The kitchen serves 1,200 meals weekly. (Will Katcher/MassLive).
In recent weeks, an unlikely corporate hand stepped in to help.
DoorDash — the company that allows drivers to sign up to deliver from restaurants to customers’ doorsteps — began partnering in 2018 with government and nonprofit organizations to facilitate deliveries that had a social impact. Since linking with Manna in August, DoorDash has paid their drivers $5 a bag to deliver meals for the community kitchen.
About 60 people asked for deliveries as of a month ago. When DoorDash began delivering, that number jumped by 10 in the span of two weeks.
Manna proudly is known for its varied and nutritious meals, Ferrari said.
On a recent Monday, the midday meal that Anderson whipped up at St. John’s could just as easily be found at a sandwich shop downtown — a ham grinder, sweet potato fries, a banana, salad, chocolate cake.
“Everyone gets a salad. Everything is locally sourced. Lettuce, tomatoes, beets if they’re in season,” she said. “We really do try to put a lot of thought into the food we make. We’ll find out one of our guests, their mom used to make something, so we’ll make that next week.”
“Once you eat our food and you meet the people that hang around here, you realize that you know it is no different than a restaurant in town,” Anderson said.
Alongside the physical nourishment, Manna hopes the people arriving for a meal get the social nourishment a community can offer.
“Everyone is a human being and deserves not just food but someone to talk to,” Ferrari said.
In the kitchen at St. John’s Church, as the staff prepared scores of meals for the Monday crowd, Alison Ryan of Sunderland and Jeannine Clark of Florence stood at their prep stations, filling cups of aioli and wrapping corn on the cob.
Ryan, the community engagement liaison for Trulieve, a North King Street cannabis dispensary, was working in a kitchen for the first time. She had previously volunteered through her job with Habitat for Humanity and the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts.
“I think there’s definitely a need for [the community kitchen] in Northampton,” she said.
The Manna Community Kitchen in Northampton, where volunteers prepared ham grinders to serve to anyone who arrives in need of a meal, Aug. 29, 2022. The kitchen serves 1,200 meals weekly. Pictured is Alison Ryan, the community engagement liaison for the Northampton cannabis dispensary Trulieve, who is volunteering as part of her work community. (Will Katcher/MassLive).
Clark retired six years ago from a job in the University of Massachusetts Amherst Office of Environmental Health and Safety.
She came to Manna a little less than three years ago, hoping to give back to her community.
“I always imagined it could have been me out there,” she said, “if I made the wrong decision in my life.”
With the doors open and the meals flowing, one Ludlow man took his grinder outside, where about a dozen people sat under a tent enjoying their lunch.
He first came to the community kitchen about a month ago and was surprised at the quality of the food he received. He does not often buy vegetables, but sometimes finds crates of them tossed away in a dumpster behind a restaurant or grocery store.
He gestured to his chocolate cake, salad with fresh vegetables, fruit, sweet potatoes and the remaining half of his sandwich.
“I couldn’t pay $40 bucks to get this in a restaurant,” he said.
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