The Art of Food Kitchens

Across America, volunteers ladle steaming bowls of stew in soup kitchens found in church basements and community centers. But hunger keeps growing alarmingly, with more than 50 million people relying on charity food assistance. How do you serve not a couple of hundred people lined up along a sidewalk but 25,000? How do you deliver tens of millions of pounds of food yearly to some 400 food pantries in New York City alone?

That’s the question DC Central Kitchen, in Washington, D.C., and City Harvest, in New York City, have to answer 365 days a year. Both these organizations rely on philanthropy and large-scale donations of food, some of which is federally subsidized. The canned goods you toss into a bin during food drives are certainly welcome but not nearly enough.

These are charities that formed to engage the scandalous scale of today’s hunger problem. Working with insightful architects, both organizations have been able to build transformative facilities.

Meal prep at massive scale

DC Central Kitchen was founded in 1989 by Robert Egger, a young nightclub manager appalled at how much edible food was wasted by restaurants. His brainchild brought gleaned food to a “central” kitchen to be turned into meals delivered to shelters and nonprofits. He also saw his facility as an opportunity to train job-challenged adults to succeed in food-service jobs.

The non-profit recently moved into a light-bathed storefront called the Klein Center for Jobs and Justice within a new apartment development in the Buzzard Point neighborhood of Washington. DC Central Kitchen has been able to triple its capacity as it heads toward its year-end goal of producing 25,000 meals a day, training 250 people for new careers annually, and engaging 20,000 volunteers per year. The kitchen has added program to bring meals to 30 Washington schools, and supplies fresh items to 54 corner stores in neighborhood food deserts.

“Training people who face a lot of barriers for food service jobs,” is still a primary focus, explained Alexander Moore, the chief development officer, who walked me through. The center’s 14-week program aims to help candidates who struggle to hold jobs because they have gotten disconnected from school or may have been homeless or were stigmatized by incarceration. They receive counseling, then learn life skills, train to work in kitchens, and move on to internships in hotels and restaurants.

Some learn to do “front of house” jobs by working in one of three cafes the organization operates including one in the Klein Center, where I can personally attest the sandwiches and pastries displayed in the blond-wood counters are tasty and conspicuously fresh.

Though it originally rescued food from restaurants, DC Central Kitchen now works closely with dozens of wholesalers, farmers and other donors. And the kitchen knew well the dilapidation that many anti-hunger programs live with. It took years, working with their architect, the Washington office of ZGF, to raise the funds to escape the basement space the program long occupied below a city shelter. “The dingy cinder-block spaces made us hard to trust by prospective students who faced a lot of roadblocks and had seen plenty of cinder-block spaces,” said Moore.

The Klein Center’s high-ceilinged 37,000 square foot space runs along V Street, which means high windows can flood the space with daylight and passersby can see in—in striking contrast to the dark basement space that had to be entered through a loading dock.

Inside there is a functional purposefulness in the unpretentious design enlivened by sound-reducing, ceiling-hung slats painted in a rainbow of saturated colors. The railings of a black-painted metal stairway that rises to an office-workstation mezzanine have been punched with round holes that suggest soap bubbles. It twists theatrically around a lobby lounge. The public and semi-public spaces line the high window wall: the lobby, cafe, a steel-tabled work space for volunteer prepping and packing, and a combination staff lounge, lunchroom, and all-hands meeting space called the Hub.

These are accessed by a long hallway topped by a frieze telling DC Central Kitchen’s story that is lined by expanses of glass that open into the humming production kitchen, a commercial training kitchen, and a classroom (where trainees were learning knife skills the day I visited). Everything going on is visible to staff, volunteers, and visitors.

Meals are made from scratch in the production kitchen, aided by 100-gallon steam kettles, and machines that quickly bring foods to cold or freezing temperatures. A device that automatically packaged individual meals had stopped working, so I saw staffers lining up dozens of foil trays for packing by hand. The kitchen staff adapts to such events—not to mention unexpected surges in demand—on the fly because “we can’t miss a meal because something breaks,” explained Moore.

The design is especially sensitive to the needs of its trainees, given the intensity of the program. A second stairway subtly partitions a quiet sunlit lounge at the far end of the facility. A ZGF staffer crafted a tiny Japanese-style rock garden beneath the stair. Booths line the back so that trainees can have private conversations with counselors, with their children’s school, even parole officers. “The wellness focus addresses the needs of participants’ for stress-reduction opportunities—to calm down and reset,” said Moore.

Rescuing 81 million pounds of Food

City Harvest dates from 1982, when Helen verDuin Palit and friends dining out on potato skins realized the restaurant was throwing out the rest of the tuber. As at DC Central Kitchen, the friends formed City Harvest to bring edible discards from restaurants and other food producers to feed hungry people in the neighborhood. It scaled up to supply the kitchens and pantries that make and serve meals. The group salvaged 3,000 pounds of food in its first year. Now, City Harvest rescues some 81 million pounds of surplus to help feed some 2.4 million New Yorkers.

To meet this unimaginable need, City Harvest opened the Cohen Community Food Rescue Centerwithin a 150,000-square-foot brick-clad heavy-timber building in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park industrial zone. The structure had been built more than a century ago to maintain subway cars.

The architect is Ennead, better known for high-finish academic and cultural buildings, but the industrial-scale core of the operation is on the ground floor where the logistics specialist firm Ware Malcomb laid out food-storage and commodity flow to allow the organization’s 23 trucks to manage donations from almost 1,700 businesses that include such big names as Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and the city’s Hunts Point Produce Market.

More than two thirds of City Harvest’s volume is fresh or packaged produce so the seven loading docks feed massive refrigerator and freezer rooms, though most donations can be stored at room temperature on tiers of steel shelves that would not look unfamiliar to a Costco customer.

Towering pallets of potatoes, carrots, and cabbages must rapidly be broken down, combined with other donations, and repackaged for delivery to soup kitchens, pantries, and nine “mobile markets,” operated by City Harvest. (These look like Greenmarkets, and seven of them serve public-housing campuses.)

City Harvest is headquartered on the upper level, where strips of clerestory windows shower the space with daylight from linear roofs popups. The light is filtered by heavy timber truss members and fanning braces. “It’s a very utilitarian building,” explained Ennead partner Richard Olcott. “You want to put what you have to best effect and those clerestories make a great workplace.”

Operationally, the design unites the long-separated warehouse operations and office staff. “It was really important for everyone to be together,” said Julia Foster, City Harvest’s vice president of marketing and communications, who walked me through the building. Or as Olcott put it, “truckers hanging out with the CEO.”

A lounge, pantry and dining area anchor a long line of workstations topped by the clerestories—a basilican character that ennobles the mission. The upper floor also includes a cavernous room where volunteers—some 120 at a time—repack donations. Though City Harvest does not prepare meals, it makes space for groups like Gods Love We Deliver to prepare their meal kits for homebound clients.

“Lots of chefs support City Harvest,” explained Foster as she showed off a handsome demonstration cooking island, backed up by a commercial kitchen, designed by the Rockwell Group. It opens on an event space where the white painted walls and heavy-timber framework are contrasted with herringbone floors made of reclaimed wood. Glass doors lead to an outdoor terrace that offers panoramas of Sunset Park’s industrial roofscape and the Manhattan skyline beyond. Celebrity chef demonstrations help raise funds for City Harvest and the space also raises revenues through rentals to weddings, photo shoots, and other events.

Art has been placed throughout the City Harvest building, include (clockwise from upper left) work by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, Cey Adams, Konstance Patton Ke-nee-go-keshek, and Natasha May Platt.

City Harvest has commissioned artworks that enliven the spaces, inspire workers, welcome volunteers, and recognize the dignity of the people the organization serves. The artwork and building “help people feel the mission every day,” said Foster, “because that’s why they want to work here.”

Punishing the hands that feed

Both facilities have been open about two years, and both have been able to meaningfully expand their impact. DC Central Kitchen’s Moore told me that 80 organizations across the US emulate their nonprofit’s work. An early volunteer and generous donor, the celebrity chef José Andrés, modeled his non-profit World Central Kitchen on the DC original, transporting portable cooking facilities to feed people where disaster has struck and in humanitarian hot spots (recently serving hundreds of thousands of meals daily in Gaza, though the kitchens are currently closed because supplies have been cut off by Israel.)

City Harvest has been able to double its throughput in the new facility and bring in more volunteers than ever. Yet hunger has only grown in recent years. “The numbers we are serving are up because of the cost of living,” said City Harvest’s Foster. “In 2023 a family had to earn $100,000 in New York to cover basic needs.”

Maddeningly, Trump administration ideologues are senselessly taking their chainsaw to food aid, including rescinding $188 million in grants to New York City meant to aid migrants—as funded by Congress—which was suddenly deemed to be underwriting alleged but unspecified “illegal activities.” USDA has already halted $500 million of food deliveries and cut a $1 billion program that supported farmers whose produce would have been donated to groups like City Harvest and DC Central Kitchen.

Republicans in Congress may push through a measure that could force millions to forgo SNAP, the program that augments the grocery budgets of lower-income people. (Documenting work hours may be required for eligibility that is likely to toss people off the rolls because of the paperwork burdens.) “SNAP is critical in New York City and across the country,” said City Harvest’s Foster. The program is used by 1.8 million people in the city, according to the organization, 560,000 of them children.

Such cutbacks, as well as possible shrinkage of Medicaid benefits, may dramatically extend soup-kitchen lines.“We’re used used to adapting to unexpected disasters like Hurricane Sandy and Covid,” City Harvest’s Foster said. But the anti-hunger network that feeds millions did not anticipate the kneecapping of their efforts by official Washington. While both City Harvest and DC Central Kitchen will likely survive this entirely unjustified and gratuitous cruelty, thousands of food pantries and soup kitchens across America—and many among the millions they serve—may not.