Mac and cheese, a great American meal and a great American tradition, never looked as delicious as it did Monday at the Concordia Lutheran Church.
That’s because it couldn’t have come at a better time.
Not with the presidential inauguration, a breeding ground for divisiveness between Donald Trump’s backers and his critics, happening on Friday. But at Pastor Jon Hopkins’s church, volunteers gathered to form assembly lines of community spirit, honoring the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his day.
A day of unselfishness. A day of unity. A day of mac and cheese, packaged and delivered to food pantries and food banks so those less fortunate would have something to eat.
“Martin Luther King said that anyone can be great, because anybody can serve,” Hopkins told me while this conveyor belt of goodness was in full gear. “That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re serving.”
They were members of the pastor’s congregation and members of other churches. They were local and non local. They joined hands to make hundreds of 12.4-ounce mac-and-cheese dinners, in honor of the man who said he had a dream, before the nightmare of April 4, 1968, when an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tenn., turned the civil rights movement upside down.
“King was fighting for civil rights, and I would also say that King fought for a larger justice agenda,” Hopkins told me. “More toward the end of his life he was more concerned with poverty, with war, about justice in general, about how people get treated, and the connection for me is the peace for King. His idea was the way we do good in the world.”
The good came from people like Hopkins and a man named Matthew Martin of Marshfield, Mass., the regional manager for End Hunger NE. He drove 100 miles to coordinate the effort. First, though, he announced some sobering numbers on hunger in America.
He said this was the program’s sixth year. He said there are 140,000 people who don’t get enough to eat in New Hampshire, 15,000 of whom live in Merrimack County, 4,000 of whom are children. He said when the program began, 1 in 4 children in America were going to bed hungry, but, with programs like this one, those numbers have changed to 1 in 5.
“So if we’re able to package over 10,000 meals and give them out locally, that makes a huge dent in local hunger,” Martin told everyone. “And that’s awesome that you guys are a part of this.”
Gail Fisk of Concord was part of this. “Dr. Martin Luther King was someone who cared about all people, not just people of one color,” she said. “He was very interested that the love he shared went everywhere, even to people who were persecuting him, and this is a way to give back to everyone in the community, to people we know and people that we don’t know, to everyone who is our neighbor.”
Fisk brought her two grandsons, 11-year-old Ryder Fisk, a student at Rundlett Middle School, and Tanner Fisk, 9, who attends Beaver Meadow School. They were part of this, too.
“The community does so much for me, and I just thought I’d give back to it,” Ryder told me. “I’m just so thankful I have a roof over my head, food on my plate.”
I asked him what he knew about King. “I know of his speech, ‘I Have a Dream,’ ” Ryder said. “I know he was a civil rights activist.”
Added Tanner, “I know that he changed the law for black people.”
The kids, all of whom had the day off from school because of the King holiday, knew their stuff. Or at least they knew enough. Carlie Saltmarsh, a 13-year-old student at Merrimack Valley Middle School, said, “I know that he had this big speech about having a dream.”
Logan Quiroga of Manchester had box-making duty, using a heavy-duty tape dispenser to seal the deal.
“It’s a day of joy, hope, and I was thinking give that joy and hope to other people,” said Quiroga, who’s 13. “I know he was a great man. I know he inspired the nation to change their views.”
I asked Phil Joseph, who runs the Quality Inn in Loudon, why he showed up. “I’m here today because I’m not hungry,” Joseph told me. “This would have meant everything to King. This is doing for other people, that was his big thing, and one day we might learn.”
Joseph returned to his work station, one of three, each consisting of two long tables lined up end to end. Volunteers wore hair nets and see-through plastic gloves. Martin gave instructions on how to create a bagged mac-and-cheese dinner.
Drop a package of deluxe cheese into a plastic bag, then fit the bag’s opening onto the bottom of a funnel, then add a scoop of grain protein into the wide-mouthed top of the funnel, then add two scoops of macaroni into the funnel, then seal the bag tight with a sealing machine.
Out of sync at first, somewhat disjointed, the three teams quickly developed a chemistry and a rhythm, the bags of mac and cheese piling up, people like Gail Fisk and her two grandsons and Joseph scooping, Quiroga taping, Martin and Hopkins supervising.
“A diverse group works together to solve a problem, so there’s equality,” Martin told me. “That’s why I love this.”