Jonathan Strafford feathered turkey meat between his gloved fingers and thought back on the Christmas when he was seven years old.
Before moving to New Hampshire, his family had gathered to distribute homemade sandwiches to people living in encampments in California. In the kitchen at the Concord Regional Technical Center, where Strafford is in the first half of a two-year culinary arts program, he remembered his family’s good deed as he contemplated the purpose of the task at hand.
The trays that Strafford, a junior at Concord High, assembled — sliced breast meat at the top and shredded dark meat wedged into the bottom and sides — would nourish families in the school district experiencing food insecurity.
“I love helping out. Growing up, we raised lots of money for the less privileged,” Strafford said. “I don’t think too much about it, we’re just helping a bit of everybody out.”
For several years, the CRTC has partnered with The Friendly Kitchen’s Family Friendly Meals Program to support hunger relief efforts around the holiday season. Their friendship has always been symbiotic: the food goes to a good cause, while Chef Jayson McCarter’s culinary arts classes are able to sharpen their newly-acquired skills.
Now, that partnership is expanding. Every month, The Friendly Kitchen delivers ingredients to the CRTC and distributes the ready-to-eat meals students prepare, arranged into trays that can comfortably feed four people, to families identified by home-to-school liaisons at three Concord schools.
McCarter’s students provide meals for 30 families each month, 10 at each school participating in the Family Friendly Meals Program.
With help from volunteers who cook meals at its own facility, The Friendly Kitchen distributes an average of 500 meals to local families each week, according to program manager Casey Destefano.
The soup kitchen works with low-income daycares, senior centers, shelters and youth enrichment organizations to identify meal recipients. Adding schools to the list of community partners illuminated some of the gaps that exist in Concord, Destefano said.
“As a community, we still have so many families who are food insecure, and as long as there is a need, we’re prepared to support them with meals,” she said. “Everyone says to The Friendly Kitchen, ‘You’re doing great work,’ but we can’t survive, we can’t function, without the community that supports us, without people donating their time, donating the food.”
McCarter, who spent 15 years managing the New Hampshire Food Bank’s culinary programming before joining CRTC, was eager to show his students a path of service.
A 20-year veteran working in restaurant kitchens, where food waste is rampant, he wasn’t always looking toward the areas of greatest need when handling leftovers because he “didn’t see a side of the industry where people come together to feed others.”
His classroom kitchen is different.
“When we come together and help out our larger community, it’s just a great thing, and we ought to be thankful for the opportunity,” McCarter said. “This is what we have to give — it’s not a hard give, it’s just being active and staying engaged. It’s almost convenient if you can do what you do as a gift to the world.”
The partnership fills a practical need in the culinary arts program, too.
The school’s local budget covers food purchases for McCarter’s base-level curriculum, and catering events bring in extra profit, but professional food preparation requires building up muscle memory through repetition. “It’s about trying to make quick decisions based on the conditions that you’re faced with and adjusting, but that gets pricey, buying food to keep students busy,” McCarter said.
By early December, his students had produced more than 200 trays of food, including a selection of entrees — venison stew, pork with apple sauce, green beans and rice — stacked neatly at the bottom of a seven-foot freezer and awaiting pick-up.
At their work station, Matthew Bergang and Jerimiah Chapman, both 16-year-old juniors, coordinated between themselves.
The 90-minute class — which is open to students from various school districts, like Chapman, who is enrolled at Merrimack Valley High School — requires students to make judicious use of their limited time in the kitchen.
“Chef trusts us to use our hands, he trusts us to use the knife,” Bergang said. Done with breaking down his turkey, he brought a pile of bone-bare carcasses to a gurgling vat of stock. “It’ll go all day and reduce until there’s lots of flavor. We just let it go low and slow.”
His classmates and their peers in McCarter’s two additional culinary arts classes provided an extra round of meals this month to supplement the school meals students miss while on winter break. In January, the expanded program will resume as normal, with Destefano dropping off ingredients and picking up meals to distribute to schools.
“The way the holidays fall this year, these students are out of school for two full weeks. These are students who rely on breakfast and lunch at school,” said Destefano. “We asked ourselves, ‘What are they going to do?'”