Guest Column: We Don't Want to Stop Feeding Los Angeles

Yahoo

28-01-2025

When the Palisades fires broke out on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 7, we fielded and sent what amounted to hundreds of check-in texts — Are you safe? Did your parents evacuate? When the Eaton fire followed that night, the calls and texts kicked up: My friends lost their home, we're evacuating, stay safe, stay in touch, I love you.Like so many L.A. restaurants, we didn't open our doors the next day, unable to ask our staff of cooks, baristas and servers to brave the air quality or risk an evacuation. We could float the loss of a day or two — unlike most restaurants — we were lucky to have enough in the bank to keep us going. The reality for most restaurants is that one bad weekend can close a whole business.By Thursday, we'd seen the full magnitude of the fire's destruction, and overnight, we made the call to scale down our regular operations and turn our restaurant into a crisis kitchen and food donation hub. We banded together with other restaurants, and a week into this nightmare, our newly named group — Rogue Foods LA — has sent out approximately 20,000 meals. It's a conservative estimate, but we're moving too fast to keep count.
We've called every single fire station in L.A., and they're on a first name basis with our call supervisor, and now call her directly when they need to feed hungry crews. We've sent meals to animal shelters, YMCA's and crisis and evacuation centers. We send orders out for crews of four or by the hundred.Our core team is a chef/owner of Little Fish, a restaurant in Echo Park; Little Fish's director of operations; a seafood purveyor; and a food writer organizing remotely from New York City. Through a group chat and a hundred spreadsheets, we have organized over 100 volunteer callers and drivers, and at least 70 restaurants — in addition to 30 or so cooks and dishwashers turning out hundreds of meals each day in our own kitchen.We are hearing from our first responders that this crisis is far from over. But we are grappling with the terrifying reality — shared with so many of our fellow chefs and restaurant industry people in L.A. — that this will have to stop. We have already had to re-open our restaurant and scale down our services. Each night, we go to bed exhausted and worried we'll have to end things entirely — long before the fires in Los Angeles stop, and certainly long before any of the thousands of displaced Angelenos are safely housed.
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We have the full staffs of three restaurants working seamlessly together in Little Fish's Echo Park kitchen in shifts that start at 4:30 a.m. We rarely lock our doors before 8 p.m. In the past weeks, we've seen the absolute best of the restaurant industry — that we take care of each other, that we will sacrifice and that we will show up no matter what.We've also seen the worst of what state inaction can do. FEMA's relief for businesses comes in the form of loans and tax relief — which take weeks and hardly help us as we try to feed a growing number of hungry Angelenos each day. It's unlikely we'd even qualify for FEMA relief in the first place, because we've accepted donations. But without those rapidly-arriving donations, we'd have no ability to keep our staff paid through closures and operate in the first place. (This catch-22 of needing urgent funds while waiting for FEMA has created a cottage volunteer industry of editing GoFundMe's, so that any fundraisers won't disqualify recipients from receiving future FEMA aid.) Ours is already an industry with razor-thin margins — in part because of the punishingly expensive hoops restaurants have to jump through.
We have crowdfunded via social media to raise almost $20,000, and we've spent every penny on food, gas and floating restaurants who are about to go under. It's not an exaggeration to say that each one of us breaks down in tears every day with gratitude for the donations — monetary and labor. What we can't pay for with donations, we pay for out of our own pockets. But the reality is that it's not enough. It just isn't — and we are staring down the face of what we could accomplish, but likely won't.If we had state backing to keep our restaurant closed and cover our losses, we could send out at least 20,000 meals a week — feeding people who are showing up or calling constantly, pleading for food. And we are just four women working together in a group text and guerrilla spreadsheets. There are scores of groups like ours — collections of restaurants meeting the tremendous, unending need.As we move out of the stage of acute crisis and into building something more long term, our group is taking steps to become an official non-profit instead of operating as our initial rogue collective. But the Trump administration's grotesque plan to freeze funding to non-profits is a catastrophic blow to our ability to sustain through what will most certainly be a cycle of crises repeated for years to come.
The bottom line is that we have the kitchens. We have the cooks. We have the drivers. Our phones never stop ringing as we field calls from fire stations in L.A., evacuation centers, shelters, community centers, displaced families and anyone who is hungry and affected by the fires.We love our home, and we have been utterly overwhelmed by the amount of generosity we've seen in action. The firefighters we speak to every day say that they've never had this much support in a crisis — but their voices are growing wearier with each day that goes by.We don't want to stop feeding Los Angeles. None of us chefs and restaurant owners and food purveyors and organizers want to. But without even the most basic of aid from the people in power, we just won't have a choice.