Where Food and Faith Meet

During times of crisis, certain creative and caring people like Jeni Wheeler rise to meet community needs. When Wheeler discovered Faith Family Kitchen (FFK), she truly found a match made in heaven, but little did she know what challenges lay ahead to keep Cape Codders fed.

Wheeler moved to Cape Cod in the spring of 2018 to continue a long recovery from a life-altering brain injury and to restart Jeni’s Joy, her personal chef services. While searching for a commercial kitchen to reintroduce her soup-centered nutrition company, she contacted the Cape Cod Culinary Incubator (CCCI). There she met Peter Troutman of Scargo Café in Dennis, who introduced her to the Faith Family Kitchen in Hyannis. “Something bigger was at play and I spent exactly three days working with another chef before I took over the FFK program. I felt like I was being punked! What was happening? It was kismet. That program gave me my life back,” Wheeler said between tearful laughs.

“It is not lost on me that I ended up at a place called faith, when I had really lost faith in myself, my health, my business, my joy. I was here, but I was faking it ‘til I was making it.” Wheeler still sounds awed.

150 volunteers a month staffed Faith Family Kitchen. Nine revolving volunteers helped each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday serving hot meals to homeless people and families with food insecurity in a community of genuine mutual caring and respect. “Love is the secret ingredient at Faith Family Kitchen,” is the mantra. “People were always asking to hug me after a meal,” she said. “It was sincere and heartfelt.”

Wheeler does not judge others. She accepts them as they are, and she expects the same. “Bad things happen to good people. I did everything right. I had a business, a house and an MBA from Babson. And after my accident, it was all gone,” she explained. She feels great empathy for those who are struggling, who may have lost homes, families, or jobs.

After the coronavirus pandemic hit, she needed to make her volunteer staff of 150 into a small permanent staff of nine. They needed to make everything to-go since there could no longer be group meals. The Vachon family – Mike, his wife Donna and their daughter Maddie – makes up one-third of the permanent staff. The three have volunteered for a long time and Mike has been called in to be a dishwasher. “It means everything to me that we eat family dinners together. To be able to provide hot cooked dinners for other families, as a family, is amazing,” Mike said. After some more thought, he added, “We take for granted that food is always there. There are so many who don’t have that luxury and it is so meaningful that we can help bring it all together, especially as a family.”

Once she got more rooted and confident at Faith Family Kitchen, Wheeler used her business background to look at inefficiencies and make some programmatic changes such as partnering with Greater Boston Food Bank for a wider variety of food and a more varied menu at less cost. She gave her patrons a survey right away where she discovered that they wanted to know what was coming up on the menu. The homeless patrons told her that looking forward to a favorite dish could sustain them until their next meal. They also wanted choices.

To those for whom food insecurity is a daily concern, and a bed for the night is questionable, there is not much that empowers. To show they were being heard and their wishes valued, Wheeler created a large whiteboard to list upcoming meals. She also made menus fun, like “taco Tuesday” with all the fixings or sometimes breakfast for dinner. People felt seen and heard. Volunteers told Wheeler that diners began to look them in the eye, offering thanks and gratitude.

A Day in the Life at Faith Family Kitchen

Three days a week, Wheeler boils 100 eggs and makes two 35-gallon kettles of soup, which translates into 500 quarts of soup a week. She sneaks all sorts of extra nutrition into soups with vegetables and a bone broth base. Soup is, after all, how she began Jeni’s Joy.

Faith Family Kitchen has ramped up from 5000 to 7000, and then 8000 pounds of food a month from the Greater Boston Food Bank. This food is delivered to Harwich, where a Ring Brothers Marketplace truck picks it up for bi-monthly deliveries to Faith Family Kitchen.

Since December 2018, Wheeler’s “part-time” schedule of 40 hours a week has evolved into 80 hours in the face of the pandemic. She still struggles with reading and with computer screens, and no longer has the knife skills she had pre-accident, but thanks to her MBA degree her organizing and delegating skills are top-notch.

Coronavirus precautions have had to be put in place. All meals for the regular participants, largely from Cape Cod’s homeless population, are takeout from a back window that opens to a ramp. Volunteers wearing gloves work behind glass, using a recently-devised Rube Goldberg-type mechanism that sends out a cooking tray with a brown bag containing soup, a hot meal, fresh fruit, and a beverage. When the tray comes back, it is disinfected.

Patrons can still choose one of two soups. Wheeler is adamant about giving them a choice. “We also want to avoid creating a larger problem for the future if we don’t serve good nutrition now. It is especially important for people living on the bubble, those who are one or two paychecks away from going under,” she explained.

In the Faith Family Kitchen, the laughter, gentle ribbing and chatter of camaraderie are muffled only a little by facemasks. Family members arrive at 5:00 to pick up their hot meal and the Friday food shopping giveaway bags in the front. The adult patrons start lining up out back at 5:00 for their 5:45 pickup.

The occasional snap of fresh gloves can be heard as orders for patrons are filled. Brownies and cornbread are individually wrapped. A choice of soup (one always vegetarian) is ladled into quart containers. The entrée is either chicken or seafood. There is an atmosphere of calm productivity about the kitchen. These folks are providing life-saving services with a sense of humor that might resemble a scene out of “M.A.S.H.”

The Friday food shopping giveaway focuses on families and preventing weekend food insecurity, which was always an issue when children were out of school on weekends and holidays. With no school in session, it is a weeklong issue. Three nights a week, families get one bag with hot food with a choice of soup. The additional Friday bag is heavy on protein and filled with hardboiled eggs, peanut butter, canned chicken, single serving containers of yogurt and fresh fruit. Seniors and families still come to the front door and can shop from items arrayed on tables to help normalize using the service. Bags are packed by gloved and masked volunteers. There has been an “astronomical uptick” in people who have never had to use a food bank. Wheeler and her team aim to make it as positive an experience as possible.

Faith Family Kitchen soon began to serve 200 patrons each night they were open. The need increased almost 50 percent in the first week after the virus hit. Jobs disappeared and families and elderly folks increased in number. They would ordinarily serve 100 dinners in the winter and 200 in the summer. There was always an increase when schools were out. They were suddenly ramped up to summer numbers.

“Families have told me we are saving their lives. One mother gave me an earth angel bracelet and a letter that made us both cry. She was a single mother, working and raising two kids and said that she is able to be a different mom because of what we provide her family,” Wheeler shared with a hitch in her voice. Last fall, she wondered why the canned chicken – which she found to be delicious as well as nutritious – wasn’t being chosen and discovered it was because it didn’t have a pop-top.

Last Christmas, every bag held a donated can opener and the canned chicken became a huge favorite. Wheeler is nothing if not a problem-solver and thanks her business experience for helping her with planning and provisioning. “And I bet I know all the allergies of everyone who uses the Faith Family Kitchen,’ she adds. That is how Wheeler rolls.