By Moe Clark, The Colorado Sun
Every weekday morning at 6:30 a.m., Josh Ford pulls into the parking lot of the First Baptist Church in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and fires up the Old Hickory Smoker. Then he heads to the basement to get to work.
“I’ve been doing restaurants my whole life. Since I was 14, making hot dogs at Skateland, Ford, 39, said. But he’s never run a food operation out of a church basement. And definitely not during a global pandemic.”
“We’re all kind of learning as we go here,” Ford said, who is the executive chef of the newly formed Denver Metro Emergency Food Network, which is preparing and delivering thousands of free meals to homebound senior citizens and low-income families during the coronavirus outbreak.
Ford was hired in August by Lost City, a small cafe that opened in February inside the First Baptist Church, which quickly pivoted its operations to create the emergency food network. Since they started making meals on March 18, the nonprofit has received nearly $400,000 in donations and delivered over 60,000 meals to hungry Coloradans. One in 11 people in the state lacks funds to buy food, according to the nonprofit Hunger Free Colorado. And that number will likely rise due to the coronavirus crisis.
About half the food is donated, so the menu for the day is often a mystery. It’s like Top Chef, but instead of a handful of ingredients, it’s pallets full of food, Ford said, whose team includes 12 paid staff members and 10 to 20 volunteers per day, some of whom are out-of-work restaurant workers. On April 16, they made tomato salad, roasted chicken, and mac and cheese.
“We try to have fun here,” Ford said, smiling beneath his gray-and-white cloth face mask, as a Lady Gaga song blared through the makeshift prep kitchen, which he’s nicknamed, ‘The Jungle.’
Ford said when he looks back at this moment in history, he hopes people remember the humanity in all of this madness. “That’s why we are doing this. To help each other out, Ford said. And whether that’s feeding one person or feeding 10,000. What better way to make people feel at ease than giving them a meal.”
“One hundred percent, without a doubt, the silver lining for me is getting to work with the people that I get to work with. We have such a phenomenal team here. I’ve always had the philosophy that you should hire people smarter than you and then get out of their way. And that’s exactly what’s happening here. And that’s been the best part.”
If something like this happens again, “I would hope we would come together quicker and realize faster that we all need to come together to help each other out.”
The hardest thing about this is “Just missing out on the stuff that I love to do with my friends and my family and stuff. Like, I haven’t been able to have a hot dog at a ballgame with my Dad. My sister’s having a baby and I’m not gonna be able to go see the baby when he’s born. My niece and nephew have a birthday coming up and I’m not going to go do those things. I haven’t been able to play pool with the guys. I haven’t been able to have a barbecue at my house. I haven’t been able to do those things that we all look forward to.”
Ford added, “When I get home, I love just sitting in my backyard with my puppy. She’s got her one year birthday coming up in a couple of weeks. We were gonna throw her a Cinco de Maggie party but we’re gonna have to delay that now.“
This story is a part of COVID Diaries, powered by the Colorado News Collaborative, or COLab. Ark Valley Voice joined this historic collaboration with more than 20 other newsrooms across Colorado to better serve the public.
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