Soup Kitchens Provide Rare, Hot Meals for Those Who Have Nowhere to Cook

After meticulously cleaning a plastic tray of its spaghetti, bread and salad on a recent sunny afternoon, Troy Tutt sat back on a bench outside the House of Yahweh, a Lawndale soup kitchen, and summed up one of the problems facing the hungry and homeless around the South Bay.

“Some people don’t remember--I don’t have a house, so I don’t have a refrigerator, or a stove, or even silverware and a can opener,” said Tutt, a homeless man wearing a cast on his arm. Tutt said he lost his job and home after he was hit by a car and was unable to work. “That’s why I come here.”

Tutt’s observation echoes what homeless advocates say about the problems homeless people face when it comes to finding food: Dozens of South Bay churches, volunteers and government agencies dole out tons of flour, canned goods and other foodstuffs to poor people with places to prepare the food, but only a handful of agencies serve prepared food.

For many homeless people, receiving a bag of groceries can be as frustrating as it is helpful.

“I went to another place I heard about in Torrance where they gave out groceries. But that was hard, because I had nowhere to fix the food,” said a man at the House of Yahweh who asked to be identified only as Howard. “If I don’t get it here, I can sometimes go to stores where they are throwing out. If not, I just go hungry.”

Though many South Bay organizations began feeding poor and homeless people in the early 1980s, some have closed their doors in recent years because of crime problems or because the numbers of volunteers began to drop. Others have refocused on more time-consuming counseling and referral services, forcing them to reduce the numbers of people they feed.

The House of Yahweh, which serves about 150 people every day, is one of only three agencies in the South Bay that regularly serves hot meals. The Crossing in San Pedro feeds about 150 people four times a week. And the Beacon Light Mission in Wilmington feeds up to 80 people nightly.

Homeless advocates estimate there are hundreds--perhaps thousands--of homeless people in the South Bay, but operators of soup kitchens do not know how many of their clients fall into that category. Although firm numbers are elusive, social workers say the need for food is increasing.

“Many of the people come in here on Thursday and say they have not eaten since they were here last Saturday,” said Edwin Kise of The Crossing, a group composed of volunteers from 16 San Pedro churches that feeds and ministers to the poor and homeless every Thursday through Saturday.

Soup kitchens face a host of obstacles: inadequate facilities to serve increasing numbers of people, few volunteers willing to make a long-term commitment and complaints from neighbors that they attract unsavory elements to the neighborhood. Those pressures have forced many groups to end or curtail feeding programs in recent years.

St. Joseph’s Table in Wilmington, which opened four years ago and at times fed more than 100 people a day, gradually scaled back operations to two days a week because of a string of robberies and security problems. Early in March, two more robberies left the program without cooking utensils, forcing it to end the meal service altogether.

“We are really disheartened. There is still a great need for this kind of service in Wilmington,” said Carol Smetzer, who coordinated the soup kitchen’s activities for Catholic Charities. Smetzer said the agency is evaluating whether to reopen the kitchen, but that it may not be feasible.

Some relief workers say they do not have enough volunteers to handle the work entailed in preparing food for increasing numbers of homeless.

“Community interest is hard to maintain,” said Carolyn Olney, program coordinator for Food Partnership, a Carson group that trucks donated food to shelters and soup kitchens. “It is very difficult to keep up private sector support. What was once considered an emergency food problem has now become a chronic problem.”

Olney said a decrease in government donations of foodstuffs such as cheese and butter has also placed more of the food supply burden on private citizens, who often cannot keep up donations over the long term.

Many groups, sensing the impossibility of feeding all the homeless in their areas, have begun to focus their efforts on specific populations of homeless, such as the mentally ill and women with children.

Crossroads in Redondo Beach, a branch of the Didi Hirsch Mental Health Center in Culver City, distributes sandwiches and coffee two days a week to mentally ill homeless people who gather at local sites such as Alondra Park and Lennox Park.

Craig Fenner, program coordinator for Crossroads, said providing food gives the agency a way to contact such people so they can direct them to established medical and social service programs. Despite the focus on the mentally ill, Fenner said, staff workers find it hard to ignore other homeless people.

“We are getting distracted by the general homeless population in the South Bay. It is very hard to pull up in the van and say, ‘Sorry, we can’t give you anything because you are not mentally ill,’ ” Fenner said. Volunteers generally do not turn away someone who is obviously hungry, he said.

Other groups have turned to a more comprehensive approach after deciding that their soup kitchens were doing little to strike at the roots of homelessness, including poor education, drug and alcohol abuse and unemployment.

The FISH Emergency Center, once an independent organization known as Harbor-Peninsula FISH (Friends in Service to Humanity) and now a part of the Harbor Interfaith Shelter in San Pedro, is one such group that abandoned the feed-and-let-be approach. Volunteers used to provide groceries to homeless and needy people without attempting further services. The group now interviews food recipients to help volunteers direct them to government programs.

“We no longer see ourselves as primarily a distributor of food as we once did. It seemed ridiculous for us to give them groceries for two or three days. We decided it was much more sensible to sit down with the homeless and assist them with the process of getting more help,” said David Christiansen, executive director of the shelter.