Countywide : SOS Plans Kitchen to Recycle Leftovers

Share Our Selves, the largest charity in Orange County, plans to build a kitchen to process leftovers from restaurants into healthy soups and stews for the needy.

Modeled after a similar kitchen in Washington, the plan--called the SOS Orange Aid Kitchen Project--is still in its beginning stages.

The idea is to gather leftovers on a regular basis from restaurants and hotels within a five-mile radius of Costa Mesa-based SOS at the outset and, it is hoped, elsewhere in the county in the future. Volunteers will gather chicken, bones, vegetables and whatever else would otherwise be discarded for use in soups, stews or other meals.

Organizers hope to raise money at an April 3 dinner to build a state-of-the-art kitchen to prepare the leftovers. They also need a refrigerated truck and containers to transport the food, equipment in which to store and cook it, and volunteers to gather and prepare it.

“There’s enough food that can be reprocessed so that we can feed a large population,” said Karen McGlinn, a longtime SOS board member who is heading the effort. “It’s absolutely clear to me that (restaurant owners) want to do something. It’s going to happen.”

Hal Rosoff, owner of Meyerhof’s restaurant in Irvine and the Back Bay Rowing and Running Club Restaurant in South Coast Plaza, has recruited several restaurateurs, food distributors and hotel food and beverage managers to participate in the program.

“Food people are almost like no others,” Rosoff said. “We are asked on a regular basis for donations. This is a business that is peopled by givers. We just go and do it.”

McGlinn and Rosoff said several people they met with this week are willing to be part of the project. But there are still a number of details to work out, such as how often trucks will pick up food and where the kitchen will be located before the project can get under way.

Many of the restaurant owners said they would be better able to provide if they knew a truck would be at their restaurants on a certain day and at a particular time.

“The food is not the primary ingredient here,” said Greg Bishop, a food distributor and a director of the Feedback Foundation, which delivers meals to homebound seniors and serves meals at sites throughout the county. “Other people have tried to do this, and it didn’t work. The No. 1 issue is the distribution network.”

McGlinn said SOS does not want to copy the efforts of the Food Distribution Center, which brokers food to agencies and soup kitchens. She called that program a “wonderful vision” but said that it does not fit in with SOS’s mission.

“I hope and think that SOS ministers to people in many ways other than just giving out food. I hope the people leave there with a little bit of dignity intact,” she said.

The April 3 fund-raiser will be held at the Robert Mondavi Wine and Food Center, 1570 Scenic Ave., Costa Mesa. Tickets are $149.95. Several chefs, led by Michael Kang of Five Feet and Five Feet Too restaurants, and Rosoff will cook a five-course dinner.

Kang has named the Orange Aid project as beneficiary of the event, which is one of the “Taste of the Nation” fund-raisers held throughout the country to fight hunger in more than 100 cities. An auction will be included.