Safety looks like full bellies in a pandemic

"Look at you! You have the prettiest smile!" Marcella Thompson greeted me as she walked across a cratered parking lot. She wore a white apron over a short sleeved button shirt and Bermuda shorts. Her neon green compression socks gave a funky flair to her otherwise classic style. Thompson stood out to me, but she is an everyday sight in this part of Durham, North Carolina.

Thompson feeds people in East Durham. Her nonprofit organization, The Mustard Seed Project, was officially founded in 2019, but she started providing meals to neighborhood children years before. Her office is in a small, worn apartment complex in East Durham where Thompson used to live with her daughters. She now lives nearby in a mostly Black neighborhood.

Feed Durham volunteers cooking on the griddle. During their monthly cooks, they feed over 500 people per day for three days. Photo by Katina Parker.

"Most of the folks who live [in the apartment complex] are Latinx," Thompson shared. "I walk here every morning from my neighborhood a few blocks away. Then there are a couple of other neighborhoods where I cook and distribute meals, groceries and family items."

For Thompson, and for Cathy "Mama Cat" Daniels, another Black woman feeding her local community in St. Louis, Missouri, the COVID-19 pandemic greatly increased the need for the mutual aid they already offered. But it also prompted other Black women, like Katina Parker in Durham and Mary Hooks in Atlanta, Georgia, to start their own food mutual aid programs.

Feeding the Future

The Mustard Seed Project began out of Thompson's desire to provide a safe and nurturing space for the young children in her neighborhood during their summer break, when caregivers are away at work. In previous years, Thompson would use her Social Security check and coupons to buy extra groceries that she would turn into snacks and meals for the neighborhood children. But when her daughter's chronic health condition required expensive treatments, she was forced to find another way to provide the meals. After meeting with Durham's mayor, Steve Schewel, she was awarded a CHAMPS grant that allowed her to create an entire summer program. She cooked breakfast, lunch, and a snack for 30 to 40 children per day in the apartment complex, and created educational activities for them.

Her work soon expanded to distributing healthy home-cooked meals, bags of groceries, and other household and baby items to the families in and around her neighborhood.

"There's a whole lot of things I can't do anything about, but these kinds of things I can," Thompson said. "So, I feel like this is what I ought to be doing."

The pandemic has drastically impacted her community's needs and how Thompson is able to meet them. Donations make up for her limited capacity to shop for her neighbors. Along with her typical offerings, she also distributes face masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer. What has not changed is the quality of the food residents receive.

"You're only as safe as the hungriest person in your community."

"We not only provide shelf-stable foods, but fresh produce, meat, poultry, and the like." This includes meals prepared by Katina Parker, who Thompson refers to as "my little girl."

Preparing for a New World

Katina Parker is a filmmaker and photographer based in Durham. Her classic seventies ranch-style home is situated on a sprawling corner lot, and was covered the day we met with giant smokers, sinks, and steel carts shaded by tents. It was Load-In Day, Parker told me, but the scene didn't feel chaotic. There is a liturgical order to every moving part. After Load-In Day, the Feed Durham crew feeds at least 500 people per day for three days. On Sundays, they deliver gratitude plates to their supporters.

Parker told me that maintaining peace was one important reason for establishing Feed Durham.

Revolutionary Pots

Cathy "Mama Cat" Daniels was in her last year of culinary school when Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, about 10 miles from her home in St. Louis, Missouri. Young people from all over the country left jobs, school, and their homes to protest during the 2014 Ferguson uprising. As she went out in the streets passing out snacks and water, she met a group of young activists called Lost Voices, who were keeping folks on the ground up to date on police activity through social media.

The group was also sleeping outside every night in protest, occupying a parking lot encampment outside a barbecue joint located midway between the street where Brown was killed and the Ferguson Police Department. With the relentless rigor of the movement combined with the regularity of local police brutality, protestors were left without much downtime to feed themselves.

Daniels began to cook large family-style meals on Sundays to feed the Lost Voices crew and others who were holding vigil in Ferguson. Parker and Daniels also met during that time and became friends.

Potbangerz feeds hundreds of people every month in St. Louis, Missouri, and provides daily service during the winter months. Photo courtesy of Cathy Daniels.

On December 23, 2014—soon after the protests began to slow to a simmer—another young Black person named Antonio Brown was shot and killed by police. When Daniels and her comrades arrived on the scene, Antonio Brown's mother shared that she didn't have the money to give her child a proper burial. Daniels gathered friends, family, and other allies to raise money for the funeral, and to cook the meal for the repast. She took the leftover food to an abandoned building called St. Mary's Infirmary, where a community of unhoused people found shelter.

The relationships that Daniels built while serving people during the Ferguson uprisings became the foundation for her nonprofit organization, Potbangerz, which feeds 100 people per week during the warm months, and many more on a daily basis during the winter months.

Potbangerz goes beyond merely cooking for the unhoused community in St. Louis; fellowship is critical.

"It's important that when you are feeding people," says Daniels, "you don't just give them something to walk away. You sit down and you break bread. We break bread, then we break down walls and get to know people. A lot of healing happens over food."

Making Hunger Political

Mary Hooks was familiar with being unhoused and vulnerable when she learned about Southerners On New Ground (SONG). Thirteen years ago, when Hooks moved to Atlanta to escape a home life impacted by the crack epidemic, she met a woman at a club who changed her life.

"I asked her what she did for work and she said she was trying to stop the shackling of Black women while they gave birth in prison," Hooks said.

Blown away by both the revelation of the inhumane practice and the idea of making change, the woman and Hooks became friends. As Hooks became more invested in the social justice concepts, her new friend told her about SONG and invited her to meet some of its members. Her first assignment was to recruit LGBTQ people for SONG's Alabama chapter. Hooks was promoted to field organizer in 2013 after the birth of her daughter, then to co-director in 2016. SONG was also the first space where Hooks and Parker met. They became friends and have collaborated on multiple social justice projects.

"The love letters were to politicize the people," explains Hooks. "We wanted to feed them, but also communicate to them why they were hungry."

Before COVID-19, SONG was primarily focused on education, relationship-building, and collective action among LGBTQIA+ people of color and their allies. As Atlanta began to shut down, Hooks got word that important food distribution locations were also closing their doors. As new tent cities began to appear across the city, SONG decided to intervene.

Valencia Gunder, SONG affiliate and founder of The Smile Trust in Miami, Florida, who has extensive experience in building power mutual aid systems, decided to quarantine with Hooks. They began cooking breakfast for the many unhoused people in the neighborhood. Similar to Thompson, Daniels, and Parker, Hooks soon found a larger purpose for the work. With Gunder's guidance and the donations and volunteer efforts of their larger community, Hooks transitioned to cooking dinners three times a week and assembling care packages, which included PPE, snacks, condoms, and a "love letter."

"The love letters were to politicize the people," explains Hooks. "We wanted to feed them, but also communicate to them why they were hungry."