Note: Open Table serves dinner at the First Parish in Concord on Lexington Road every Thursday at 5:30 PM; all are welcome. They can be reached at P.O. Box 42 Concord, MA 01742 or (978) 369-2275.

At this time of year, the Open Table's food pantry is extremely low on canned goods. You can help in a variety of ways: drop food off in their bin at Crosby's; offer to run a food drive; or you can collect a small supply of food and call them directly to arrange a drop-off. They particularly need canned protein (tunafish, peanut butter, ham) and canned fruit. Beans, while donated the most, are not the most popular.

Preparation for each meal starts six to eight weeks in advance, when the dinner manager plans the menus. A week or so before the dinner, she considers current prices, seasonal produce, as well as the number of volunteer cooks available and adjusts the menu accordingly. She prepares a shopping list and leaves it for the shoppers. A number of volunteers do the shopping, including a group from Minuteman ARC. Our shoppers go to the store any time from the evening before the meal up until 2:00 p.m. on Thursday.

Cooks arrive at the kitchen at 2:00 p.m. to start meal preparations. Generally, four to six cooks come each week. The dinner manager has the menu and recipes ready for them.

Meanwhile, at the Everett Street pantry, volunteers fill each of the 80 or more bags to be distributed. These are filled with canned goods - every bag gets similar items. These include fruit, vegetables, protein and starch. Then volunteers (during the school year, students from the Fenn School) bring the bags to the church.

Back at the church, volunteers and guests set the tables and arrange the donated flowers. While the dinner setup is occurring, another group of volunteers is getting ready for the food pantry. Someone picks up perishable donated produce, bread, bagels and other items from stores around Concord and Acton. A volunteer picks up the weekly meat order in Maynard and another person goes to Crosby's Market to pick up the orange juice, milk or eggs. Other volunteers arrange the pantry items on tables for distribution.

By 5:00 p.m., everything is ready for our guests to arrive. At this point, volunteer drivers, using the Concord Council on Aging vans go to pick up guests who need transportation.

The dinner coordinator arrives by 5:30 p.m., along with the dinner volunteers. The dinner coordinator ensures that everything is ready to go, and that the volunteers are given their job assignments, which include serving dinner and dishing up food.

Guests continue to arrive, are served dinner and wait for their turn to go through the food pantry, where they take a prefilled bag, and then select from fresh produce, breads, bagels, pastry items and other donated food. Each guest is given a fresh protein (ground beef or turkey, sausage or eggs), and either milk or orange juice.

As dinner winds down, still more volunteers arrive to wash the dishes, clean the tables and put the tables and chairs away. At the end of the evening the trash is taken away. Cardboard, glass, and cans are recycled. The pantry, kitchen and hall are swept, vacuumed and mopped. Our volunteer drivers bring guests back to their homes.

The dinner manager has already begun refining the dinner menu for the next week, preparing recipes and shopping lists. The cycle begins again.


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