Jacksonville restaurant cooks 1,000 meals for families in need
Courtesy – Black Barn Kitchen
JACKSONVILLE, Ore — A Jacksonville restaurant is cooking up something special ahead of Thanksgiving. Black Barn Kitchen has prepared 1,000 meals to distribute to community support groups that will hand them out to people in need.
Among the groups receiving meals are Access, Rogue Community Health, Rogue Retreat and others. Owner Nathan Trivers said this is the first time the restaurant has taken on an effort of this size. On Tuesday, staff members and volunteers packed all 1,000 meals.
“It’s lovely to have customers that are able to come buy food,” Trivers said. “But for every customer that wants to buy food, there’s probably three human beings out there that are unable to.”
The Thanksgiving meals include turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans, chocolate cake and rolls with butter.
Chef Emilia Zabaldo led the effort in the kitchen. She and a team of staff and volunteers spent Monday preparing and cooking the meals.
“I get a lot of joy helping people that don’t have anything,” Zabaldo said. “We have the means and the people to help us, so it seems kind of automatic.”’
Angie Serrano, who works at Black Barn and volunteered to help on Tuesday, said giving back has been important to her since childhood.
“As a little kid I’ve always wanted to give back to the community or the world, and working for a company that’s all about that as well gave me the opportunity to be here,” Serrano said. “So it’s just fun.”
Serrano said she and other volunteers worked quickly and finished packing the meals ahead of schedule.
“We’re working all together as a team and we’re busting through,” she said. “We’re almost done, we were scheduled until 2 p.m., and I think it’s noon now. We should be done here in like 30 minutes.”
Trivers said Black Barn is in the process of transitioning into a nonprofit organization, with hopes of providing free meals more frequently throughout the year.
“It just kind of gave me an epiphany to do something not only for Thanksgiving,” he said. “In the new year, we want to create a food program that will be able to feed 1,000 to 3,000 meals a week.”
According to Trivers, about 95% of the food used for the project was donated by organizations including US Foods, Charlie’s Produce, Cutler Investments and several local resource groups. He thanked all who contributed.
“This is a good plateau of something that could actually make a change,” he said.
Oscar Rodriguez is a multimedia journalist at NewsWatch 12. You can reach Oscar at orodriguez@kdrv.com.