Story and image from DCist
Mark Bucher co-owns Medium Rare, a steakhouse with three locations in D.C., Arlington, and Bethesda. The restaurant has been providing free delivered meals to seniors since early in the coronavirus pandemic.
Bucher’s newest project — one that he’s collaborating on with a host of local government agencies and restaurants — is called “Feed the Fridge.” Initially launched in the fall, the project is installing community refrigerators stocked with healthy, restaurant-quality meals in public spaces.
The point of the program is to provide school-age kids with good, nutritious meals, but families are welcome to collect what they need. The meals are free and available for anyone to take.
As of now, Feed the Fridge has set up eight refrigerators across D.C. They’re filled daily with 25 meals from six area restaurants, including Medium Rare, Cava, and Duke’s Grocery. (That list is expected to grow as early as next week.) The meals are designed to be served hot or cold.
Each participating restaurant is being paid $6 per meal by Bucher’s nonprofit, We Care. By the end of this week, he says the total number of fridges will double.
Before 2020 wraps up, the project aims to stock each refrigerator with 100 meals daily. The plan is to scale up to 100 fridges by the end of January — the equivalent of 10,000 free, restaurant-quality meals for whoever needs them.
Each meal features a protein, a starch or carbohydrate, and a vegetable. “The bolognese sauce has cauliflower grounded into it,” notes Bucher. “The kids don’t even know [there’s a vegetable in it].”
“They’re not checking in with anybody, there isn’t any list,” he says of the protocol for picking up food from the fridges. “It’s dignified.”
In mid-March, when the city shut down due to COVID-19, Medium Rare offered up meals to area residents over 70 and unable to leave their homes. The demand was huge, according to Bucher.
Fairly quickly, local governments caught wind of what Bucher and his team were doing, and looked to help. D.C.’s Department of Aging and Community Living tells DCist/WAMU it connected Bucher to more than 300 seniors. As the pandemic drags on, Bucher’s team continues to deliver more and more meals. He says they’re close to having delivered 20,000 meals since March. That includes about 3,000 Thanksgiving meals; another 3,000 are expected for Christmas.
Bucher admits it’s been a big lift to deliver so many meals to so many people. That’s how the idea for Feed the Fridge emerged. Instead of going from home to home, he thought, why not make it easy for people to pick up meals at community centers, fire stations, public libraries, schools, and senior living facilities?
But the future of Feed the Fridge isn’t necessarily tied to the pandemic. The project offers a model for how private businesses and local governments can work together to address community challenges like hunger. For now, Bucher and his team are stocking the community fridges one steak salad at a time. “People are learning that the meals are here,” he says.
