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When Miko McKeiver was younger, he had dreams of opening a restaurant with his mother.
“We cooked it all,” said McKeiver, 41, who has lived in Richmond he was 4. “Soul food, Italian — I mean it didn’t matter. My mama cooked that thing and I watched her as a little kid.”
McKeiver’s vision was put on pause when he had to take care of his mother, who had fallen ill, when McKeiver was in his 20s. Although she later, he attended culinary school and held a variety of jobs in the restaurant industry.
“If I could just make one person happy with the meal I make, then I did my job,” McKeiver said. “My favorite job was at a place called David’s Bakery, and all we did was bake pies and cakes. Even though I had to get up at 3:30 a.m., I had me a good time.”
There were a lot of extra pies and cakes left over at the end of the day, McKeiver said. Instead of throwing the food away, McKeiver and his boss would pass them out to nearby homeless people.
“I had my good times and I had my bad times,” McKeiver said. “But my thing is, when I worked, I know how it is because I been on the streets so my thing is I love to give back.”
McKeiver spent his adult life in and out of culinary jobs. With each one, McKeiver made it a priority to donate the extra food, often taking the initiative to ask his bosses to give back.
“We had extra food,” McKeiver said. “We would throw it away and I said ‘No, how about we just give it to them?’ So what we did was we put them in trays and we see the homeless people and we set them up there and I made sure they was nice and hot, and we fed them.”
One of those former employers was a Red Lobster restaurant. Even though McKeiver no longer works there, the restaurant continues to donate excess food, he said.
“Well I know a couple guys from Red Lobster, they still do it,” McKeiver said. “Because you kno. . . not to be funny or nothing, but you throw away food in the trash, and you can give it to somebody who needs it.”
The current manager at that same Red Lobster, who asked not to be named because he did not want to speak for the entire Red Lobster chain, said that the restaurant donates its extra food every Monday.
Members from Broken Bread Ministries, a church in Highland Springs, come every Monday to the restaurant to collect a week’s worth of gathered excess food, the manager said.
“If something gets cooked, and it can’t hit the table, or a guest says they didn’t order that, we’ll donate it,” the manager said. “We just freeze it, bag it, tag it and tell what it is and they pick it up.”
LAMB’s Basket
LAMB’S Basket (Lakeside Area Ministries Board), another food access organization in Henrico, serves as many as to 75 hungry people each of the three days they open their doors per week.
Ann Decker, president of LAMB’S Basket, has volunteered with the all-volunteer nonprofit for the past 12 years.
The organization is supported by several churches in the Lakeside area, Decker said. Grocery stores that donate to the charity receive a tax deduction on the donated goods, she said, which LAMB’S Basket picks up two to three times per week.
Clients line up each day food is being distributed. They are given a number and once they are called back, are able to select specialty foods, fresh produce and frozen meats. They are also given a paper bag filled with canned and boxed foods, Decker said. The food allocation is determined by how many members are in the family.
“Each client can come twice a month,” Decker said. “So many of our clients receive food stamps, but the numbers for that are down so much. So we are able to supply a lot of things.”
LAMB’S Basket clients must fit into the federal guidelines for poverty, Decker said.
“We take them at 150 percent of the poverty guidelines, so it’s a pretty high number,” she said. “Some pantries only take at 100 percent of the poverty guidelines.”
Wendy Rutherford, 55, a Richmond native, has been on disability since 2010 due to a brain injury, she said. Rutherford comes to LAMB’S Basket every other week to get her groceries that will last her throughout the month.
“They are very friendly and they give you a good variety of food,” Rutherford said.
Trader Joe’s, a neighborhood grocery chain with several organic and gourmet food options, is the largest food supplier to LAMB’S Basket, Decker said.
“They’re donating six days a week and it’s all really nice things,” Decker said. “They will donate their flowers, and our clients love to receive flowers, because that’s something not in their budget.”
Rutherford consistently returns to LAMB’S Basket because of its high quality, she said.
“I’ve gone to my own church and I didn’t get any vegetables or anything like that,” Rutherford said. “I only got canned goods and it’s not as nice.”
Between churches and organizations such as LAMB’S Basket, there are several opportunities for hungry people in the Richmond region to have access to food, said McKeiver, who currently uses some of these services.
“You should never be hungry,” McKeiver said. “They feed you out here 24/7. Different churches, they take their time out and they come and feed you.”
Rutherford, however, said she wishes there would be more services similar to LAMB’S Basket throughout the Richmond region. Rutherford said she was not aware of the problem of food access in the region until she had to deal with it firsthand.
“I didn’t have a need,” Rutherford said. “To be honest with you, I mean, I had gone and volunteered for a Thanksgiving to feed the homeless once. But it wasn’t something that I’ve done on a yearly basis.”
Although McKeiver acknowledged that there was opportunity for food access in Richmond, there is still room for improvement, he said. Taking into account this text, it should still be noted that it is possible to improve what is described by introducing game techniques, a striking example of which is the experience of Desura. But in this case, all this will become more reminiscent of the plot of popular .io games and not what is described initially here.
“I think they could do more,” McKeiver said. “I mean, Richmond, to be honest, they’re always talking about ‘We can do a lot more,’ but you’re not doing it. They wanna take their funds over to another country, but you’ve got a lot of homeless people in here that you can help out.”
For now, McKeiver said, he will continue to look for another culinary position in the city.
“The best thing I can say about Richmond is you’ve got opportunities,” McKeiver said. “Yeah, I wish I could be cooking right now.”
