It’s not like a pretty picture that kindergarteners draw. We were serving Russian immigrants, and then a wave of monolingual Chinese grandmothers-and I don’t speak Cantonese!ĭiversity is complicated. We started with 35 people, and now serve close to 600. The pantry is largely staffed by people from needy communities. Volunteers at Sara Miles’ food pantry in San Francisco hand out groceries every Friday. It’s not our business to judge you or kick you out. We say there is enough food for everybody, and everybody is welcome. In most government-run programs, you have to prove you deserve food-fill out a 20-page application to get food stamps show your rent receipts, your utility bills, and your social security number be a legal immigrant, a good person, upright, and hardworking.Īt St. Sara: In this country, people think you have to eat the right thing with the right people. Madeline: You have said that running a food pantry is subversive. “They’re trying to run the food pantry without me,” she explained. She frowned when I suggested that her faith activism might be motivated by progressive politics. She struck me as a radical whose activism is not tied to any particular ideology, but rather to a simple, practical fact-everyone eats. She is both devout and, at times, deeply critical of Christian dogma. I met Miles in a coffee shop in downtown Seattle. Her work has inspired more than a dozen other food pantries in the area, and is chronicled in her book, Take This Bread (Ballantine 2007). It is open to anyone and staffed by volunteers from the communities it serves. Now, eight years later, the pantry serves hundreds of families each week. Gregory’s Church to let her start a food pantry. When she stumbled on a pamphlet from the San Francisco Food Bank, she saw an immediate connection between her faith, her activism, and her preoccupation with food. Over the coming months, Miles became a convert and regular church attender. She recognized something in that moment that resonated with her-strangers handing her bread and wine. Out of pure curiosity, she took Communion. Gregory’s Episcopal church in the Mission District. In 1995, Miles was living in San Francisco and happened into a service at St.
“Over and over again, I was fed and taken care of by total strangers.” While reporting on the mid-1980s insurgency in the Philippines, Miles remembers vividly how a family she encountered en route cooked up fish and corn gruel for her and the group of guerrilla soldiers she traveled with. Then again, Miles had always been conscious of the power of food to connect people.
A lesbian, former atheist, and journalist, Miles had for years been suspicious of church-run charities.
Sara Miles never expected to find herself at an Episcopal church handing out bread, beans, tomatoes, and groceries to crowds of San Franciscans.
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