Empty Bowl Dinner to Raise Funds for Berkshire Food Project
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The menu sounds like a fancy feast. Red lentil & apricot. Chicken with white bean chili. Potato ramp vichyssoise
Those and a couple dozen other soups are being served this Friday, April 8, not as part of a luxurious extravaganza but as part of the 12th biennial Empty Bowl fundraiser for the Berkshire Food Project.
But no one ever said a fundraiser to fight hunger couldn't tempt and please the palate.
"It's pretty fancy stuff," Valerie Schwarz, executive director of the Berkshire Food Project.
The soups are donated by eateries as varied as the Williams and MCLA dining services (hearty vegetable and rattlesnake chili, respectively) to Gramercy Bistro (carrot with coconut) and everything in between, including Olympic Pizza (clam chowder), Zucchini's (chicken noodle), Chef's Hat (unstuffed green pepper) and Bounti-Fare (cream of broccoli).
For a $30 donation, guests can come to First Congregational Church on Main Street and sample all these soups (including other interesting-sounding varieties like tomato cabbage and and red clam with sausage), eaten in bowls created and donated by local potters — bowls that the guests then get to take home with them "as a constant reminder" that not everyone in the community has enough to eat.
Seatings are at 5 and 7 p.m. and advance tickets are recommended by calling 413-664-7378 or visiting Wild Oats in Williamstown.
Money raised will go right back to the Berkshire Food Project, an organization started by Williams College students in 1987 that provided three meals a week and that has since grown to now serving a free, nutritionally balanced, expertly prepared meal each Monday through Friday at First Congregational Church of North Adams. According to its website, in 2011, the Berkshire Food Project served more than 27,000 meals, which included emergency food and meals to take home.
"But here the word 'serve' is used advisedly, for the BFP is emphatic in its determination not to be a soup kitchen," the website reads. "We have no 'chow line' where globs of unidentifiable stuff are plunked onto paper plates. Each client is served at the table by a student or community volunteer and the food is served on attractive chinaware. Some of our food is supplied through in-kind donations from businesses and organizations; shares in the cooperative, organic Caretaker Farm, in Williamstown; and the Western Massachusetts Food Bank. The remainder is purchased from wholesale stores, retail providers and local supermarkets."
"We're all about feeding people and making sure they have food," Schwarz said, and that's what makes the Empty Bowl event an appropriate fundraiser for the organization. "That ties into this."
Williams continues its involvement by doing more than just donating soup; many students volunteer serving soup the night of the event. And that spirit of volunteerism is what Schwarz hopes people will go home with in addition to their bowl — which will serve as a visual reminder of the fundraiser every time they look at it on a shelf or fill it with food from their own kitchen.
"It just triggers people to say, 'Maybe I could volunteer today,'" she said. "We're all here to help each other."
Tags: Berkshire Food Project, fundraiser, hunger,
