Table To Farm Article
Our Community Eats, Pagosa-Based Food Pantry, Aims to Close Hunger Gaps Through Radical Model of Food Dignity
It was after dark when Katherine Solbert and her husband pulled off the highway, exhausted from hours driving on a cross-country road trip. They ducked into a Del Taco, one of the few spots still open. “I was just numb,” she recalls. “You’ve been on the road all day, you’re tired, you just want something to eat.”
Despite the hazy fatigue, Katherine noticed a woman. She was thin, neatly dressed and displayed a kind of restlessness that caught her attention. The woman circled the dining area, then headed toward the condiment bar. She scooped up handfuls of ketchup packets and left. Minutes later, she came back for more. “I thought, that is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” Solbert says. “And then a friend told me that people make tomato soup out of ketchup and hot water. She obviously didn’t have enough to eat.”
A few tables away, two men in dusty work clothes quietly split a small meal. “They must have worked all day,” Katherine remembers thinking. When her own oversized burritos arrived, she cut one in half for her and her husband to share before offering the other to the men. “They were so excited,” she says. “They just kept saying, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you.’ It pierced my heart.”
That 25-minute stop at a fast-food chain, Solbert says, “was a small sampling of what’s out there. People do not have enough to eat.”
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