EMILY MALIK: Hi, my name is Emily Malik. I'm here with —
AMBER SUMMERS-GRAHAM: Amber Summers-Graham and —
LISA SIMMONS: Lisa Simmons. And we are all meal coordinators for the Cache Valley Loaves and Fishes Community Meal. This meal started in 2010, became a twice a week meal. And it's now held every first and third Saturday at the Presbyterian Church.
EMILY MALIK: I think all of our experiences have been super different over the years.
LISA SIMMONS: Any memorable experiences that you can recall over your years?
AMBER SUMMERS-GRAHAM: Yes.
EMILY MALIK: There's always something.
AMBER SUMMERS-GRAHAM: One of our volunteers was making a punch in one of those coolers. We used dry ice, and they screwed the lid on the cooler and I hear this explosion like a bomb went off. There were some people that I think hit the deck. And the lid shot off the cooler, hit the ceiling of the church. And it took us I don't know — weeks — to get the punch off the ceiling.
EMILY MALIK: We do have prime rib sometimes. And we actually got a chef in town to cook the prime ribs for us. And he brought them back and they were so delicious. And people were like bringing it back, like, "Can you cook this more?"
LISA SIMMONS: We got a wheel of — I don't remember the name of the cheese, but it was a huge wheel of cheese. I remember the volunteers coming and we were shredding it up in the food processor and we made mac and cheese out of it. And they were like this is really expensive mac and cheese. Like, this is really good cheese. We had no idea ...
AMBER SUMMERS-GRAHAM: We all have our strengths and weaknesses but ... and it's so good that we have such a variety of talents and tastes on our team to coordinate just because my gosh, they get a variety only because we have a variety, I swear. We got pretty good at doing cornbread in bulk. Remember the low country boil. We did that a couple of times.
EMILY MALIK: That was a fun one.
LISA SIMMONS: Oh, yes, cooking a lot of food and milk cans; we steamed it in the milk cans.
EMILY MALIK: There was the time we went to Farmer Dale's and picked all of his leftover tomatoes.
LISA SIMMONS: Yes,
EMILY MALIK: We had like four wagon fulls of tomatoes that we washed and peeled.
AMBER SUMMERS-GRAHAM: Oh my goodness,
LISA SIMMONS: One time we were making a meal with a lot of spices — lots of little spices. And so someone said, "Go to the grocery store where they sell the spices in bulk, and measure them out, and then ..." So I go to the grocery store and get there and realize there are no measuring spoons. And so, I just guess and try to guess a little over so we have enough. And I put these all in little baggies and label them as spices and then get to the meal and things get busy.
And then at one point, someone was like, "Kay, I mixed all the spices together." And I was like, "Where are the leftovers?" and they were like, "They were not measured, in little baggies?" And at this point the damage was done. So we served the meal. A couple people were like, "There's way too much. This is not good." But genuinely several people said it was good.
AMBER SUMMERS-GRAHAM: It's works out it always works out.
EMILY MALIK: Always, like I think Amber's the one that called it the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
AMBER SUMMERS-GRAHAM: It is!
EMILY MALIK: I mean, I really hardly did Loaves and Fishes before the pandemic; I just knew one thing: that we wouldn't be able to come back if we shut down for the entire time. I mean, everything was so uncertain. We ended up doing takeout only for almost a whole year. So having been in a space where it was just us feeding people — like literally just throwing them food and containers to go and never really interacting with anyone — To watching us come back to this more community oriented organization... You get the chills when you're at a meal, you're like, "Oh my gosh, we're making like an impact in people's lives". There's something really magical about the volunteer experience.
AMBER SUMMERS-GRAHAM: The operation is run completely by volunteers. And when you have several small groups together, that might be very diverse. It's really fun to see them sitting at a table chopping celery together and talking about their backgrounds. And that is total evidence of what this meal is doing for our community.
LISA SIMMONS: Oh, absolutely. There are so many people that you would never meet otherwise.
AMBER SUMMERS-GRAHAM: Yeah. I agree.
EMILY MALIK: You definitely — I don't think a meal goes by where you're not like, "Why do I do this?" Moments, right? There's moments but then you'll see something overreaching, that's just like, "Oh yeah, that's why I do this. This is why." Every time.
