Statistics

I stumbled upon this awesome tool today while browsing the National Campus Kitchen website. You can scroll over any part of America and find out the percentage of food insecure people in every county. McLennan county has a food insecurity rate of 18.9%. That's way too high. Baylor Campus Kitchen is fighting to lower that statistic with every meal we cook and pan of food we deliver.

Check the site out for yourself. Compare your home county to McLennan. Bexar county, where San Antonio is, has 16% food insecurity.

http://feedingamerica.org/our-network/the-studies/map-the-gap.aspx

What runs but never gets tired? Water!

After a long wait, we started planting the garden last Wednesday. This plant was a test plant to see how well the plants will do in our brand new garden. We planted a bed of tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, and okra. We had about 8 volunteers helping us out and finished rather quickly until we realized that the garden did not have a water hookup yet! (ohh noo) As some of you know, when you plant a new seedling in the ground, they need a nice drink of water so they can be happy in their new home. Well, the drip irrigation system was turned on, but I didn’t know what time it would come on and I really didn’t want our brand new baby plants to die on my watch. Luckily, some of our lovely volunteers from across the street let us borrow some water. We transported it in buckets and watered all of our new plants and they are doing great! I talked to one of the Campus Kitchen’s Reps from D.C. last week about our beds and she was amazed that we were planting tomato plants already because they just planted their cold weather plants. She said there was still snow on the ground (brrrr) so be glad you live in Texas!!

--Hannah Laird, Garden and Produce Coordinator

Survey fun

Volunteers!!!

we need your help.

As we try to grow and become more effective, a key ingredient to our success is your feedback. Take this survey and let us know how we can better use you to serve our community.

http://atrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_bNukudlFYRPB6EA

working out the kinks

We had a great Tuesday kitchen today. I had 4 volunteers, but I could have put more to work if needed. We made a snack mix for the Waco Arts Initiative for Grace and we half-way defrosted the pot roast. Good news is that the pot roast came individually packaged, so it should be good to go on Thursday. While the roast was defrosting today I had volunteers chop up veggies to go with the roast on Thursday, because Thursday's cooking shift has less time and they have to prep and cook.

--Jennifer Spear, Head Kitchen Manager