“The city that care forgot” is a phrase often attributed to New Orleans. Throughout the city’s multi-century history, it seems there was always something trying to take it down. But as evident following major natural disasters like hurricanes and tropical storms, and the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, New Orleans is a city of resilience; a city that will always care for itself. Earlier this year, it was announced that Louisiana would not participate in the Summer EBT program, originally established to help food insecure families throughout the summer months. New Orleans restaurateurs Isaac Toups and Amanda Toups have decided to take the matter into their own hands to help the families and children of New Orleans through their nonprofit Toups’ Family Meal.
Q: Why did you create Toups’ Family Meal?
Amanda: It started [originally] because of COVID. In the restaurant business, the meal that we eat together as a staff is called “family meal,” between lunch and dinner service. It’s time to come together and everyone get fed before you go into a busy dinner service. When COVID happened, we had to lay off our cooks and our servers, but we were determined to keep our management on staff because we didn’t know what’s going to happen. We had them come back every day for family meal so that we can keep an eye on to make sure they were okay. It started with 15 [people] and then 30. And then 60. We were eventually cooking for 500 people a day and the lines were wrapping around the block on Carrollton. It took about five days for the cupboards of families to be empty. That’s how food insecure in New Orleans is. Eventually, we stopped doing just service industry [folks] because there were mothers reaching out to us and going, “Hey, look, you don’t have to feed me if you’ll feed my kids.” And we were like, “Absolutely not. We’re going to feed all of you.” So then we had a benefactor reach out to us and go, “I see what you’re doing. Here’s some money, start fundraising and keep going, you’re not going to keep going otherwise.” I thought, he’s right. A former Saints player sent us some money, and then we started crowdsourcing and going, “Hey, if you can donate to ‘family meal,’ we’ll keep going.” It was $10 here and $5 there and $100 there and we kept going and then we got really lucky.
World Central Kitchen reached out and said, “We’re coming down.” We were the first restaurant in New Orleans to be onboarded with World Central Kitchen. Between our family meal, which lasted 18 months, and World Central Kitchen, we were able to get 100,000 meals out into the community during that that time. We thought, “Well, we did it. That’s it.”
Q: What was your motivation for this latest effort?
Amanda: In February when the new governor decided to reject the additional EBT funds, Isaac and I got real pissed off. I mean, we’re not talking about prisoners or convicts. We’re talking about kids. It was cruel for no reason. The two lines [he said] really made me very mad. The first one was, “Well, if we give the families this money, then then they won’t become more self-sufficient.” And then he had a reporter asked him, “Why would you turn on the money for kids?” And he said, “Well, kids will figure out a way to eat.”
As we know, the [number of] food insecure children in New Orleans is one of every three below the poverty line. One in three children don’t have enough to eat right now who were already in school. What the what the bill does, essentially, is those kids are dependent upon free breakfast and free lunch and school. That’s five days a week, and then four weeks, at four weeks a month. That’s 40 meals that we would need to replace, and they gave them $40 for 40 meals; $1 a meal. I don’t know about you, [but when] was the last time you fed yourself on $1? We decided to do some community outreach before they even decided to take the $40 and see what the needs were in our community. We were devastated to understand how bad the food insecurity really is. I knew it from COVID. But now I really know it. It’s changed. It’s gotten worse, in my in my opinion. It’s gotten worse since COVID.
Q: How did you get started?
Amanda: We started going out across our social medias and [asking], “What do you need? Do you need cold food, hot food and groceries? Do you have transportation?” We really dug up a lot of data. We decided to do an Easter food drive for two reasons: We would feed New Orleanians Easter dinner because they deserve a nice Easter dinner, but also that gave me and Issac and my staff a chance to put our hands on these people and ask, “How many kids are in your house? Can you get here? What do you need? Is it cold food? Is it hot food? Is microwavable food, what is it?” We were able to feed 1,500 New Orleanians Easter dinner, which was great. But I was able to gather enough data to understand the problem, maybe tackle it in a little bit of a different way than we that we had before.
Q: What changed?
Amanda: The way we had done it before was people will come to the restaurant, the restaurant becomes a community center. We had organizations come and pick it up the food and then they would bring it to hotspots and New Orleans. Now after speaking with these women, because it’s 99% mothers and grandmothers, it’s the working poor. These mothers have jobs, a lot of times more than one. They don’t have secure transportation. They’re taking public transport to that job. In the summertime, their children are at home alone, and they don’t want them cooking on the stove. So through the partnership with Second Harvest, they’re going to help us get the children enough food in a way that they can either eat cold or it’s already in a microwavable container that just pop in the microwave, or things like packets of grits and packets of oatmeal. I quickly realized that I had a bigger problem than I even realized. I knew that already that I was going to have to turn people down. Within two days we had over 800 kids signed up, and we’re just a small restaurant. We had to really try and focus on New Orleans. And that has put us at about 500 kids. So that’s where we’re at right now.
