Helping the hungry

Salvation Army trucks deliver sandwiches and hope

Catherine Jun / The Detroit News

Detroit -- Every day the red and white trucks wend their way through the streets. And every day, thousands of hungry people watch and wait for them.

The Bed and Bread Club trucks, the Salvation Army's mobile soup kitchens, have for 22 years fed the hungry in the Detroit area, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

In the thick of an economic recession, these trucks have served a record number of meals in Detroit and Highland Park. That's 1,600 bread loaves a week, at least 1,000 pounds of lunch meat a week and more than 60 gallons of soup daily.

When children were out of school in the summer, the trucks served as many as 4,000 meals a day. That's double the number from five years ago.

For some, the Bed and Bread Club provides their only hot meal of the day.

"It's gone up dramatically in the last six months," said Maj. John Turner, general secretary of the Salvation Army of Eastern Michigan. "More people are out of work and they're hungry and meeting the truck."

The higher demand is straining the program's budget, pushing Army staff to stretch donation dollars.

By noon, the three trucks leave from the Salvation Army's Harbor Light facility on Lawton. As one plodded through neighborhoods on a recent afternoon, about a dozen residents were queued up, waiting before the wheels came to a halt.

From the inside looking out, the truck windows frame the many faces of the area's poor: the disabled, the single mothers, the war veterans, the seniors. There's also the newly jobless and the chronically out of work. The routes the drivers take have been reconfigured in the past year, trying to better trace the bloodline of the city's most desperate.

On a recent morning, Angelo Asberry, 42, sidled up to the truck for soup, a sandwich and cup of hot chocolate.

The lanky Detroiter carried a backpack, one of his few belongings. Asberry said he has been staying at a shelter since his government-subsidized house burned down two months ago. On weekends he cooks Italian sausage at Detroit's Eastern Market, but that doesn't earn enough to find a new place, he said.

"I've been looking for work every day," Asberry said.

As the program's name suggests, it also offers the homeless a place to sleep. A caseworker rides on the trucks, offering those without a home a spot at a Salvation Army shelter. Those with drug addictions can enroll in a detox program. Want to start your life again? Volunteers can help recipients study for a high school GED, find a job or get a permanent home.

Seeing a need to feed more mouths, the agency earlier this year directed one of its full-time staffers, Joe Barger, to find ways to stretch the program's dollars. Barger has been the program's food service coordinator since January.

His job? "To try to find as much donated food as possible and try to cut the costs on everything else we buy," Barger explained.

Barger sniffs out the best deals at food banks like Gleaners, wholesale grocers and food rescue programs like Forgotten Harvest.

"We have saved a lot of money this year," Barger said. "That's why we've been able to continue increasing our service."

Working with food agencies and area churches, Barger reconfigured the trucks' routes to reach into areas that may not have experienced poverty before.

The trucks now venture further west, past Greenfield, and further east, into neighborhoods where recently abandoned homes provide cover to underground neighborhoods of squatters, who emerge when the trucks roll in.

"The east side is very, very desperate," Barger said. "That's one of our biggest routes."

The increased need has mirrored the doubling of the city's jobless rate in the past five years. Now about one out of four is without a job.

Lanell Smith, a Bed and Bread truck driver, understands this. After the Detroiter was laid off from a construction job, Smith was out of work for 2 1/2 years before he was hired as a driver.

"It's a humbling experience," said Smith, who has been with the agency for about 18 months. "I could have been out here."

The Bed and Bread Club's $3 million budget comes almost wholly from donations. Staffers say $120 will feed one person for a year.

"Our endeavor is to help them out of the situation they're in," Turner said.

Thomas Sutka, a disabled Vietnam veteran, relies on the Bread and Bed truck for a daily meal.

When his pension payments were adjusted, they weren't enough to pay the rent on his Detroit home.

For the past four months he's been living at the Detroit Veterans Center on Park Street.

"They're doing a really good thing," Sutka, 59, said as he deposited a sandwich in the pocket of his weathered denim jacket.

"We get hungry at 7, 8, 9 o'clock and the kitchen's closed."

cjun@detnews.com (313) 222-2019