Chefs prepare holiday meals for East End single moms in need

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Chef Marco Barrila is the head of the Frugal Food Project, which donates holiday meals to single mothers and their families.
Photo by Marco Barrila

Amid the stress of being a single mother—getting the kids to school, going to work, monitoring homework time—getting dinner on the table each night can be a major obstacle, said Marco Barrila, a private chef on the East End. Add to that the pressure of creating a special meal for the holidays, and there’s the motivation for his decision to create the Frugal Food Project, which donates and delivers prepared meals to single mothers during the holiday season, through the organization Citizens 4 Humanity.

Mr. Barrila said he started the project last year with 15 to 20 families to feed, and this year the list has grown to 162 families from Westhampton to Montauk.

Single-mother households make up 8 percent of the population on the East End, and 10 percent of them are below the poverty line, according to the 2008 American Community Survey. Mr. Barrila said that many of those families rely on overtaxed food pantries and that in addition to the stress of preparing a holiday meal, he was also concerned that children of single parents were not getting full meals and the proper nutrition.

“Normally, they would go to the food pantry and get canned food, boxed mashed potatoes, milk and eggs,” he said. “They don’t get a lot of real food. I just thought with these meals we can make so many kids happy and so many moms happy.”

When Mr. Barrila came up with the idea for the Frugal Food Project, he rallied a group of people he thought would be interested in helping, including other chefs, who donated the use of their establishments’ kitchens as well as their expertise, and volunteers to help build a list of eligible mothers and secure donations from local food stores, farms and individuals.

The name of the project comes from Mr. Barrila’s experience working with the wealthy in the Hamptons.

“The waste in some of these mansions is scary,” he said. He hoped that with the fund-raising campaign, people would be more cognizant of how much food they buy that gets wasted.

“That’s what made me think, ‘How much of this could we collect for people?’” he said. “If you simply save something you essentially throw out in the garbage, you’ll help somebody else by just being more conscious.”

Chef Barrila estimates that a family throws out 10 to 13 percent of what it buys, and he asks that that much of the money set aside for food shopping be donated to the project.

He said he hopes the group can deliver meals from Christmas Eve through the end of the year, but so far, it has raised only enough donations for about 40 families.

He said it costs about $20 to feed a single mother with one to three children, and about $50 if there are three to four children.

Sheila Minkel, a volunteer with the project, said the group compiles the list of mothers to help mostly through word of mouth and neighborhood connections.

“I got involved because I know Chef Marco and I work with a lot of women that are out of work,” she said. “But a lot of single moms and the women we help have jobs and still don’t have enough food on a daily basis.”

Susan Dean, a mother of three in Hampton Bays, will receive a fully prepared meal at her doorstep on Christmas day. Ms. Dean said that as a newly single mother, she’s had a difficult year and hadn’t even considered what she would do for Christmas before she was contacted by the Frugal Food Project.

“This year, we were just going to wing it,” she said. “I hadn’t even given it any thought, so it’s a nice surprise and I’m relieved not to have to deal with it.”

Though Ms. Dean didn’t know what she would receive, she said Ms. Minkel told her it would be a surprise. Mr. Barrila said volunteers would prepare turkey or roasted chicken meals with all the traditional trimmings.

“We are going to cook them a really good meal,” he said. Ms. Minkel said local organizations have been supportive in giving food donations including King Kullen, Cromer’s Market in Sag Harbor and Annie’s Organic Cafe in Southampton.

Another Hampton Bays mother of three who did not want her name used said she was contacted by the organization at the suggestion of a friend. She said she thinks the program is a “wonderful thing during a stressful time of year.”

“It’s a very difficult and very stressful experience to be the one that has to do everything and never have anybody else to fall back on,” she said. “I’m trying to scrape together enough to buy the children their gifts, never mind putting food on the table and then making it special for the holiday.”

Mr. Barrila said he believes the holidays call for a special meal to be shared with family and friends. But he said that in his experience, many single mothers don’t even invite guests over for the holiday meal because they can’t afford to feed them.