On a Tuesday morning, Adam Cornelius whizzed around St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in Midtown, making sure the coffee was brewed and the kitchen was ready, before rushing to the RIU Hotel across the street to pick up the leftover food from the buffet.

Packed in trays and sealed with aluminum foil, the food would go on to feed roughly 250 people at the church’s soup kitchen that operates every Tuesday and Thursday. 

“I would say half the food that we serve is recycled food,” said Cornelius, the operations manager of St. Luke’s on West 46th Street near Eighth Avenue. “Some weeks it’ll be 75%.”

The people who rely on the soup kitchen come from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, including the elderly on fixed incomes, employed people who don’t make enough, migrants, homeless individuals, and families with children. But what they all have in common is food insecurity during a time when soup kitchens are operating on smaller budgets due to government funding cuts. Now places like St. Luke’s are serving leftover or “rescued” food from restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores—donations that give charities several meals that otherwise would have gone into the trash.

Some of St. Luke’s supply comes through City Harvest, the first food rescue organization in New York City, sourcing food from a network of 1,600 donors, including farms and several grocery stores like Amazon Fresh, Costco, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. City Harvest then delivers repackaged items to their partner food pantries, soup kitchens, community partner distributions and mobile markets.

“That’s from City Harvest,” said Cornelius, gesturing to bags of bagels, buns and cupcakes from Whole Foods.

Restaurants located around the block from St. Luke’s have also come to the soup kitchen’s aid.

Now any meal that is not served or touched from nearby eateries, such as Jasmine’s Caribbean Cuisine and the RIU Hotel, ends up at St. Luke’s Soup Kitchen. Even larger companies like Google and Uber Eats have started donating rescued food from their corporate kitchens through their partnership with House of Good Deeds, a non-profit that facilitates donations through community partnerships.  

“It’s great that they can repurpose this food. Also saves us money too,” said Cornelius, adding that he now stores extra frozen meat and vegetables, and has recipes that make 30-40 meals in about 15 minutes.

Cornelius remembered when the church didn’t have as much food on hand. Two years ago, buses carrying migrants arrived unexpectedly, and the church had run out of food.

“That crushed us,” he said.

St. Luke’s receives funding from social service organizations like the United Way and Broadway Serves, but Cornelius said that the soup kitchen already lost $30,000 to $50,000 of government funding this year. 

According to City Harvest data, there were more than 47 million visits to soup kitchens and food pantries citywide last year compared to approximately 25 million visits in 2019.

Molly Horak, senior communications manager at City Harvest, said the staggering federal government cuts of $186 billion dollars to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program puts the city at risk of losing at least 250 million meals in a single year.

“We know that more of our neighbors will turn to our partner food pantries and our mobile markets in order to put food on the table,” Horak said, adding that City Harvest is already ramping up donations by “onboarding a number of new food donors.”

Inside the church room where the meals are served, Bill McCauley helped volunteers label the trays— meatballs, pasta salad, rice and corn, and asparagus. McCauley, a retired actor and voiceover artist, known as “Soup Dogg,” is the head volunteer in charge of the food service, and trains and oversees people helping out, including corporate groups. 

“You get one meal at a time,” said McCauley. “If you want a second, however, you go back out and get in the line.” This rule has to be followed, because the soup kitchen must report the number of meals to the donors, he explained. 

A little before the soup kitchen’s 1 p.m. opening time, all the volunteers formed an assembly line by a long table. Rice, meatballs, vegetables, beans and bread – from City Harvest, RIU Hotel, and others – were packaged together, and then handed out to each visitor with a choice of a hot or cold drink, apple, and bag of chips. 

Soon, the soup kitchen was full of people sitting at three long tables. Some returned to the line for a third or even a fourth meal to take away. 

Julia Sicklick, who works in the garment district, spent her lunch hour volunteering, handing out drinks to the visitors. She said it’s a great feeling to “be able to look people in their face and help them, give them a meal, and hear them say thank you.”