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10 million meals: A bittersweet milestone in the AIDS war

Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz on 10.28.09 at 5:20 PM | no comments

Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz

I'm a staff reporter for RedEye on the gay beat.

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Lori Cannon, a spitfire of a woman with flame-red hair, remembers the moment more than 20 years ago when she and friends took up arms against the AIDS epidemic with a simple weapon: Food.

On Christmas Eve 1988, a year after the AIDS Memorial Quilt debuted at the 1987 gay March on Washington and launched a generation of AIDS activists, Cannon and friends loaded hot meals into cars and drove to five different Chicago neighborhoods to deliver food to 35 AIDS patients too sick or poor to feed themselves properly.

"We knew that these clients would be celebrating their last Christmas," Cannon recalls. "And it was, for all of them."

Twenty-one years later, the food delivery service once known as Open Hand has transformed into a food pantry called Vital Bridges, with five grocery centers throughout metro Chicago serving some 1,600 people monthly.

On Thursday, Vital Bridges will mark the delivery of its 10 millionth meal, a bittersweet milestone that comes after a year that brought a flood of new clients battered by the down economy.

"This is an astonishing and, to me, horrifying number," Cannon said.

Said Vital Bridges CEO Debbie Hinde: "We never thought we'd have to still be doing this. Everyone thought there'd be a cure."

Hinde said the pantry saw a 58 percent spike in clients as a result of the bad economy, resulting in 30,000 more meals being served this year than last.

To become a client, people must have HIV and/or AIDS, with medical problems, and be living at 140 percent below the poverty line, which typically is an annual income of at most $13,000. Most clients make less than $9,000 per year, Hinde said.

Vital Bridges caters to the HIV/AIDS community by offering high-quality food that is rich in nutrients--crucial for improving body composition and strengthening the immune system. Clients select from a menu devised by registered dietitians, and must include fresh fruits and vegetables, low-fat milk and meats. They walk away with about 10 large meals per week.

Though some food comes from donations, the organization spends $700,000 purchasing it directly to ensure it has nutrient-rich foods in stock.

"If the economic situation continues, and the numbers continue to rise, it will be very difficult to continue to provide the same quality food," Hinde said. A third of the organization's $3.4 million budget comes from private sources, and the rest is from public grants.

While Vital Bridges still does home delivery for a handful of clients, most people go to the food pantry, which originally opened in Lakeview in 1994 after medicines improved quality of life and reduced HIV/AIDS from a death sentence.

As the disease evolved, so too did its victims, who once overwhelmingly were white gay men. Today at Vital Bridges, which offers housing and counseling sessions as well as food, 26 percent of clients are female, and 67 percent are black. When it comes to HIV risk factors, 38 percent are men who have sex with men, while 28 percent are heterosexual and 15 percent are intravenous drug users.

Though the fate of victims has changed, Cannon said she's "still propelled by rage" to battle the disease that claimed many of her friends, including a 28-year-old man named Christopher, whose poster-sized framed photo hangs on her office wall.

"People ask, 'What did you do during the war?'" Cannon said. "We fed people."

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Vital Bridges could always use money, volunteers and food. To help, visit vitalbridges.org or call 773-665-1000.

Published in Gay news and tagged AIDS, Debbie Hindle, economy, food pantry, HIV, Lori Cannon, nutrition, Open Hand, poor, Vital Bridges