From the Kitchen to the Community: How the Red Cross Delivers Hot Meals

Written by: Cuthbert Langley, South Carolina Region
Pictures by: Kristen Perdue, Virginia Region

Roger Hudson stared intently at a dry-erase board in a small room just off the gym at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. Hudson was planning where American Red Cross emergency response vehicles (ERVs) would deliver hot meals to people cleaning up after February’s floods.

Everyday, more than a dozen ERVs descend upon the church to be loaded up with hot meals, cooked by volunteers with the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief. Hudson knows all too well the importance of partnerships, like this one.

“The Baptists are national partners with us,” Hudson said. “We can’t do it without them. We order the food, they cook the food, and we deliver the food.”

At its height, the kitchen set up at the Shepherdsville church cooked 4,000 meals a day. That’s 2,000 meals for lunch and 2,000 meals for dinner. 

After leaving the church, disaster workers drive the ERVs to hard-hit neighborhoods in both Kentucky and Southern Indiana. To keep himself organized, Hudson keeps a list of counties on a white board, along with the number of meals that will be delivered daily in that area. 

“What you do on the first day and second day, you do what we call search and feed,’ he said. “Once you figure it out you establish routes.”

Hudson has been with the Red Cross since 1978. He began his time as a volunteer and then became a staff member. He’s since retired and now volunteers to help.

He’s deployed more than 50 times, most recently to Texas. That’s where he spent six weeks, making sure residents of Beaumont received hot meals as they recovered from Hurricane Harvey. 

The operation, he said, was intense. 

“The kitchen I was doing there, I had 52 ERVs and we did 400,000 meals in three weeks,” Hudson said.

At the end of the day, Hudson said the people he’s helping out are the fuel that keeps him going during exhausting deployments with the Red Cross.

“In this role, it’s knowing somebody is getting a hot meal that they may not have gotten,” he said with a smile.

So far, the Red Cross has distributed more than 14,000 meals and snacks to people impacted by the floods. The Red Cross could not do this without the support of the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief kitchen and other partners.