Photo: Matt Skoufalos
In a region of deep abundance, hunger often hides in plain sight. Grocery trucks roll past shuttered corner stores. Restaurant kitchens overflow while pantries scramble against the clock.
“On one hand, we’re surrounded by massive abundance,” says Elias Bitar, owner of Norma’s Eastern Mediterranean Cuisine in Cherry Hill. “On the other hand, there are still people in this same radius who don’t have enough. How can that be? We’re throwing food away, and at the same time, there are people who want it.”
That tension – between excess and need, waste and want – is the beating heart of Family Meal, a new food security program born out of Bitar’s decades in the restaurant industry and years of work inside the food insecurity system. The idea is deceptively simple: take excess produce that food pantries struggle to distribute before it spoils and turn it into high-quality, ready-to-eat meals for people who need them. But beneath that simplicity is a radical rethinking of standards, dignity and what equity around food could look like, says Bitar.
Bitar had long been involved as a donor and board member of the Food Bank of South Jersey, offering not just funding but hands-on support grounded in his restaurant experience. His collaborator, Sarah Geiger, a program operations consultant focusing on food security, came from inside the system, having worked directly with food banks and food security organizations. From their different vantage points, both kept arriving at the same pressure point.
“Pantries are the last stop before food gets to the people who actually need it,” Geiger says. “And what we saw there was an inefficiency. Produce is something pantries receive, something people need and something that’s critical to healthy eating, but it’s also kind of a ticking time bomb. Once it arrives, pantries have to move it fast. It’s one of the biggest obstacles they have in distributing food efficiently.”
“We were producing meals because that’s one of the most highly coveted resources pantries can offer,” Bitar says. “There’s really nothing better than a hot, healthy meal. At the same time, pantries were drowning in produce they couldn’t reasonably distribute. Sometimes they’d give people cases of potatoes, but often the clients are walking, or they don’t have much space and they don’t want that much food. So they give away what they can, and after that, it’s anyone’s guess. It just goes to waste”
“If we’re serious about equity for people experiencing food insecurity, we also have to think about time,” Bitar adds. “Time isn’t a renewable resource. For people working multiple minimum-wage jobs, cooking from scratch is often unrealistic. Being able to access healthy food – a fresh or reheatable meal – matters. It should be the same standard of food I expect for my own family.”
“It’s easy to take these things for granted if you don’t interact with people experiencing food insecurity. But they’re in every zip code. They can be your neighbor – and often are.”
Bitar had brought meals as a one-off, and the response was immediate. “They kept asking when we were bringing them again,” Bitar says.
Pantries were ready before the infrastructure was. “They started calling us with numbers, ‘I’ve got a pallet of this, a pallet of that.’ And I had to say, ‘Hold on, calm down – I can take a couple of cases, but I can’t take that much yet. My restaurant isn’t that big. We were doing what we could, but there’s a real cost involved.”
Now, the work is about scale and systems. “What we’ve been doing over the past couple of months is trying to find a larger commercial kitchen that can be devoted to producing these meals,” Bitar says.
Even then, nothing is wasted. “We work with our partners at Three Haven Farms to turn any produce that isn’t usable into organic compost,” he says. “Instead of excess produce going to a landfill, we’re using every single part of it – either by turning it into meals or by putting the nutrients back into the soil.”
For Bitar, this work is inseparable from his life as a restaurateur. Norma’s has been a family operation for more than three decades. “We have strong systems in place,” he says. “Operating at the standards we’ve set isn’t particularly difficult for us at this point – we kind of have it down. You can take that foundation and open a hundred restaurants. But that’s not really of interest to me. I’d rather put my energy into things that feel more fulfilling, like helping people out.”
“I was born with an inability to see inefficiencies and just let them continue,” Bitar adds. “I also have a strong allergy to treating the status quo as the ceiling. It’s okay to be comfortable, but the way my mind works, I’m always asking, ‘Why is it like this?’ Why do we accept such low standards for the food that’s given out in the nonprofit world, and even for what’s sold in the for-profit world? I don’t accept that.”
Geiger has seen how that mindset translates into action. “What makes him different from other donors is that he brings the same standards – what we call radical hospitality in the nonprofit space – that you experience in his restaurant,” she says. “Those are standards rooted in service, dignity and respect for the people being served. The line between customer and client dissolves. He doesn’t see why there wouldn’t be equity – why everyone wouldn’t be treated as a neighbor.”
The program is still young, but the invitation is wide open. “We need help with anything and everything,” Bitar says. “We need funding, we need space, and we need talent.”
People who want to get involved can visit familymeal.us.
“It’s easy to take these things for granted if you don’t interact with people experiencing food insecurity,” Bitar says. “But they’re in every zip code. They can be your neighbor – and often are.”
