This summer, I was fortunate enough to spend my days at Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program through the Maine Community Fellowship out of Bowdoin College’s McKeen Center for the Common Good. MCHPP has countless outstanding programs that help connect our community with fresh, healthy food; perhaps its most experimental and youngest program is the Community Kitchen and where I spent most of my time with MCHPP.

The Community Kitchen at MCHPP has three primary functions. It is a processing facility for excess produce that other MCHPP programs cannot distribute, it serves as a low-cost incubator kitchen for local small businesses and it does small-scale co-packing projects for local farms. The Community Kitchen’s processing capacity supports other MCHPP programs, such as the Food Pantry and Soup Kitchen, as well as satellite programs such as Pantry to Pantry, which delivers groceries to homebound older adults.

At the beginning of my summer, I knew I would enjoy working in the Community Kitchen — its work combined my passions for social justice and sustainability with my love for cooking — but I never could have guessed how transformative the experience would be. Every day, the MCHPP Food Bank volunteers sort through thousands of pounds of food to determine whether it is suitable for distribution through the pantry and satellite programs. While the majority of food passes the test, some food is past its prime and becomes compost or animal feed. Now, the Community Kitchen creates a third, in-between option for produce that does not meet distribution standards but is not entirely invaluable. A bruised apple, a potato that has begun to sprout or 350 pounds of rutabaga that the Food Pantry cannot distribute before it turns — all of this produce that would otherwise leave MCHPP gets redirected to the Community Kitchen to be transformed into ready-to-eat products for our guests. At its core, this work speaks to MCHPP’s commitment to sustainability by reducing the amount of food waste generated by the organization and seeing the value in imperfect produce. Likewise, it speaks to MCHPP’s mission to provide the community with access to healthy food by supporting the organization’s distribution programs with additional products.

But the Community Kitchen speaks to another thing: resilience. Each piece of produce that entered the facility was itself resilient, reclaiming the value that a bruise or perhaps a spot of mold had temporarily diminished. Working there, I learned to be more resilient, cleaning up messes and big spills, finding creative ways to redirect failed processing projects, and pushing forward to the next. The product we sent out was indicative of the resilient nature of MCHPP as a whole, part of a network of creative ways the organization provides for its community, even in the face of political uncertainty.

And through all this, I began to discover and appreciate the resilience of our community. This resilience shows up in many forms, from a wide network of community organizations to individual resourcefulness. Maine’s food systems, which I became acquainted with throughout my experience, are a particularly fascinating aspect of the hardiness of the state’s community. Organizations like MCHPP, I came to understand, are essential therein, as they help connect resources and helping hands with those who need them most.

Leaving MCHPP at the end of this summer, I feel invigorated and am optimistic that community will persevere through challenging times. Further, I am excited to watch the Community Kitchen continue to grow as it has over the past few years, continuing its contributions to sustainability, nourishment and resilience. Most importantly, I am incredibly grateful for my experience with MCHPP and will carry what I learned with me for many years to come.