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Restaurants serve healthy meals, dignity

Pay-as-you-can restaurants allow customers to pay what they can afford.

By Catherine Newhouse

Published Jan. 22, 2010

As Denise Cerreta watches a young man pour a mound of luscious yellow-red plums into a plastic box in the kitchen at the One World Café, she concludes people can be each other's miracles.

"We were really low on food," One World Café founder Cerreta said. "He brought in a huge bushel of overflowing plums. I was thinking this morning: gosh, I wish we had plum pie."

At Cerreta's restaurant in Salt Lake City, customers get to decide what to pay for their meals. Guests who can't afford to pay can earn a meal by volunteering in the kitchen or garden. Rather than take advantage of Cerreta's generosity, the community often pitches in to help.

"Some people are waiting for that bolt of lightning or that crack of the sky for some angel to appear," Cerreta said. "I think we're each other's angels. That's the beauty that happens all the time in this place."

One World, founded in 2003, makes healthy, organic food available to everyone, regardless of pocketbook size. Cerreta's model has inspired the launch of four additional pay-as-you-can restaurants across the nation.

Although no Columbia restaurants use a pay-as-you-can policy, many serve similar locally grown organic food. The Main Squeeze Natural Foods Café has employed a few homeless people in the past, paying them in both food and money, owner Leigh Lockhart said.

"I'm doing what my passion is, but the more I'm in it, the more I see the real gap between the haves and the have-nots when it comes to food," Lockhart said. "I think it's a basic human right we all have to fresh healthy food."

After months of getting to know a lively homeless gentleman she met in 2006, Lockhart hired him as a dishwasher and let him sleep in the Main Squeeze backroom. He was the first homeless employee, and his tidy work habits proved to be helpful around the café. He always expressed his sincere appreciation for the good food.

"He might have eaten canned vegetables that you'd get when you go to the soup kitchen, but to eat fresh corn on the cob or salad is so much healthier for you," Lockhart said.

Lockhart said a pay-as-you-can restaurant would be difficult to finance in today's economy, but she would open one if she could afford it. She estimated the start-up cost at $200,000.

"Columbia, if any place, would respond favorably to it," Lockhart said. "It's just really hard to walk into a bank with a business plan and say you want to open up a restaurant and let anyone pay what they want. Some philanthropic individual would have to get behind it."

A successful pay-as-you-can restaurant could cut costs by using unpaid volunteers and choosing a location outside the expensive rent area, Lockhart said.

"I wish my business would make enough money that I could just feed people and surround myself with vegetables every day," Lockhart said.

About seven years since opening One World, Cerreta has seen how much her community needs a pay-as-you-can restaurant. One woman confided to Cerreta that before coming to One World, she had to resort to breaking open her food storage and sifting the weevils out of flour to make food for her children.

By offering fresh fruits and vegetables at any price, Cerreta hopes to restore her customers' dignity. She said fresh food provides the most nourishment because the nutrients are at their peak.

"You pop a radish in your mouth straight out of the garden, and it's like fire," Cerreta said. "You eat a radish from the store that's how many weeks old, and it's truly diminished."

The SAME (So All May Eat) Café in Denver also features a daily changing menu of seasonal, organic fruits and vegetables. Brad and Libby Birky founded this pay-as-you-can restaurant in October 2006 with Cerreta's guidance. They serve such unusual dishes as a pizza topped with blue cheese, pecans and apple slices.

At SAME, the Birkys get to meet people like Mr. Kidd, a leathery-faced Southern man in his 40s who slept outside. With a thick, scraggly auburn beard and hole-ridden work boots, Mr. Kidd might have looked out of place in — or thrown out of — a normal restaurant. But in the SAME Café, he eagerly devoured salad, thankful for the nourishing food and shelter from the stinging cold.

Buried under four winter coats to weather the brutal blizzards, Mr. Kidd shoveled snow for people around the neighborhood, hoping to save up enough money to travel to New Orleans, help with hurricane recovery and find a church maintenance job. When he shoveled outside the SAME Café one day in late 2006, he found out he could earn a meal for his work.

One February 2007 afternoon, a bony clean-shaven man in jeans and a neat button-down shirt entered the café and met Brad Birky's gaze. When he walked up to the counter and smiled, Brad Birky suddenly recognized him and said, "Kidd! Look at you!"

Mr. Kidd grinned. He'd cleaned up so well he was almost unrecognizable. Working for meals at the SAME Café had enabled him to save up enough of his snow shoveling earnings to buy new clothes, a haircut, a hotel room to clean up in and a bus ticket to New Orleans.

"I was just totally blown away," Brad Birky said. "Kidd was one of the first people that we saw that had such a need for what we were doing. He could get a meal but he couldn't get a healthy meal."

As Cerreta spreads the pay-as-you-can model, she insists there is one last gap critical to her restaurant and her mission to end world hunger she can't fill on her own. Cerreta wonders how people could distribute food on Earth as it would be provided in heaven, so no one goes hungry.

Pay-as-you-can restaurants reflect an answer of their own. One World cuts down food waste by encouraging customers to choose their own portion sizes. The result? Satisfied guests clean their plates entirely, and food that otherwise would have been scraped into the trash remains in the kitchen. When Cerreta looks into the compost bin four and a half hours into the workday, she sees only about one measuring cup of food there.

"I really believe that if we could end waste in America like that, we could feed the world overnight," Cerreta said. "It releases the availability of that much more food."

In the SAME Café, a watercolor painting depicts a line of people, all holding bowls in their hands as they approach a scarlet castle in the clouds. Outside the castle window, a giant pair of hands holds purple grapes, two fish and a breadbasket.

"That's what heaven is, a place where all your needs are met and you're taken care of," Libby Birky said. "If the world operated in a pay-as-you-can model where all people's needs were met, I think it would be a completely different place."

In a pay-as-you-can restaurant, people like the young man with plums step forward to be each other's miracles. The resulting food supply overflows instead of running out.

"If we could all collectively think, 'How would we do it there?' We'd help each other figure this out because it's not a one-person thing," Cerreta said. "Maybe there's a way, if we all put our heads and our hearts together, we could figure out how to truly feed everybody."