Bringing home the bacon.

Bringing home the bacon.

Good afternoon. 

Sara Rubin here, with a newfound appreciation for going grocery shopping. While it’s a practice my household has kept to a minimum throughout the pandemic, we still make our own lists, shop for what we like and choose the brightest apples and freshest greens ourselves.

Maria Heugo is 70, and a lifelong resident of Monterey. To keep herself safe during the pandemic, she’s cut down drastically on outings, limiting herself mostly to the bank and the pharmacy. For a while, early on, she was paying people to go grocery shopping for her, but that got costly. So when Monterey County rolled out Great Plates Delivered last June, Heugo jumped on it. “The food is wonderful,” she says. “It’s very nutritious. It’s really good.” 

The concept is this: Local government pays local restaurants to prepare three meals a day for eligible seniors, who earn too much to qualify for other food assistance programs, but not enough to have, say, a personal chef on staff. (To qualify, participants can earn between 200 and 600 percent of the federal poverty level, roughly $24,000 to $72,000 for a single person per year.) 

It’s a win-win—help keep seniors at home, and pump money into the struggling restaurant sector. At Angelica’s Bakery (which is participating in the Great Plates program run by the city of Seaside), owner OB Bonilla puts it this way: “You kill three birds with one stone. You are keeping businesses open; you are keeping the elderly safe; and it is good for the state.”

When I first started reporting a story for the March 4 print edition of the Weekly about Great Plates, I thought it would be a story about restaurants adapting. But that’s only part of it—it’s also a story about seniors in our community getting a basic and essential need met in a smart way. Those are seniors like Heugo, who is super enthusiastic about the fruit bowls she regularly receives. Even in the Before Times, she would never buy herself more than one kind of melon—and she’d rarely buy melon because by the time she could eat the whole thing, it would have started going bad. 

Some of what’s arrived at Heugo’s Monterey doorstep: A salad with avocado, tomatoes and olives (“it was delicious”), clam chowder, grilled salmon “that was absolutely out of this world.” She’s got an appointment to receive her first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine on March 29, but won’t go out until after she’s had her second, and even then, she says she’ll be cautious and keep shopping to a minimum. 

Mostly she says Great Plates has been an improvement, but there are a few things she really misses. At the top of this list: Farmer John thick-cut bacon. 

In Carmel Valley, Inge Howard helps take care of her friend, Newell Cutter, who has been diagnosed with stage 5 kidney failure. “Beginning of last year, we didn’t think that Newell could stay alive much longer,” Howard writes by email. “[As] soon as the Great Plates Delivered program started for him in June, we could tell there was an improvement in his overall well-being. After a couple of months his condition started to be stable and it has been ever since. Even though his kidneys are no longer working, his health has not been getting worse and he credits this primarily to the nutritional food delivered through the program.

“There is a saying ‘you are what you eat,’ and in the Great Plates Delivered program this really comes true.” 

The program, 75 percent of which is funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), is currently set to end on March 8. It’s been extended before, in the 11th hour, by FEMA officials. Monterey County officials, restaurateurs and meal recipients are all hoping it gets extended again. 

In a letter on Dec. 29, 88-year-old Beryl Czuleger of Monterey wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom asking him to extend the program, and to express her gratitude after she had a series of strokes while her husband, Tom, was recovering from a hip replacement. “You can imagine how difficult it is for us to shop for groceries, as well as transferring the heavy bags from our car into the house,” she wrote. “Our quality of life and our health have improved. We hope that this wonderful program can be extended.”

Whether or not the program is extended again—and I hope it is—worry not: I am going to drop off some Farmer John bacon on Heugo’s doorstep this weekend. 

-Sara Rubin, editor, sara@mcweekly.com