I have been volunteering at The Felix Project since the summer of 2021. I go every 1-2 Friday/ Saturday for a 4-hour morning shift helping out with meal packing in the kitchen. I love this routine.
At the start, Felix was my way of easing back into the post-covid π· world in a community setting. I wanted to connect with other like-minded volunteers and I was curious about how a kitchen of this scale operated. Over the past 18 months I met numerous volunteers, many Felix kitchen staff, and together we packed thousands of π₯ meals made from donated food.
I like the fact that people from all walks of life volunteer there. I like how diverse and inclusive it is. I love the deep care π that everyone shows. Working a desk job π©π»βπ», I find the repetitive, monotonous motions of meal packing soothing. (It relaxes my brain. π) I enjoy playing jigsaw puzzle with irregularly-shaped π chicken pieces, attempting to break my own PB on labels per minute, cracking thousands of eggs π₯ in one go and fluffing chilled or frozen rice (Okay, I lied. Fluffing rice is my least favourite task. π°); but most of all I love being teammates with otherwise strangers bonded by the same mission - To feed the hungry with excess food.
Last week, I found a nugget on a Felix label. Iβm π³ stumped that it took me 18 months to notice, but it totally made my day and Iβm grateful I finally did. Ingredient #1 in any Felix meals is Compassion. How utterly beautiful is that. π§‘
βοΈ Felix needs help actually. Rice fluffing π is a long-standing efficiency drain that caps the number of meals Felix can pack on any given day. In the kitchen, rice is steamed in deep dishes, then immediately chilled π₯Ά like all other cooked items for food safety reason, until itβs ready to be boxed up. The problem is the steaming and chilling results in rice getting stuck together into blocks. This is the reason why on average the whole meal packing team of 8-10 spends 45-60 mins a day breaking rice blocks up. βFluffingβ is what we call it. The time β° can instead be spent packing ~500 meals to feed more hungry people.
π Are there any rice/ kitchen experts out there, who might have a solution π‘ to this problem? Can the process be altered to speed up or even eliminate the time-consuming fluffing step? Who can help?