There Are No Accidents

For the last several days, something has been bothering me.

Food.

More specifically, the amount of perfectly good food I have had to throw away at the end of the night.

Working in catering, there is inevitably waste. You plan for people who don’t show up. You prepare enough because running out isn’t an option. And at the end of service, sometimes you find yourself standing over trays of beautiful food knowing exactly where they’re headed.

The trash.

We’ve worked with charities at Gateway before, and we’ve made efforts to donate what we can, but it has always been hit or miss. Inconsistent. And lately, throwing away good food has started to genuinely wear on me.

Because I know better.

I know there are people not very far from the building where I work who are hungry.

Maybe this bothers me so deeply because somewhere in me, I remember what an empty refrigerator looks like.

When I was a little girl, my parents divorced, and for a while things were hard. I remember opening our refrigerator one day and seeing almost nothing inside. There were condiments—ketchup, mustard—and I think some butter. That was it.

For about six months, my mother had to accept federal assistance to help us get through that time.

I was five years old, and I loved milk. I remember being so excited when I learned that a social worker was going to bring us some. In my five-year-old mind, I knew exactly what milk looked like and exactly what I was waiting for.

Then she arrived with milk in a box.

And I cried.

It’s such a small memory, but I have carried it all these years. A child doesn’t understand federal assistance or divorce or why a refrigerator that once had food in it suddenly doesn’t. A child only understands that she wants milk and that somehow even the milk doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to anymore.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s part of why I became a chef.

Maybe somewhere inside me, I have always needed to feed people. And when I say feed, I mean something much larger than putting food on a plate.

To feed someone is to nourish them.

To provide for them.

To care for them.

There is something inside me that is cared for, too, when I know someone else has been taken care of. Knowing that someone is fed, that for at least this moment they have enough, satisfies some deep need in me that I don’t think I fully understood until now.

Maybe that’s why it is so difficult for me to throw good food away. Maybe it’s why helping people who don’t have enough has never felt abstract to me. I know what it is to be a child who opens a refrigerator and doesn’t find food there.

And I was given an extraordinary gift in the middle of all of that: my grandmother taught me how to cook.

She gave me more than recipes. She taught me what you can do with food. You can take what you have and make something from it. You can put a plate in front of someone and, without saying a word, tell them: I see you. You matter. I want you to be nourished.

Perhaps becoming a chef was never only about loving food.

Perhaps it was always, in some small way, about making sure the refrigerator wasn’t empty.

And tonight, the universe did something interesting.

One of our runners came up to me.

“Are you the catering manager?”

I told him I was.

He hesitated.

Then he asked if I would ever be interested in donating our leftover food.

He works with an organization called All Hands On Deck: STL, an all-volunteer nonprofit whose philosophy can be summed up in one word:

S.H.A.R.E.

Share Health And Resources Equitably.

They rescue food that might otherwise be discarded and redistribute it through free grocery shares and pop-ups throughout St. Louis, particularly in communities where access to nutritious food and other resources can be difficult. Their work extends beyond food, too—connecting people with resources, supporting community health and working toward stronger, more sustainable neighborhoods.

As he was telling me all of this, I could hardly believe the timing.

“Yes,” I said.

Absolutely yes.

And suddenly the food I had been worrying about throwing away wasn’t going into the trash.

It was going to people.

The Question He Almost Didn’t Ask

He stayed late tonight to help me pack everything.

And he was grateful.

But so was I.

Maybe even more so.

Because somewhere along the way, while we were packing containers and standing around the kitchen after everyone else had gone, the conversation stopped being about food.

We started talking about spirituality.

About the natural world.

About what God actually is.

About what happens when human beings take something sacred and build institutions around it.

We talked about Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass, a book we both dearly love—a book that, in many ways, is about reciprocity. About understanding that our relationship with the earth, and ultimately with one another, was never meant to be transactional.

We are supposed to receive.

And we are supposed to give back.

At some point, I asked him about his tattoo. Then I showed him mine—Om Mani Padme Hum, the mantra of compassion, rising out of a lotus. He showed me his in return: a lotus, too, but with the sword of knowledge rising from its center.

There was something quietly beautiful about that exchange, two lotuses carrying two different ideas that were not really so different at all—compassion and wisdom, the heart and the knowing.

He also had the Lakota words Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ—“all my relations”—an acknowledgment that the boundaries we draw between ourselves and the rest of the living world are not as absolute as we pretend: people, animals, plants, trees, earth.

All related.

All belonging to one another in some way.

And maybe that was why the conversation felt so familiar to me.

I had been telling him what I have come to believe—that while we are here, we are supposed to help. To ease suffering when we can. To stand beside those who cannot stand entirely on their own.

Christianity calls us to care for the least among us; Buddhism asks us to cultivate compassion for all sentient beings. And there we were, talking about these things while carrying pieces of the same philosophy permanently on our skin.

Different traditions, different symbols, different roads perhaps—but beneath them, the same quiet recognition: none of us is here alone.

At some point in the conversation, he said something so simple that I knew immediately I was going to borrow it:

“I get Jesus. I don’t get the church.”

Exactly.

There is something profound in separating the sacred from the structures we’ve constructed around it.

Maybe God is much bigger than religion.

Maybe God is generosity.

Maybe God is reciprocity.

Maybe God is the instinct that tells us food should feed someone instead of filling a dumpster.

Maybe God is the little voice that tells a man to ask a question he almost didn’t ask.

There Are No Accidents

Before he left, he invited me to join the Native Women’s Care Circle for a water blessing along the Mississippi River next Sunday.

I’m going.

Afterward, I learned that this wasn’t simply a small local gathering. The Native Women’s Care Circle is a grassroots, matriarchal, Indigenous-led prayer group devoted to the health and welfare of Native families and communities and to stewardship of the land and water.

The St. Louis circle is part of a much larger tradition of weekly prayer along the Mississippi inspired by the Nibi Water Walks.

Years ago, Ojibwe elder Sharon Day called upon people along the river—from its beginnings in Minnesota toward its journey south—to gather on Sunday mornings and continue praying for the healing of the water.

Here near St. Louis, Native women have been gathering along the Mississippi for years to do exactly that.

I asked Terry what time I should be there. He explained the timing to me as “Indian time.”

“Whatever time you get there, but around 9:00 AM.”

I loved that immediately.

He also began explaining what I will experience. You don’t simply walk down to the Mississippi and take water from it. You approach the water as something living and sacred. You ask permission to receive some of it.

A small amount is gathered into a vessel—traditionally, copper vessels are used in the Nibi water-walking tradition—and the water is held in prayer before ultimately being returned to the river.

There is something about that that already moves me deeply: you ask the water.

Not because the water belongs to us, but because we belong to a world made possible by it.

There is another Indigenous teaching Terry shared with me that I keep thinking about: water has memory. I don’t mean that as a scientific claim, but in the spiritual sense in which water is understood as more than an inert resource.

In Ojibwe teachings, nibi—water—is regarded as a sacred, living and moving being, something that carries stories and connection. In the Nibi Water Walk tradition, water gathered at the beginning of a journey is carried in a copper vessel and ultimately returned downstream, in part as a way of reminding the river of its original state.

I find that idea extraordinarily beautiful. The Mississippi flowing past St. Louis has already traveled through countless places and lives before it reaches us, carrying the story of the land with it.

And long after it passes us, it keeps going. If water carries memory, then standing beside the river in prayer feels less like speaking to an object and more like entering an ancient conversation already in progress.

We spend so much of our lives taking from the earth without asking anything. We turn on faucets. We divert rivers. We consume and discard. We behave as though nature is a collection of resources placed here for our convenience.

And here is a ceremony that begins with an entirely different premise.

Ask first.

Very Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Receive with gratitude.

Offer something back.

I’m so looking forward to standing beside the Mississippi next Sunday and participating in that prayer.

And as I drove home tonight, I kept thinking about how strangely these things happen.

For days, throwing away food had been bothering me.

Not intellectually.

It was bothering my heart.

I wanted another answer. I just didn’t know what that answer was yet.

And then someone walked into my dining room.

Someone I might otherwise have known only as one of the runners working in the building.

He asked me a question.

And he told me later that he almost didn’t.

That part stays with me.

Because how many moments in our lives hinge on something that small?

A question we almost didn’t ask.

A phone call we almost didn’t make.

A person we almost didn’t introduce ourselves to.

A door we almost didn’t walk through.

We tend to imagine that the important moments of our lives will announce themselves. That there will be some unmistakable sign telling us, Pay attention. This matters.

Usually there isn’t.

Usually it’s just someone standing in a dining room saying:

“Are you the catering manager?”

Tomorrow Morning

Tomorrow morning at 11:30, All Hands On Deck will hold a pop-up in the city.

And tonight, instead of throwing away perfectly good food, we packed it.

Tomorrow someone will pick it up.

Someone will bring it home.

Someone will eat it.

Maybe someone will feed their children with it.

Food that was headed for a dumpster will instead become nourishment.

And hopefully this isn’t a one-time donation.

We exchanged information. We talked about what we could do going forward. And for the first time since this started bothering me, I feel like there may finally be a relationship that allows us to consistently move surplus food out of our kitchen and into the hands of people who can use it.

That alone would have made tonight extraordinary.

But I think I received something else, too.

I met a kind soul.

I had one of those unexpected conversations that reminds me there are still people wandering around this world asking the same questions I am—about spirituality, purpose, nature, service and what we’re supposed to be doing with the short amount of time we’re given here.

Perhaps that’s why tonight doesn’t feel accidental.

I don’t know exactly what I believe about the invisible forces moving through this world. I’ve become increasingly comfortable admitting that I don’t need to know.

But I believe in paying attention.

I believe in synchronicity.

I believe there are moments when something we’ve been carrying quietly meets an answer coming toward us from a direction we never thought to look.

And I believe sometimes grace is much less dramatic than we’ve been taught to expect.

Sometimes grace doesn’t part the sea.

Sometimes it doesn’t arrive accompanied by thunder or revelation.

Sometimes grace is a man who almost doesn’t ask a question.

Sometimes it’s two people talking about God in an empty dining room.

Sometimes it’s an invitation to sit beside water.

And sometimes it’s simply taking something that would have been thrown away and putting it into the hands of someone who needs it.

Maybe there are accidents in the universe.

But tonight didn’t feel like one.