Cooking for peace and the environment

Patricia Downing set the tone at St. Faith’s community kitchen

A fond farewell to Patricia Downing at St. Faith’s Anglican Church after 11 years of cooking. Left right, Tara, David, Patricia, Sherien. | Constance Brissenden

Since 2013, Patricia Downing has helped many of us learn how to cook. A formidable force with a reassuring smile, Downing has organized more than 110 community kitchens at St. Faith’s Anglican Church.

“My goal was to encourage cooking from scratch and how to stretch food dollars,” says Downing, affectionately known as Trish. At 78 years, she is retiring with fond memories. “Above all, I enjoyed seeing the pleasure that interesting and lively people derived from the monthly cooking bees.”

Supported with donations from the church — including the use of a professional kitchen, and often fresh produce from Downing’s own garden — upwards of a dozen participants cooked together once a month.

After each community kitchen, we left with food (plenty of it) and a feeling of community that drove away feelings of isolation. Over the years, some of us lost family members or beloved pets. Others experienced bad health, injury, job loss, or financial difficulties. But when we left a cooking session, we all felt encouraged hearing Downing’s cheerful voice bidding us goodbye. 

Downing’s volunteer role was to choose the recipes, gather the ingredients for each recipe, measure the amounts of each ingredient, arrange them at our cooking stations, and contact the participants to show up on the second Tuesday of every month. She supervised our efforts as we chopped and mixed, boiled and baked. Finally, she carefully divided up the three main courses and one dessert into our containers, so that each of us felt fairly treated. All for a basic donation of four dollars.

Over the years, participants came and went. Many were introduced to the potential of home cooking for the first time. I learned the best way to chop vegetables from Mary, and how to run the steam washer from Sherien. We learned “Trish Tricks” such as scooping out the last kernel of rice from a cooking pot and the last bit of egg white from a shell.

Downing was all about being environmentally careful. Scraps were composted. Lower-priced cuts of meat were introduced with the best ways to cook them. Seasonal produce was preferable. One portion of a chicken cacciatore (or some such recipe) could be divided up at home and boosted with pasta or rice to make it go further.

All of this was surface stuff for a program that had much deeper meaning.

At a goodbye lunch for Downing’s retirement, Reverend Travis Enright spoke of his goals from 2013 — his first year at St. Faith’s. “The community kitchen represented everything we were trying to do in the neighborhood,” he recalled. It was an anchor, showing the way for caring and community. At the centre was Trish, who never wavered for more than a decade.”

Downing helped bring more volunteers to St. Faith’s Anglican Church, and Tara’s involvement goes back to the beginning. At the time, Downing was Tara’s occupational therapist and invited her to join. A friendly cat-lover, Tara sums up her life philosophy with the phrase, “To live is to love.” 

That certainly embodies Patricia Downing’s community kitchen.

St. Faith’s is looking for a new volunteer coordinator to restart the community kitchen in September. If you are interested in helping or being on the list of participants, email rector@stfaithsanglican.org.