Comfort food: Nonprofit gives Americans 100K free lasagnas

A grassroots nonprofit organization offering Americans free lasagnas recently surpassed its 100,000 lasagna delivery mark

On a recent summer morning, Lynn Hirsch was determined as she packed the back of her gray SUV with 20 aluminum pans of lasagna. The retiree was on a mission: Drive nearly 70 miles from her suburb of Atlanta to two rural Georgia towns and get the hearty dishes into the hands of people who needed them. It's an increasingly typical mission for volunteers of Lasagna Love — a grassroots nonprofit organization of 33,000 people across the country who are sharing free lasagnas with Americans struggling with financial and other challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The group is one of many charitable initiatives launched during the pandemic to help families counter hunger, and pay for housing costs and other expenses. In an average week, 69-year-old Hirsch makes and delivers four lasagnas near her Alpharetta, Georgia home. But this time, she wanted to do something different — help feed those in the Georgia cities of Chatsworth and Dalton who had been requesting meals but couldn’t get them because of a lack of volunteer chefs in their areas. Frustrated by the need, Hirsch and other chefs volunteered to make the meals, which, in part, helped the nonprofit recently surpass its 100,000 lasagna delivery mark. Meredith Niles, a professor at the University of Vermont who’s been researching the pandemic’s impact on food insecurity, says the nonprofit is “an amazing example of the generosity and ingenuity” that many people have shown to help others during the pandemic. Many of the lasagna meals have provided comfort to Americans facing health challenges, or loneliness during the pandemic. Others were given to parents stressed about managing their children’s schooling from home, or Americans grieving the death of a loved one from the coronavirus.