Church kitchens are a combination of dollar store half-price bins & yard sale Pfaltzgraf, quite the statement on remnants of a Lost Civilization. Roadside collectible shows go away – let’s just inspect the contents of church kitchens!

We have eight million toothpicks, fourteen pepper shakers & ½ of a salter. We have a huge tub of ice cream (vanilla) with two scoopers, and no one eats ice cream in Florida during the chilly season.

The refrigerators are full of inedible cupcakes with giant swirls of pure colorful cane sugar on top & a bite of pretend-it’s-your-grandma’s icing. However, it’s grandmom on Alzheimer’s.

We have six tubs of butter. Oat butter (what?), plant butter (what?), Land O Lakes in three sizes, & vegetable butter (what?) Bet our ancestors never thought “progress” to include such – it was hard enough to get salt on the table in the “auld days.”

We have a sea of bland silverware including three-tined forks & spoons with odd handles obviously the last of That Which Did Not Sell tables all over the flea markets. (“What’ll we do with this? I know! Give it to the Church!”)

A recent Christmas party has left us with more to add to the collection. A forest of plasticware vies with a stack of disposable baking pans tucked for invisibility behind the coffee cups we don’t use. 99 wine glasses – & we do not serve wine at our church for any reason – fill two cabinets I dearly want to put something else into. But we have nowhere to put the wine glasses.

We are victim to renters who feel each & every one they must bring a box of plastic forks as some esoteric ritual of entry. Um, suggestion: just put a buck in the kitchen basket instead. Yesterday I passed along the guilt to Goodwill, sending over a huge trash bag full of plasticware. It’s my sin, too, when these reach the ocean floor, but I’ve done it behind my own back, yeh? I don’t get to the ocean floor much, anyway.

We have the empty ice bucket with the scratch-off label saying “Do NOT put this back empty!” on it. We had four bags of English Toffee Coffee (what?) which I surreptitiously trashed yesterday. I cannot believe anyone on earth wants English Toffee Coffee & the aliens are bringing plastic spoons when they land, so no need there. (These were donated by the fella who one day brought us the whipped cream.)

We have four jars of CoffeeMate which I did not know was still even in production, except perhaps in some Iceland communities where they drink tea. We now have an entire 6’ shelf of unmatched, variously-sized napkins & a ministerial preference for uniformity in Sunday settings. We have four cans of whipped cream total for Sunday consumption.

A Church Kitchen literally runs on sugar. Inedible cookies vie with the refrigerated “cupcakes.” Even the kids who come through ignore the sweets having been warned their heads will fall off if they eat this stuff. We do have one minister who raids the room every day for a treat; however, she’s switched to pretzels. We have no pretzels.

We have a tubular package of hamburgers from last July 4^th which I will also surreptitiously toss one day when the freezer burn on them pushes on the empty ice bucket. Mixed in with all this in the freezer are ice packs for emergencies, two first aid kits with no bandaids, a bottle of Manischewitz vying with four jars half-full of pickles for shelf space.

It’s kind of like what you’d find after nuclear winter in a looted market. The Country Time Lemonade which our congregants avoid in favor of the Arnold Palmer mix seems to grow a can of the powdered chemical nightly. Don’t even ask about the dishwasher pods which were incidentally put on re-order with Amazon during Covid Closure.

One shelf has nothing but cheap [plastic] containers in the hope someone will put a few of those burgers in for take-home.

CONCLUSION: Try not to eat out of a church kitchen except on potluck day when you can see the provenance. I now have a secret which I’ll tell here, in utter confidence, to the entire world: Generally, on Sunday the two hotpots with regular coffee are consumed religiously while I throw out the decaf so carefully made earlier… I was refreshing the bin of coffee packets & noticed someone put decaf in the regular bin so everyone has been drinking decaf for the past month. Shhh! I’m not telling.