Food donations also swell at Zuccotti Park

Phyllis Coelho plunged her blue gloved hands into a plastic sink of gray soapy water and spent an afternoon last week cheerfully washing dishes "to support the revolution."

Coelho, 70, a retired social worker, had traveled from Belfast, Maine, the day before with her 78-year-old friend and fellow dishwasher, Jane Sanford.

They headed directly to the protest at Zuccotti Park because, they said, it was time to "show up." At a table behind her, Nan Terrie, an 18-year-old pre-law student from Orlando, Fla., was furiously chopping carrots and onions even as she juggled cellphone calls from people wanting to donate food, and handed hastily scribbled "to-do" lists for other volunteers.

Anj Ferrara, a 24-year-old artist, was tearing open some of the 40 boxed pizzas that had just arrived. And Tom Hintze, a 24-year-old bike tour guide, was trying to figure out the logistics of getting a truck and driver to pick up massive trays of pulled pork that someone wanted to send from Brooklyn.

The makeshift "kitchen" in the center of the park is the ever-evolving heart of the Occupy Wall Street encampment, managing to feed thousands daily even as it scrambles to figure out how to deal with an endless flow of donations.

But the people who work there -- and those they serve -- say it is much more, imbuing it with the same fervor that has marked the protests from the beginning.

Bagels and eggs for breakfast; pizza and burritos for lunch; fresh salads, organic vegetables and casseroles, pasta or barbecue chicken for dinner. Endless helpings -- all fresh, all free. And all served amid the deafening din of protest: masks and marchers, drum circles and dancers, chanters gripping signs exploding with rage at corporate gluttony, all surrounded by barricades and a phalanx of police officers.

The kitchen has no on-site oven or refrigerator or stove, just fold-up tables, tarps, racks of food and tanks of water.

Truckloads of fresh fruit and vegetables arrive daily from organic farms from upstate, Vermont and Massachusetts; steaming containers of chicken and rice, burritos and lasagna are sent from restaurants all over the city; tubs of Ben and Jerry's chocolate and cookie dough ice cream arrived one sunny morning (and was scooped by the company's board chairman, Jeff Furman); and there is a seemingly never-ending delivery of pizza pies, ordered by phone from supporters all over the world.

Donations have come from organized groups. The Corrections Officers' Benevolent Association of New York City donated food to feed roughly 800 people. And the United Federation of Teachers donated a huge storage space on Broadway, about seven blocks away, where the hundreds of UPS boxes arriving every day -- filled with canned food, and sleeping bags and blankets -- are sorted and stored.

But from the kitchen perspective, the most crucial donation happened a few days ago, when the Rev. Leopoldo Carl of Overcoming Love Ministries in Brooklyn wandered into the park and offered the use of his soup kitchen -- a state-of-the-art commercial operation capable of cooking for more than 1,500. The church, he said, had plenty of cold storage too.

Volunteer Heather Squire was incredulous. She had spent the past week desperately searching for such a space so that the protesters could store fresh produce for the winter and move away from the daily trips to home kitchens that are simply not equipped to cook in volume.

"I'm an atheist," Squire says. "But there is something mystical happening here."