Passing out dinner downtown
(Credit: John DuBois)
I’m on toasting duty for the Los Angeles Burrito Project, tossing tortillas on the open burners of a household stove and handing them off to the dozen or so scruffy bike kids lined up assembly-style in someone's kitchen. One guy uses an ice cream scoop to dole out a mishmash of beans and rice from a stainless steel cauldron, and a petite strawberry-blonde ladles salsa from a can the size of a bucket. After they go through roughly 300 tortillas (299 on the day I'm there), they'll nestle the newborn burritos into messenger bags and bicycle through the sketchiest districts of Downtown, handing off burritos to anyone who seems hungry. Then they'll go have some beers.
They do this every Wednesday.
Jake (not his real name) sports a thick beard, a banged-up elbow and scattered tattoos. He co-founded the off-the-books charity two years ago with his roommate and a friend (all prefer to go nameless) after being impressed by a similar project in San Francisco's Mission District. Living in L.A., Jake became a de facto bicycle enthusiast after his car broke down and he commuted from Downtown to Culver City—on a BMX bike. The marriage of bicycling and feeding the homeless further jelled at a Downtown dive bar. “Bar 107 helped out a lot with the formation of it. It just happened that a bunch of people doing the project happened to be drinking beers there,” he deadpans.
It took a year or so for the weekly burrito meet-ups to take off. If you weren't too drunk back then to remember, the newly formed Burrito Project set up a donation stand in front of the Echo at the 2006 Fuck Yeah Fest, selling hand-screened shirts emblazoned with a bike and the words “Mom said share.” But now, Jake explains, they've got a “tight-knit group…like a family,” which ranges from nine to 30 people wandering into his house every week, each toting a six-pack or an armload of tortillas. The living room becomes a tangle of bicycles, and the kitchen is hot, crowded and lively with chatter about bike parts, dive bars and local music. Someone offers me a Michelob Ultra and teaches me how to roll my first burrito.
Though the group has been awarded the first-ever MySpace Impact Award and at one point campaigned to get more support and members—local businesses such as Malo and Pure Luck have helped supply the project's efforts—Jake says he’s not interested in being in charge of anything. The L.A. Burrito Project almost never answers MySpace messages, and new people coming and going in his kitchen are rare. Rather, the group's approach is to encourage other do-gooders to form their own families and chapters. This year has seen the formation of a Hollywood Burrito Project, an Inland Empire Burrito Project, and another group in Michigan consisting of “moms in Detroit riding around with their kids,” Jake says. There's even a Falafel Project in Syria. I ponder that for a second and imagine myself accidentally burning a pita bread.
Despite the ingredients or the continent, each project stresses that they just want to help out the community in a concrete way while remaining faceless. Jake says he’s trying to keep things as anonymous as possible, but still, after cooking, toasting, folding, wrapping and handing out (by our calculations) over 30,000 burritos, he does admit that people recognize him. “Sometimes I'll just be riding my bike downtown and someone will ask if I have any burritos.”
To learn about additional Burrito Project chapters—or if you're thinking of starting your own—check out the general MySpace page and click around.
Alie Ward is Events editor at Metromix Los Angeles and is now capable of folding a burrito.
