Lasagna Love: A Multilayered Approach to Food Insecurity

Photo by Michael Piazza / Styled by Catrine Kelty

Andrea Scullin says she’s just trying to get dinner on the table.

She may be talking about her own approach to home cooking, but Scullin and her team of volunteer lasagna chefs have managed to do that more than 20,000 times in the past few years across Massachusetts. Scullin is the state’s regional director for Lasagna Love, a grassroots food aid network that makes a simple but profound promise: When times are tough, they’ll deliver a home-cooked dinner.

It is not frequently that I find myself at a loss for words, but often, when a loved one met tough times, a pan of lasagna was all I could summon. Even if prepared elaborately, lasagna always amounts to a grounding comfort. It is both unassuming and celebratory. It is impossible for a wedge of lasagna to put on airs, as its bubbling layers spill across the plate.

And yet lasagna demands an audience. By design, it is a dish for sharing. But its implicit invitation meets challenges: late shifts at work, COVID quarantines and tight budgets can make family dinner an impossible luxury.

“Lasagna is one of the richest dishes in the Italian repertory, but it need not, indeed it ought not, ever be cumbersome,” wrote Marcella Hazan in Marcella’s Italian Kitchen (Knopf, 1987). Hazan wrote that nowhere more than a lasagna recipe does Italian cuisine better represent the cooking ideal of insaporire—that is, she said, “to make tasty.”

Hazan was referring to the flavors of the dish, but for many households, complexity can undo dinner completely. Lasagna’s promise, and its soothing potential, is understood with deep empathy by the more than 190 volunteer chefs who make up Lasagna Love’s pasta-based mutual aid network.

“Coming together to eat is really nostalgic for a lot of people,” says Lasagna Love Boston coordinator Emily Chilton. “[But] I think that’s a comfort measure that is really hard to replicate without a meal prepared.”

It was that idea—to both love lasagna, and lasagna as proxy for love—that prompted Lasagna Love founder Rhiannon Menn to post to a Facebook-based mothers’ group in early 2020, wondering if anyone needed help with dinner in the pandemic’s early stages. Menn attended school in Massachusetts, which was among the first states to establish a Lasagna Love node.

The system works like this: Potential recipients fill out an online form to request a lasagna (or another one-pan meal), and a matched volunteer chef gets in touch. One can also nominate a recipient, who can then opt whether or not to complete the request. The matched pair works out the details: ingredients, volume and timing.

Lasagna is a versatile comfort dish, says Scullin. Chefs accommodate many dietary requests, including gluten free, low carbohydrate and vegan options. Others make a point to include often-costly meat-based ingredients. Kid-savvy cooks sometimes add grated vegetables as hidden nutrition for the produce-averse.

Volunteer chefs range from high schoolers looking to satisfy service hours to retired professional chefs who love to cook and feed others. But professional experience is not required.

The volunteer chef community includes several who signed up after receiving a meal from the group.

“We encourage our chefs to be recipients if they need to be, because somebody needs to help the helpers, too,” says Scullin. “So I have had someone bring dinner to my house. I can tell you, it is absolutely the most amazing thing… It’s for everyone.”

Elizabeth Cushwa, of Eastham, volunteered as a chef, but just as her coordinator reached out to arrange her match, Cushwa learned of her own breast cancer diagnosis. She responded that she’d need a little time before she could help, after all.

“And the woman who called me said, ‘Would you like a lasagna?’” she recounts.

“It was actually necessary to have something that I felt like was homemade, that was nourishing… It kind of renews your faith in humanity.”

Food insecurity takes many forms, Scullin explains. “Need is different for every single person,” she says: a case of COVID, job loss, a mental health challenge, a hospitalized family member.

“I loved the premise that it’s not solving the world’s problems,” says Chilton. “But if it makes somebody’s experience a little bit easier, let’s do it.”

Chilton urges that anyone who could use a little help with dinner should sign up, with hopes that the group can help destigmatize the simple, yet often difficult, act of asking for help.

“Everybody wants to feel like ‘Oh, I don’t need this, somebody else needs it more than me,’ but it’s still OK to say you need help, [even] one time.”

Chilton sees Lasagna Love’s work as fitting into a broader ecosystem of food aid across the Commonwealth, not as a panacea.

“This is not a big-picture swipe at solving food insecurity,” she says. Chilton has professional experience working with food insecurity missions, and pointed to political forces that she hopes will make greater strides in addressing hunger. In her town, she counts a food pantry, a community fridge and school meals for children among the available resources. But unlike some programs, Lasagna Love does not require any paperwork or documentation, factors which she said can often complicate access.

That ease actually garnered some early skepticism, says Scullin, who said that some saw the group’s offering as too good to be true.

“It was kind of unbelievable for people at first that someone would drop off a lasagna for free just because they’re having a hard time. In those first couple months it was really, you know, ‘Yes, this isn’t a scam: We’re really doing this.’”

And how did the team work to overcome the trust hurdle?

“We continued to deliver,” she says. “Every time someone requests, if we’re able to deliver, we deliver.” And, she says, if a requested area still awaits volunteer coverage, they will set expectations.

When physical distance was suggested during the pandemic, Lasagna Love offered a contact-free means of helping. But the anonymous nature of the deliveries has other value, says Chilton, who has worked extensively in the nonprofit world focused on hunger relief causes.

For example, some large volunteer events are often rife with photography and social media documentation, Chilton points out. For Lasagna Love recipients, that missing piece means everyone involved can focus on the meal with privacy and dignity.

“I think the recipient’s face staying out of it is really beautiful and important,” says Chilton. “You don’t have to see the impact in the moment. You can do something good and be proud of one little way you could help, and you don’t always know what that means to the other person.”

It runs counter to what she has seen elsewhere in terms of an occasional sense of expectation that a recipient must demonstrate need in exchange for services, or provide an educational opportunity for the volunteer.

Here, however, she said, “You reach out to somebody, you coordinate a time to drop it off, you leave it at their doorstep, and you walk away to let them enjoy and have their moment, and you don’t need to be part of that.”

By removing the pressure of visibility and contact, she hopes, more will raise their hands to be served. “Somebody in your community will help you out without needing to know anything else,” she says.

She wants anyone who could use a little help for any reason to understand that the message is simple, and the invitation is open. She reflects on coordinating dinner for her children, wrangling daycare pickups while hoping to serve a good and nutritious dinner.

“It’s OK to just be, like, dinner is stressful… If that eases somebody’s brain-space of… ‘What do I have to coordinate? What do I have? Who’s eating right?’ If those pieces can get alleviated once in a while, that could just really change somebody’s course of the week, I think. I hope.”

It may be just a lasagna, but Chilton sees it as more. It’s a means for connection, and a way to clear the plate for more time together. Signing up to receive a meal could make room for bath time, or add bandwidth to care for an elderly parent. And the need to create that space often falls outside of traditional rubrics for support services. That’s where Lasagna Love can step in.

“You might be feeling alone, but maybe your day can be a little bit easier if you have dinner covered. Because there’s people who want to do it, too. If this would just make your time easier, then, yes, you are deserving.”

As someone who has experienced Lasagna Love’s work both through giving and receiving, Cushwa says that duality helped illuminate the immensity of the group’s work.

“What I was doing wasn’t just a nice thing,” she says. “I liked to cook, but I was doing it because it really makes a difference in another human being’s life.

“What’s the most basic thing to every culture?” she continues. “Eating meals together… There are really fundamental basics that cut across all cultures, and they’re all related to food.”

Of the 20,000 requests fulfilled in Massachusetts since Lasagna Love began, Scullin counts 52,000 adults and almost 34,000 kids among household diners. Nationally, and now expanding beyond the U.S., the group reports that it has delivered more than 250,000 dinners.

Lasagna Love is eagerly recruiting new volunteer chefs, and encourages anyone in need of a meal to request one. You can find out how to do either at lasagnalove.org.

And to get Lasagna Love’s founder Rhiannon Menn’s lasagna recipe, as pictured above, click here>>

This story appeared in the Spring 2023 issue.