CityView Magazine

16 | May 2020 T he work that Jesus did with the loaves and the fishes is the undeniable gold standard for feeding the multitude, but Jason Hairr and his crew were doing a formidable job one recent morning trying to pull off a fairly impressive task themselves. By just aer sunrise, Hairr had 500 hot dogs sizzling on the mammoth grill at his Southern Coals Country Style Kitchen. His regular crew and some extra friends who had volunteered to help were working in assembly-line fashion, placing the hot dogs into buns, wrapping them in foil, doling out servings of baby carrots, and then plopping everything, plus a cheese stick and a fruit cup, into brown paper lunch bags. By 9:30, Hairr's enormous trailer, equipped with both heating and cooling capabilities, would be pulling onto Raeford Road and heading to Spring Lake, where the crew began handing out the bagged lunches to schoolchildren and their families even before the scheduled time of 11 o'clock. Earlier in the month, Hairr had cooked barbecue on site at another location and passed out plates. "He was a blessing from the beginning, and he continues to be," said Beth Maynard, executive director of Child Nutrition for Cumberland County Schools. "He has definitely been a wonderful community partner." It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes nothing less than a well-coordinated and heroic effort to keep a community of children fed during a pandemic. In Cumberland County, it was critical that Maynard and her staff of cafeteria supervisors and staff managed to mobilize quickly. North Carolina recognizes the first week in May as National School Nutrition Employee Appreciation Week, and never, it seems, has there been a more appropriate time to recognize those who have been asked to figure out solutions to a problem they never could have foreseen. ey couldn't have done it, Maynard said, without the help of Jason Hairr and others. G I V I N G BY KIM HASTY | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MATTHEW WONDERLY Feeding the Children

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