Everyone Deserves a Clean Cup

By Adam Walker Cleaveland

I spent today in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco with 8 of our middle school and high school youth. We went into San Francisco to serve lunch and dinner at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. The youth did an awesome job serving over 700 meals at lunch and close to 800-900 at dinner. If any of you have ever been to Glide and worked in the kitchen, you’ll know they have an amazing food assembly line that gets set up, and things go very, very quickly.

During lunch, my job for 2 hours was to place the plastic cup on the napkin, and pass it down the line. A pretty simple job - but when things were really flying, you had to be pretty quick about it. During one of these rushes, I picked up a plastic cup and happened to notice that it hadn’t gotten thoroughly cleaned by the dishwasher. It wasn’t really dirty, but it was clear that it wasn’t as clean as the rest. But I saw the rest of the trays coming my way, and another was already being handed to me, so I figured it wasn’t that big of a deal. I placed the cup on the napkin, and just kept working.

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