There are many reasons to visit Los Angeles.

Perhaps, you hope to spot a movie star, shop along Rodeo Drive, or surf in Malibu. Then again, how about a chance to fry up several hundred pounds of frozen pollock?

Drop, count to ninety, drain. Repeat. Over and over, submerging mesh baskets into sizzling vats of vegetable shortening, until I’d produced a small mountain of golden, crispy fish. This was how I spent a morning in March of 2014, when helping cook lunch at The Midnight Mission, which is the largest, continuously-operating social service agency and homeless shelter in Los Angeles.

I was given the briefest of instructions on how to operate a Hobart Vulcan deep fryer by Rob Rice, who is executive chef in the Midnight Mission’s kitchen, where every day an average crowd of a thousand hungry people arrive for breakfast, lunch and dinner. (This adds up to nearly 100,000 meals a month, or over a million annually.) Once I’d gotten acquainted with the Vulcan, Rice flattened a few empty cardboard boxes onto the floor to absorb splatters of grease which erupted every time fish filets met hot oil. Printed on each box was advertising copy that in bright red lettering proclaimed the pollock to be “Beer-Battered!” The same might be said, I realized, for many of the homeless men and women who’d soon arrive to eat it.

As the hours passed—drop, count to ninety, drain—I chatted with a few of my fellow kitchen workers. Most of them are enrolled in drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs run at the mission, and live with 250 other men in dormitory rooms on the building’s second floor. In a typical greeting, each man would tell me his name, recite how long he’d “used,” then proudly announce the duration of his sobriety.

Noe, who appeared in his late 30’s, was addicted to speed for most of his life, but sober for seven months. He wanted me to know he was adopted from an orphanage in India, by a single woman who lived in Beverly Hills. Hyperactive as a child, Noe was put on Ritalin in the second grade. “Was I born an addict, or was this learned behavior?” he asked me.

Before I could answer, I was shaking hands with Alex, who’d smoked crack cocaine for 35 years, but was 18 months clean. “I fell into fear,” was his harrowingly simple explanation for a decades-long drug habit.

These guys clearly respect Rob Rice, who oversees all meals, but is primarily responsible for food served to the 250 residents, as well as sixty people who are paid, full-time staff members of the Midnight Mission.

A lean, attractive 42-year-old, Rice is a marathon runner who teaches yoga on the weekends. In the past, he was a “Corporate Culinary Trainer” for Wolfgang Puck, training chefs for jobs in Puck’s restaurants such as Spago, Chinois and Postrio. Rice liked to surprise new hires with a “grocery bag test.” The chef was handed a sack full of unlikely items—maybe sardines, Kiwi, and chocolate—and told to make something as tasty as possible in the next 90 minutes.

“Rarely was anything created you’d call inspired, but even being able to make something edible under pressure like that told me something,” Rice said.

He also consulted with the actor, Mark Wahlberg, and his brothers, Donnie and Paul, as they opened a chain of “gourmet burger” restaurants called Wahlburgers. Rice’s career has had its share of ups, downs, and surprising twists of fate, which makes him sensitive to attitudes he occasionally sees among privileged volunteers who drop by the Midnight Mission.

“Sometimes they’ll turn up their noses, and say, ‘Well, the people who end up here have made a series of bad choices.’ Really? Let’s take the judgment out of it, shall we? We are all human. Everyone’s capable of good and bad. Some of us were just luckier to get away with more, without getting caught.”

Rice continued, “I like to think I have a pretty good understanding of the human condition. I don’t baby the guys who work here, but sometimes people need a couple of second chances before they can get it right.”

On the day we met, Rice was coaching a few of his workers through a recipe for glazed carrots and chickpeas. He planned to serve this the following day at a special buffet lunch in honor of Persian New Year, or Nowruz. “I should probably add some rose water, but I don’t have a lot of that lying around,” he observed.

With an expected head count of 2,000 guests, Rice was assembling ingredients for chicken marinated in yogurt and Middle-Eastern spices; rice with saffron, currants, and apricots, and a mixed green salad. As he discussed recipes with Alex, Noe, and a few other guys, Rice offered impromptu lessons on the healthy benefits of turmeric, and ginger root. He explained why poultry’s dark and white meat are different in texture and flavor. And, he taught an easy way to peel shallots: “Blanche ‘em in a little hot water, and the papery skin will just slide off.”

Watching this shallot-peeling tip was a guy whose massive forearms and neck were inked with apocalyptic tattoos. He looked on with wide-eyed awe, as if Rice had done an incredible feat of magic. When I smiled at him, the tattooed guy grinned back, and said, “Hi, I’m Sam. I used to drink a liter of vodka every day, but now I’ve been clean for 64 days!”

Such refinements of cooking technique (rose water?) might seem effete, if not downright ridiculous, in the setting of a soup kitchen, yet Rice is trying to show these men how a real restaurant operates. Thanks to his past career, Rice has connections to dining spots all over Los Angeles; many have hired guys who used to work with him at the Midnight Mission. In Rice’s experience, restaurant work is often a first leg up for people with less-than-perfect criminal records, because kitchens are a meritocracy where knowledge trumps all.

“An executive chef shows up one day, and discovers one of his sous chefs has quit,” Rice explains. “He’ll go into the dishwashing pit, and ask if anyone there knows how to, say, roll ravioli. Some Mexican guy will shout, ‘I do!’ and he’ll be promoted from dishwasher to prep cook, just like that. This happens in kitchens all over L.A., every day. No one cares if you are a felon, or if you’ve been arrested. If you know how to roll ravioli, or French-Cut vegetables, that’s your opportunity to advance.”

Before he can teach these men how to cook, though, Rice must contend with unique health problems they face transitioning from life on the streets. For instance, in advanced cases of Hepatitis “C,” when a person’s liver stops functioning, their skin will take on a sickly hue. “Any time people are light green, that’s not good,” Rice said.

On a happier note, he firmly believes nutritious eating can ease some of the pain these guys feel as they “detox.”

“It’s a little like a conversion, or being ‘born again,’” Rob said. “It is one palette, one salad, at a time.”

Alex, of the 35-year crack-smoking habit, agrees. His cholesterol levels have gone down dramatically since he’s been on Rice’s diet. “Before I came here, my idea of fresh produce was opening a can of creamed corn,” he said. “Rob changed all that.”

In the process, Rice has to be endlessly flexible with his meal-planning. Perhaps as karmic payback for all those “grocery bag tests” he inflicted, Rice now contends with a chaotic food supply at The Midnight Mission: it’s feast one day, F.E.M.A. the next. Those chickpeas in his glazed carrot recipe come from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “The beans aren’t whole, but cracked into pieces, so they can’t be sold. They’ll end up as a food drop to a refugee camp, or with me.”

The bigger challenge Rice faces this morning, however, is on the “feast” side. As frequently happens, a vegetable grower from California’s central valley has shown up this morning. This one arrived with dozens of wooden pallets, each piled with many crates of green beans. It is not only a massive quantity, but one that’s on the verge of spoiling. Green beans can last up to two weeks after being picked, Rice explains, but he guesses these will begin to grow mold in the next thirty-six hours.

“Most of our clientele? You show them a cucumber and a zucchini, side-by-side, they wouldn’t know the difference. They’ve been raised on fast food, and when I say ‘raised,’ I mean eating at McDonald’s for three meals a day, practically their whole life. If food is not fried and heavy, they won’t touch it. It’s a very big problem, because unless I smother vegetables with cheese sauce, they won’t eat them. Not to mention, a lot of them don’t have many teeth left, so it’s hard for them to chew.”

Rice and I stared at the many pallets of green beans, stacked from floor to ceiling. It would require an ocean of cheese sauce to smother all of these.

My merry mood, however, changed immediately as I headed east on Sixth, and crossed over Los Angeles Street. In the space of a few short steps, there was a distinct change in atmosphere, as if I’d passed over an invisible line dividing affluence and poverty, or through a portal between happiness and misery. Civic boosters and real estate brokers may have dubbed this neighborhood as Central City East, but everyone else calls it “Skid Row.”

The term dates back to the 17th century, when it referred to a muddy passageway through the woods along which felled timber was hauled. This artery, especially at its shore-line terminus, was the Broadway (or “main drag”) of a logging camp; most of the bars and brothels patronized by men working in such camps were built nearby. Functioning both as a latrine and boxing ring, inevitably blood, vomit, urine and shit would mix into the mud of Skid Row. By the end of the 19th century, the name was used for any locale—from San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, to the Bowery in Lower Manhattan—where men who were down on their luck would gather.

Today, Los Angeles contains the largest population of homeless people in the United States, an estimated 58,000 people. As a result, quite a lot of downtown is nearly impassable, so congested are its sidewalks with overloaded shopping carts, garbage bags full of who-knows-what, and mysterious bundles tied with rope. There’s laundry hung to dry on chain link fences, as well as buzzing swarms of flies drawn to the dirt and decay. All is jumbled and tumbled together, as if there’s been an earthquake, or terrible fire, and thousands of people have been unexpectedly dislocated, forced to grab whatever they could, and camp here, in the open.

Flimsy and improvised as things at first appear, a closer look shows these living situations to be more or less permanent installations. Pieces of blown-out furniture (sofas, chairs, dining tables, bureaus), force pedestrians to walk in the street. Inside these outdoor “rooms,” people hang out, sprawled across filthy mattresses, sitting on plastic lawn chairs, or on upturned buckets that once held sheetrock compound. They are smoking and drinking beer; talking, laughing or dozing. This vista, of strangely relaxed despair, stretches for many blocks in all directions around The Midnight Mission, which was founded in 1914.

“For nearly a century, we’ve been a beacon of light for those with no where else to turn,” said Ryan Navales, the mission’s Public Affairs Coordinator, who gave me a tour around the facility on my first morning there. “Downtown Los Angeles has long been a magnet for drifters, and people hoping for a lucky break. There’s been this persistent idea it might happen if they came west. Families drifted out here during the Great Depression. Farmers came when they were fleeing the Dust Bowl. Veterans poured in following World War I and II, Vietnam, and now Iraq and Afghanistan.”

A third of the homeless in Los Angeles have substance abuse problems, Navales estimated. “At Midnight Mission, our focus is on them. Booze is a bigger problem than drugs. It’s cheaper, and legal, so it’s much easier to get.” He then quickly corrected himself. “We shouldn’t talk about the homeless as if they are all the same. ‘Homeless’ is an adjective, not a noun. It’s a homeless man, a homeless woman, or a homeless child. There are 58,000 homeless individuals in Los Angeles, and 58,000 different stories of how they ended up this way.” (To put this number in context, Navales tells me 58,000 people would be a near-capacity crowd at the Los Angeles Dodgers’ baseball park.)

Navales then shared his story. He comes from a small town called Pilgrim, in the Eastern High Sierra in Northern California. Though he made his living as a carpenter, he was also a “Microsoft-trained tech engineer,” with a three-bedroom house in Pasadena. But he developed a taste for alcohol, and soon graduated to heroin. “I had run amok, and was living on the streets. My family, and my parents, all reached their limits with me. I burned every bridge possible.”

Three years ago, a cousin dropped him off at the Midnight Mission; all that was left of his life was in one backpack. Fifty pounds heavier than he is now, Navales said it was even hard for him to walk, as he could only shuffle his feet along like an old man. “I was swollen up like a tick from all the alcohol in my system. I had a distended liver. I was pissing blood, and addicted to librium.”

He paused, his eyes having welled-up; Navales took a few deep breaths before continuing. “I recognized this might be my last chance. I grabbed on to what was available here, and I got busy getting sober. This place saved my ass. My life now is smaller than before, but it’s manageable.”

During our time together, Navales emphasized three things.

First, the Midnight Mission does not take any government money, but is completely funded by the donations of individuals, families and corporations. Lately, some of the biggest financial contributors are wealthy Iranians who live in the Pacific Palisades.

“They wanted to give back to the community, but there really aren’t many homeless or needy people in their neighborhood,” Navales explains, allowing himself a small grin at this understatement. (Pacific Palisades is one of the most affluent areas in the United States.) “So, three years ago, they decided to hold a Nowruz celebration here at the mission. We cook up traditional Persian food, and we close down Sixth Street, and set up tables for an open-air buffet. You’ll see what it’s like tomorrow; it’s really great!”

Second, the mission is one of America’s largest organizers of 12-step meetings for the homeless. In the three days I spent there, I was frequently asked if I’m in the “program,” or if I am a “friend of Bill’s.” They were not inquiring about my kinship with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, but Bill. W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Finally, the Midnight Mission is both non-sectarian, and non-religious. “There is no praying here, and no church,” Navales said. “You don’t have to do anything to get help, except ask for it.”

I learned some of this history from Larry Adamson, who is president and CEO of the Midnight Mission, and only the fourth director in its 100 year history. As an ice-breaker when we first met in his office, I asked how it felt to run America’s largest soup kitchen. This proved an unfortunate blunder.

“We are not a soup kitchen,” Adamson told me, his voice impatient. “We don’t serve soup. I want to banish that stereotype. Our executive chef, Rob Rice, used to work for Wolfgang Puck, so we have some very well-fed homeless people, trust me.”

What’s more, because of many donations of fresh food, Adamson estimated the average cost of these excellent meals served at The Midnight Mission is less than 14 cents each. (Later, Rob Rice will claim it is closer to 11 cents.) “But, the unexpected arrival of food each day puts major demands on Rob,” Adamson explains. “When a truck load of broccoli shows up, he has to quickly decide what to do with it.”

I think of all those about-to-go-moldy green beans.

“Which, in a funny way, brings us back to our creation a century ago,” Adamson said.

Thomas Liddecoat, or “Brother Tom,” was a broker for fruits and vegetables, who sold these perishable goods (this was before refrigeration was readily available) to “Mom and Pop” grocery stores operating along Main Street and Los Angeles Streets, two avenues that defined downtown L.A. at the beginning of the 20th century. In those years, the city’s population was growing rapidly, as was its homeless population. When Liddecoat saw how many WWI veterans, and other vagrants who were living on the edges of downtown, hungry and hopeless, he suddenly had an idea. After work, he could go back to his customers and retrieve whatever food they felt was about to spoil, and would soon throw out. Liddecoat brought this back to his house, where his wife, Mary, and he would cook it up, and serve it to homeless men—but only after they’d listened to one of Liddecoat’s sermons.

“Liddecoat was a lay preacher, of the Pentecostal faith,” Adamson recounted. “He was said to deliver a very fiery message! Not only heated, his talks were lengthy, too. By the time a meal was finally served it was usually quite late at night. Legend has it, then, people would say of Liddecoat’s operation, ‘Oh, that’s the place where you can go get dinner at midnight!’ Hoboes began to refer to the place as the ‘midnight mission’ and the name stuck.”

Intrigued by what Adamson told me, I did some more research about Liddecoat. Early accounts of his life are vague, and frequently a bit contradictory. Liddecoat eventually become quite a celebrity, and conducted many newspaper interviews. Whether because of unscrupulous journalists, or Liddecoat’s own burnishing of his past, certain stories about him which may or may not be true nonetheless became established facts over time.

Born in 1864 in England, Liddecoat immigrated to the United States, and ended up in Colorado, he said, because his father caught “gold fever.” Later in life, Liddecoat was often quoted as saying he spent his teenage years being raised by American Indians, witnessed the Wounded Knee massacre of Lakota Indians in 1890, rode with Buffalo Bill, and wild venison was his favorite meat dish. He usually completed this portion of his biography by telling of a promise he made to God. In several printed stories, Liddecoat is quoted with words that are nearly identical: “One night, when the moon and stars were shining brightly, I rode on my horse to a secluded spot and promised God I would be His worker if He would let me prosper.”

At the turn of the century, after launching a successful business of selling fruit and produce in Colorado, Liddecoat came to Los Angeles, where he expanded into a wholesale operation. Apparently God saw fit to answer Liddecoat’s horseback prayer; by the time he opened a shelter for the homeless in 1917, situated at what he called “Hell’s Half Acre” on Los Angeles Street, Liddecoat was able to pay for it with $100,000 of his own money.

Soon, he was known for carrying around specially-printed tickets in his pocket, that he would pass out to homeless people. It promised, free of charge, “one meal, bath, bed, barber, laundry, doctor visit … and salvation!” Though listed first on this ticket, in those early days, meals were pretty much an afterthought, and prepared in ways that were haphazard, at best. Food at the mission was exposed to flies and cockroaches, as well as being handled by men who were afflicted with a variety of diseases, including syphilis and tuberculosis.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Brother Tom often replied when people complained about such unsanitary conditions.

When, in 1929, the Los Angeles health department and other city agencies forced the Midnight Mission to “clean up or close up,” Brother Tom was unbowed and only grudgingly put more sanitary practices into his operation. He argued if city government couldn’t be bothered to make any other provision for these men, it was hypocritical for such charges to be levied against his kitchen. Above all, Liddecoat did not want his men to feel coddled. On the contrary, he called them “jailbirds, hopheads and drunkards” to their faces, and insisted they were wholly accountable for all the bad decisions they’d made. He also never failed to remind his listeners of how much worse off they’d be without him.

Despite, or maybe because of such tough love, the number of people showing up at the Midnight Mission continued to grow, and soon exceeded Liddecoat’s ability to pay for it himself. Seeking out deep-pocketed donors, among his earliest supporters were Harry Chandler, publisher of The Los Angeles Times, and Albert M. Johnson, an eccentric millionaire who was President of the National Life Insurance Company. Liddecoat frequently stepped into the pulpit on Sunday mornings at various L.A. churches, including Sister Aimee McPherson’s Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Being hailed as the savior of the unwanted by community leaders, he also took his show on the road as a chaplain for the United Fruit and Vegetable Association, raising awareness of the homelessness problem at produce conventions nationwide. “No man is safe and no citizen’s property is secure so long as any man is either hungry or unemployed,” he liked to say. “If a man has food, lodging and a presentable exterior, he will not turn to crime.”

As Liddecoat’s fame grew, he traveled widely across the United States, and even internationally, for the next three decades— often accompanied by his daughter, Mary. He seldom turned down a request for a photograph or interview and, with his well-rehearsed skill for telling heart-rending stories about the men of Hell’s Half-Acre, Liddecoat was always “good copy.” Appreciative members of the press returned the favor by bestowing upon him such grandiose nicknames as the “Bishop of the Underworld” and “Father of the Poor,” while the L.A. Realty Board dubbed him “the most useful citizen in L.A.”

Brother Tom Liddecoat died in 1942.

“I wish I didn’t have to use it, but we regularly get thousands of pounds donated to us. I can’t afford to buy anything else, so it’s actually our biggest source of protein.”

Rice spends a surprising amount of his food budget on flavorings to make this pink goop palatable. Each week, he uses ten pounds of coarse-ground black pepper, a similar amount of curry powder, oregano, and parsley, as well as 30 pounds of peeled garlic cloves. Listing all of this, lead him into an embittered rant on why MSC is “damn near toxic.”

Prior to the mid-20th century, he explained, a lot of meat scraps and tissue from cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys went to waste because processors had no efficient means of separating it from animal carcasses after the bulk of their meat was removed. Machines developed in the 1960s automated the process, however, which made this salvage of scraps faster and cheaper. Today, what remains of a picked-clean carcass is ground up, combining bone, bone marrow, skin, nerves, and blood vessels in addition to a miniscule amount of actual meat. What results is a substance with the consistency of cake batter, which can then be formed into meat “by-products” such as chicken nuggets, bologna, or hot dogs.

Before he can put it into spaghetti, chili or curry, Rice boils the MSC, then strains it to remove most of the excess fat. At his urging, I reluctantly reached into a pan of cooked chicken and put a teaspoon or so into my mouth. I was prepared for it to taste bad; to my surprise, though, it had little or no flavor whatsover. It was like chewing a bunch of rubber bands.

“I wish I could change the way people eat,” he said, “but these guys are very aware of their stomachs’ real estate. From 8 p.m, to 8 a.m., there is no food to be found in the mission. You and I are accustomed to going this long without eating. When so much is out of their control, though, and they’re trying to impose so many rules on themselves they’ve never known before, to have nothing to eat for that amount of time seems scary. They’d rather fill up on chili and cheese, because they think this will tide them over longer, and give them more energy.”

“A big bowl of dal [Indian lentils] and rice would taste better, fill them up more, be healthier, and cheaper to produce than chili made with mechanically-separated chicken,” he said. “But this crowd will not eat dal. They want the chili.”

Rice’s posture, normally so upright, had momentarily collapsed. His shoulders, and the corners of his mouth, were sagging downward.

“This place is dark. It demands a lot. A lot of people who come here suffer from mental illness, or have been the victims of really quite extreme abuse. I think the whole first month I worked here, I would go home crying practically every night.

“But you have to make a distinction between those who are lost, and those who are wandering,” Rice said. “If they’re lost, all you can do is show them unconditional love, and treat them as nicely as you can. For the wandering, though, it’s about letting them experience success once in a while.”

At this last thought, his mood brightened. Soon enough, he was again giving directions and orders to his kitchen staff. Owing to their limited attention spans, he’s learned it is best to assign each guy with one simple task at a time. This included me. Yesterday, I’d spent hours deep-frying pollock; now I was told to peel and dice Bermuda Onions. I worked at this for several hours, by which point I’d long since stopped weeping from the onion fumes, and could finish the job dry-eyed.

The Nowruz lunch was about to begin. There were probably 100 men and women standing just outside the kitchen, all wearing gaily colored T-shirts which announced, “Nowruz—The 2014 Iranian New Year’s Festival.”

A local bakery had donated several hundred lemon meringue pies. Each pie needed to be cut into eight pieces; each individual slice then put on to a plate. Rice demonstrated his preferred technique, severing the pie clean in half, then into quadrants, then eighths.

“Got it?” he asked.

“Got it,” I replied.

When I tried to communicate this method to a few of the Iranian women, however, the lesson didn’t go over too well. Either these ladies are perpetually on gluten-free diets, or they have chefs at their houses in the Pacific Palisades who do pie-cutting for them. For whatever reason, the prospect of making individual servings of all these pies was met with raised eyebrows and much clucking of tongues.

“They’ve got it under control,” Rice said, as he pulled me by the elbow. He wanted me to accompany him out to the loading dock of Midnight Mission to see something I might find surprising.

As we walked there, he paused to inspect a delivery of cauliflower “cores.” At some distant vegetable processing plant, there is a machine which plunges a circular blade into the underside of a head of cauliflower. This apparatus, something like a hole punch, shears off all the florets, and what’s left behind is a central stalk about the size of a soda can. Crate after crate, containing hundreds (if not thousands) of these cores now awaited Rice’s attention.

“What’s most odd about this, of course, is that up to 70-percent of all the nutrients in cauliflower is found in its stalk,” he said.

The cauliflower was not the “surprise,” though. Instead, it’s still more pallets of food just arrived from L.A. Specialty, which is The Midnight Mission’s single largest donor of food. What’s come this morning is an astounding bounty of organic produce such as broccoli, snap peas, romaine lettuce, arugula, sweet peppers, fava beans, avocados, and portobello mushrooms.

“If I had a restaurant, and you sent me this, I’d have a menu for the next few nights,” Rice said.

L.A. Speciality is one of Southern California’s most esteemed purveyors of fresh fruits and produce. All the city’s finest restaurants order from them, and most of these customers have an arrangement whereby rather than throw away what they haven’t used, L.A. Specialty trucks will haul it away and bring it over to The Midnight Mission. As such, 100 years after Tom Liddecoat got the idea to cook meals from produce his customers didn’t sell, the same strategy is still at work. I can’t decide if this is wonderful, or awful.

There’s no time to ponder this, though, as Rice needs me to get busy on cutting carrots. A couple of other guys were washing and peeling them, while I was to work my way through tub after tub, slicing away. Rice ordered me to make a “French cut,” by holding the knife at a 45 degree angle so it sliced the carrot diagonally into an oval shape. The greater surface area on each oval slice, he said, would increase the amount of its natural sugars that caramelized as it was stir-fried. This was news to me.

After cutting for an hour or so, my wrists began to tingle a bit, then ache. My knife was starting to get dull. I didn’t know where a sharpening steel might be; I wasn’t even sure this kitchen had one. Because of a blunt blade, and my somewhat dulled wits, holding the knife at a 45-degree angle began to be rather a lot of work. Gradually, I shifted the knife upwards, and began to slice perpendicularly. This was much easier. I kept at it, slicing and slicing, with carrots and the color orange filling my vision. My mind wandering, I’d lost track of time, when I suddenly noticed Rice was standing at my side.

He picked up a carrot slice, which was perfectly round, not oval.

“What happened to my French Cut?”

I was about to complain about the numbing repetition of this task. Wasn’t there something more important for me to be doing? But, I thought better of it. What if I were down on my luck, in detox from many years of drug abuse, and this skill Rob was trying to teach me might be the very thing which could get me a job, and escape from Skid Row?

“I’m sorry, Rob,” I said.

He didn’t smile and say, “Oh, that’s O.K.” Instead, he glared at me for a few long seconds and, just before walking away, repeated his earlier instructions. “Keep the knife at a 45 degree angle, OK?”

I realized Rice was giving me a second chance. Whether or not I would use this as an opportunity to experience success was completely up to me.

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Or, so I discovered when I spent time at Los Angeles Youth Network (LAYN), a constellation of homeless shelters that care for homeless adolescents and teenagers—many of whom were kicked out of their childhood homes because they are gay.

Word has begun to get out among my circle of friends that I’m researching different ways that needy people get fed. Various people have come forward with ideas and invitations. One of that particularly intrigued me was from my old pal, Hope Biller, who is on the board of Los Angeles Youth Network.

Nearly twenty years ago, Hope was my assistant at Edelman Worldwide, a global public relations agency where I then toiled on such consumer food products as Maxwell House Coffee, Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, and Nestle’s Tollhouse chocolate chip morsels. These days, she is a reality TV casting director and she lives with her husband, Ken, who’s a television producer, and their two children, Sofia and Sam, in Los Feliz, a quiet neighborhood just below Griffith Park. Sam, a seven-year-old, and Sofia, who is 10, are precociously sophisticated children; they know how to behave in first class airplane cabins, or on sound stages. What’s far more impressive, I was to discover, is that they aren’t in the least bit jaded. Instead, Sam and Sofia have open, relaxed demeanors around those who are less fortunate than they are.

A few months later, I had reasons to travel to Los Angeles and, so, I recalled Hope’s suggestion. When I telephoned, I learned that she would love some company, as Ken was in New Zealand working on a sci-fi/fantasy television series called “Legend of the Seeker,” and she was a little lonely. If I wanted to prepare a dinner at a LAYN group house in West Hollywood, she and the kids would be happy to be my sous-chefs.

This was an offer I could not refuse. Retrieving the telephone number she’d given me for the LAYN’s head of “volunteer efforts,” I gave this person a call. After I introduced myself, I explained my plan. In addition to making dinner for however many children lived at the group house, I might also provide a few cooking lessons, demonstrating how easy it was to, say, sautee spinach and garlic, or make a quick tomato sauce for pasta.

After I’d pitched this idea, there was a rather long pause.

“Don’t expect too much from these kids,” he said. “Many of them have been very brutalized by their upbringing. They are angry and closed down. It’s not like everyone sits together and eats family-style. It’s great what you want to do, but I hope you don’t think this is going to be like ‘The Brady Bunch.’”

I was surprised by his sarcasm. It is a touchy matter, this volunteering to cook for others. There appears no particularly correct way to go about it, but seemingly limitless ways to get it wrong. Perhaps it’s because making someone a meal is, quite literally, an imposition of your taste—in this case, your taste in food—onto someone else. I may prefer to think of my whipping up chicken curry or couscous as gastrophilanthropy; others, apparently like this gentleman, may consider it gastro-colonialism. Who am I to tell anyone what they should eat?

“Fine, I completely understand,” I said. “Maybe I was getting ahead of myself, with the idea of cooking lessons. I wonder, though, if you can suggest some types of food that the children especially like to eat?”

Again, there was a longish delay before he finally answered.

“No, it’s anyone’s guess what they’ll want to eat on any given night, but if they like it, they’ll eat like wolves. Especially the boys. So, if you’re confident of your cooking, I’d say you should make twice as much as you’d normally prepare.”

Not much direction to go on, but it was a start.

Over the next few days, as I began to daydream about possible menus (macaroni and cheese? Stir-Fry? Sloppy Joes?) I tried to imagine what these kids in Los Angeles would be like. I’ll admit, in my ignorance, the idea of a runaway teenager seemed somehow anachronistic, a throwback to the 1960’s. While it is true that public perception has shifted over time, and today the media is much likelier to fuel fears of “missing” or “abducted” children, or youngsters who are coerced into prostitution or “sexual trafficking,” the phenomenon of kids running away from home is still a very serious problem in America.

According to the National Runaway Switchboard, an organization based in Chicago, Illinois that maintains a toll-free number (1-800-RUNAWAY) to provide help to children who have already, or are thinking of, running away, an estimated fifteen-percent of American children will flee their homes at some point between the ages of 10 and 18. It’s also thought there may be between 1 million to 3 million runaway and homeless kids currently living on the streets in the United States.

That said, I wasn’t completely wrong in my initial impression, as a 21st-century shelter like Los Angeles Youth Network is still heavily influenced by public policy decisions made back in the 1960’s when runaway youth first became a national problem. Such, at least, is the theory of Karen M. Staller is an Associate professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

In her book, Runaways: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped Today’s Practices and Policies, (Columbia University Press, 2006), Staller explains that until the early 1960’s, there was a tendency to think of runaway kids as modern-day Huckleberry Finns. They were somewhat romantically imagined as simply “lighting out for the territory,” on a kind of youthful lark, their belongings tied up in a kerchief that dangled at the end of a stick, slung over one shoulder. However, when waves of Baby Boomers began to enter their teenaged years in the mid-1960’s, runaways began to be perceived more as part of the so-called “hippie” phenomenon. Youths bolting from their parents’ homes in unprecedented numbers, were now seen as psychologically troubled and critical of society as a whole, rather than mere “adventurers.” In response, elected officials began tinkering with the basic rules governing when, and how, to regulate America’s youth. For instance, in 1971 the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

Some of this, I knew from personal experience, as one of my older sisters ran away from our house, back in the late 1960’s. It was wintertime, and we were living on Long Island, in the suburbs of New York City. One morning, Martha went off to high school (from which she was scheduled to graduate the following spring), and that night, she failed to return home. Without leaving a note, without leaving a trace, she’d simply vanished. Nearly a half-century later, how well I recall the panic and disbelief that surrounded our house! Doubtless they knew it was a waste of time, but having to do something, on many evenings my parents drove the rest of their children into Manhattan. Dad would slowly drive around different parts of downtown, with some of us scanning the sidewalks to the left, others to the right, keeping our eyes on the look-out for Martha. We never found her.

She came back a few weeks later. It was only then that we learned she’d had a plan in the works for months. Martha hoarded all her babysitting money and high school graduations gifts, until she’s saved enough to buy a one-way airplane ticket to North Carolina, of all places, and found a room in a boarding house. One night her landlady got the story out of her and subsequently called my parents who went down to retrieve her.

While she was still missing, though, my parents, like many others like them, were fearful that Martha might even have found her way out to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Staller’s book brings us back to 1967, as the media and pop music groups of the day promoted a so-called “Summer of Love,” a phenomenon which brought thousands of runaways to California.

A counterculture group called the “Diggers” organized help for this influx of homeless young people, providing free places to sleep, free clinics, free food, and telephone help lines. When Huckleberry House opened in San Francisco, it was the first of what would become a nationwide movement of alternative and radical service providers that sheltered runaway children. Other shelters followed in the late 1960’s, such as Covenant House in New York City, Ozone House in Ann Arbor, and Looking Glass in Chicago. Considered radical at the time, these places were not part of the traditional child welfare or juvenile justice systems. Teenagers asked for help directly and were not ordered into treatment by judges or other authorities. Most of these care providers would not call parents or police against the teenager’s wishes. Ground-breaking in the 1960’s, in 2011 it is still the prevailing ethos at a place like Los Angeles Youth Network.

A few days later, someone from LAYN called me back, with a more specific food idea. At the West Hollywood group house, there was one particular girl, Cindy, who asked if someone could make chiles rellenos. As the story was told to me, it seems Cindy did especially well on a school test, and she really hoped life would somehow reward her with this dish—one she remembered her Mexican grandmother making. Now, I agree with Cindy. Chiles rellenos are delicious, but what makes them so is a very time-consuming and labor-intensive recipe. Not exactly the sort of meal you want to make for 25 kids, who I was warned, I should actually count as 50 because of their wolfish appetites. I knew better, but I immediately agreed that chiles rellenos would be a snap for me to make. No hay problema. Well, they were a goddam problem, both for me, and for poor Hope, who generously offered me the full run of her kitchen.

Any cook will tell you that some meals come together easily, nearly magically, as if an unseen hand were stirring the sauce. Others feel jinxed, like they are a disaster from the start. My chiles rellenos were in the latter category, beginning with the fact that all of Los Angeles’ best grocery store chains—Gelson’s, Von’s and Robertson’s—either did not carry, or were mysteriously sold out of, Poblano peppers. As a result, I had to scour a half-dozen hispanic grocery stores east of downtown in order to find 50 Poblanos big and plump enough to hold stuffing. Then, there was the searing and de-seeding of these peppers, making a meat stuffing, dipping the stuffed peppers in an egg white batter, and frying them till they were golden brown. Ay Dios Mio!

A lifetime ago, back when Hope was my assistant at a public relations agency, she was used to seeing me take on impossible projects, and spend inordinate amounts of time fussing over insane details like the manufacture of the “world’s biggest chocolate chip morsel,” that would be cut apart with a jackhammer at a press event. Still, I think Hope thought I’d gone a little crazy, as I brooded over a huge pot of black beans cooking on the back of her stove for parts of two days. Finally, though, the food was ready, and on a cold, rainy night of September—it felt more like an evening in Portland, Maine, than sunny Los Angeles—we loaded up Hope’s car, and she, Sofia, Sam and I drove over to West Hollywood.

As I’d been warned, what we encountered here was a pretty fearsome bunch of teenagers. We rang the bell, knocked on the door, and repeated. Ring-ring; knock-knock. Finally, a kid opened the door for us, but turned away without any greeting, and ambled back to the living room. Here, a group of maybe a dozen kids were sprawled on sofas, chairs and the floor, all watching a Vin Diesel movie on a television larger than any I’d ever seen before. They had the thing cranked to such an incredible volume, it felt as if my own body were being pummeled by each punch thrown onscreen. Thinking some super-heroic action of my own was required, I turned on my biggest, brightest smile. “Hey, you guys! We’ve brought you an incredible feast of Mexican food!”

No one said hello. No one offered to help us unpack the car. Instead, as Hope and I repeatedly struggled through the living room, hauling in foil-wrapped pans and hampers full of food, we would occasionally hear little groans of impatience when we momentarily blocked the television screen. In the kitchen, we found two boys about to dig into a cardboard box recently delivered from Pizza Hut.

I am not all that fragile—really, I’m not—but the smell of it nearly made me gag. “You guys! Don’t eat that!” I commanded. “Didn’t anyone tell you that we’re having Mexican food tonight?” They both looked at me like I was a cop, which, under the circumstances, I sort of was.

“Give me fifteen minutes, please? If you don’t like what I’ve made, you can eat the pizza, O.K.?”

Without answering, they shuffled away. They left behind their pizza, however, which I immediately threw away.

As I hurried to get things ready, I was relieved I’d cooked everything at Hope’s house, and not relied on this house’s kitchen, which I’d been assured was “professional” grade. Ha! Of the stove top’s four electric burners, only two worked. There were no pots bigger than what’s necessary to boil an egg in, and—I was later told, as a suicide prevention precaution—there were no knives whatsoever, and only plastic eating utensils. Juggling the pans between the little fire I could muster, I heated up the chiles rellenos, rice, black beans, and a zucchini, tomato and corn casserole. I put out the three sorts of salsas I’d made, with varying degree of spiciness: mild, medium, and lethal. As I’d hoped might happen, the scent of these various dishes began to waft out into the living room, and a few of the kids managed to drag themselves away from Vin Diesel long enough to pop their heads into the kitchen. I asked after Cindy. I thought she might be particularly excited to see what was going on, and would act as some sort of emissary to the others.

“She ain’t here,” a young man with a comically thick mop of black hair told me. “She, like, ran away, and no one’s, like, heard from her for, I dunno, like, a week?”

I looked at Hope, but she made a point to be gazing elsewhere.

This was discouraging. Very. But then, I got a grip. What was really discouraging was that a child like Cindy, wherever she was, had been kicked out of her own house and ended up here at LAYN. Children need to be shown love, not judgment. Well, maybe a little tough love could also do. I went out into the living room, and placed myself squarely in front of the enormous T.V.

“O.K., you guys. I know you don’t know me, but I have cooked for two days, making some really good food just for you. Will you please come into the kitchen, and at least look at it?” The sounds of cars crashing and shattering glass boomed forth from behind me. I could actually feel the backs of my thighs trembling, the vibrations were so strong.

No one moved.

“Please? I promise you, you’ll be happy you did.”

Still no one shifted position even a fraction of an inch. It was like I’d entered an opium den, and every person present was doped to the gills, reclining on a distant star.

Thinking I’d have to win them over, one by one, I wandered into another room where I saw a young man sitting next to a table above which were heat lamps. I thought he was tending a terrarium, or maybe trying to harvest bean sprouts. Nope. It was his collection of arachnids, a.k.a. spiders. I don’t know if I am unusually prone to fear and loathing of creepy-crawly things, but it took nearly all that was left of my good will to sit with this teenager, and hear him discourse on his various specimens, including tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, Trapdoor spiders, Feather-legged Spiders, Lynx Spiders and Long-Legged Spiders.

“Oh, a Daddy LongLegs! We have those back in New York!” I said, trying to get into the game. My outburst was ignored.

There are at least 50,000 species of spiders, I learned, and most have eight jointed legs, no wings, no antennae, and eight eyes that typically are arranged in two rows of four. Spiders are not particularly interested in people; they spend their entire life span capturing and eating other insects (about 2,000 in a year), thereby doing a great deal of good for our environment.

“Most spiders are killed only because they scare people, not because they are actually dangerous to humans,” the kid said, his voice doleful.

It occurred to me that there was some sort of encouraging comparison to be made between homophobia and arachnophobia. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could learn to love everyone equally, gay or straight, human or spider, eight-legged or two? But the sentiment was convoluted, and I couldn’t quite get it phrased right in my mind, so I sat silent. Finally, though, after he’d shown me how a centipede can stun a fly and then suck it in whole for later digestion, I wondered aloud if he might like to do the same to a chile relleno?

He laughed, the first hint of mirth I’d seen since entering this house. Happily, Spider-Man seemed to have some credibility around the ‘hood; when he went into the kitchen, others followed.

Well, dear readers, I want to go on record as saying that I now believe in transubstantiation. No, not the Roman Catholic dogma that believes the wafer and wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ during a communion service. Rather, what I saw in Los Angeles was equally astounding. A home-cooked meal turned a roomful of sullen and angry teenagers into a bunch of dopey, drippy, happy children.

So, a sultry Latina who had been weeping, alone, in the corner of the living room when we arrived, was now eating her apple cobbler (you didn’t know that was Cucina Mexicana?) and asking me why she could taste lemons. Her heavily-mascaraed eyes widened in amazement as I explained the concept of “zesting” to her. A very fabulous young black kid who’d looked me up and down like I was a used car when we arrived, now was all smiles, and wanting to know if I’d ever heard of The Fashion Institute of Design and Technology in New York. Actually, yes, I told him. I can see it from my office window. What did he want to know? And, there was the pudgy Mexican boy who looked like he’d attended The Hell’s Angel Preparatory School, his long, lank hair hanging down in his face so you could just about see his nose, and enough metal drilled through his ears, lips and cheeks, that a magnet would have sucked him across the room. Yet, a plate of food, or two, (or four) later, and he had Hope’s son, Sam, in his lap, tickling him, and Sam was laughing himself sick, giving as good as he got, and twisting the kid’s nose ring.

The Brady Bunch? No. But, at least for a night, this was family-style.

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