Soup & Bread 2019

Tis the season — to start planning for Soup & Bread. Now in our eleventh year (!), we return to the Hideout on Wednesday, January 2, for another thirteen weeks of soup to warm your hungry, chilled, bedraggled soul. And as ever we want YOU to join us on the soup line.

As ever, we’ll be in the cozy back room of the Hideout all winter. As ever, we will have bread from Publican Quality Bread and other treats donated from local bakers. As ever, kids are welcome if they’re with a parent or guardian. As ever it’s all pay what you can — give one dollar or one hundred, you’re still welcome to join us and fill your bowl. And as ever, your donations will be passed on to our network of neighborhood food pantries and hunger relief organizations.

But while, to paraphrase French critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr and 80s hair-metal band Cinderella, the more things change the more they stay the same, we do have some changes under our hood.

• Do you want to make soup? Great! We can showcase six to eight cooks each week; if you’d like to bring your soup skills to the table, please read this FAQ and then SIGN UP ON THIS GOOGLE DOC. Of course, if you have questions, contact us (as ever) at soupnbread10@gmail.com.
• We no longer have fiscal sponsorship thru the Social Good Fund. It’s not them — they were great! — but we decided that given our minimal overhead and our even more minimal fundraising abilities, the administrative apparatus they offered just wasn’t necessary. If you would like to help defray some of our costs with a donation to Soup & Bread, you can do so via PayPal here, and we will shower you with gratitude – but not an accompanying tax deduction. For some of you that may not matter; for others, we’re sorry and we super appreciate all you’ve been able to do for us in the past!
• You may have heard rumblings about threats to the Hideout from the looming Lincoln Yards development. Well, it’s all true. Most alarming: there has been a proposal made to designate our “blighted” area a tax-increment financing (TIF) district, which would (crudely) channel your tax dollars into the pockets of mega-developer Sterling Bay and mega-entertainment conglomerate Live Nation (aka Rahm’s brother Ari Emanuel). Hideout staff and supporters have been organizing to urge the city council to hold off on all decision making about the TIF and other Lincoln Yard-related development until after the city election at the end of February. More about that can be found here at #DELAYTHETIF. The next community meeting is Thursday, Nov. 29 at 6 pm. We would love to see you there.
• On a lighter note, hey we have an Instagram account now! Follow us at @soupbreadchi. That’s also our Twitter handle, btw. And on Facebook (bleh) we are Soup & Bread: Chicago.

I had planned to wrap things up here with a few thoughts about the ever-more-critical practice of sharing food and community in ever-more-perilous times. But I’ll save it for later as this is so long already. In short: we miss you, we can’t wait to see you in January. Join us; together we are greater than the sum of our humble, stumbling parts.

Soup & Bread
Thanksgiving 2018

PS: We will be selling Soup & Bread Cookbooks at a handful of holiday markets this year; see our online calendar for details!