Qualcomm Stadium was quickly filling up with food this afternoon as local restaurants and food banks heeded the calls for meals for displaced San Diegans.
While I was there this afternoon, volunteers were piling food on tables to serve the lines of hungry people. I saw deliveries from Baja Fresh, Jamba Juice, Starbucks, Einstein Bros. and others — burgers, pizza, spaghetti. And there was a huge wall of canned vegetables like corn and carrots.
I talked to one guy who was loving the food: Robert Mann, displaced with his wife, Eunice, from Rancho Bernardo to the stadium early this morning.
“They been feeding us crazy!” Mann told me. “I’ve had candy, water, a hot dog — I just saw they brought a bunch more Italian food, pizza and stuff. It’s fantastic.”
There was so much food already there that some vendors were turning around to find other places to give. I ran into Darryl Charles, Sr., in the security office at the stadium. Charles is the owner of the Chicken Shack, that mobile fried chicken restaurant we profiled in the People at Work series earlier this month. I thought I might run into Charles today — he’d told me when we did that story that he rounded up his truck and took chicken out to the firefighters in the Cedar Fire a few years ago.
Charles said he came to the stadium to see if they needed more food, but when he saw how much was already there, he was about to go out to one of the fire fronts instead.