Serving Meals on Two Wheels

Group rolls with idea of carrying food on bicycles to homebound seniors

By Steve Law

The Portland Tribune, Aug 6, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Shari Shanks cruises back to the downtown Loaves & Fishes as a volunteer delivering Meals on Wheels to homebound seniors. She led a campaign to create a Meals on Two Wheels program here, and raised money to buy several bike trailers.

Leafing through Bicycling magazine several months ago, Shari Shanks read about bicyclists in Austin, Texas, delivering hot meals to homebound seniors by hauling coolers loaded on bike trailers.

They call it Meals on Two Wheels.

“After I read that, I thought, ‘Why doesn’t Portland have that?’ ” says Shanks, 42, a bike commuter for two decades.

In the space of a few months, Portland’s Meals on Two Wheels program was rolling, and soon surpassed Austin’s in size and scope.

Shanks, who lives in Northeast Portland, had never volunteered for the gas-powered version of the Meals on Wheels program. But the avid bicyclist contacted Loaves and Fishes, the nonprofit that operates 31 Wheels on Meals distribution centers scattered around the Portland area. She was soon working out logistics and raising money to buy bike trailers. The program officially launched in May, and now has at least 15 bike trailers and designated bike-delivery routes from 20 locales.

Every Thursday, Shanks or another member of her eight-person team of Con-Way Transportation Inc. employees pedals from their Northwest Portland offices to the downtown Elm Court Loaves and Fishes, on Southwest 11th Avenue and Main Street.

For last week’s shift, spaghetti marinara, nectarines and other foods were packed into two coolers – one for hot lunches and one for cold meals to be eaten later. The coolers were Bungee-corded onto a flatbed Burley bike trailer. Then the bicyclist hit the streets, while other volunteers loaded coolers into car trunks or took off on walking routes with hand carts.

Shanks delivers meals for eight to 12 seniors, mostly living in single-room-occupancy apartments and hotels.

“A lot of these people, you’re the only person they’ll chat with all day,” she says.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am with the bicycling” option, says Robert Bradley, program coordinator at Elm Court, while unloading hot meals from the stove.

Meals on Two Wheels has helped Loaves and Fishes recruit a new crop of younger volunteers, he says, and many of them had never heard of the meal-delivery service before.

By using bicycles, the program can serve more people, Bradley says, because in many cases that’s faster than using cars or walking downtown. As message-delivery services discovered long ago, bicyclists can distribute packages downtown faster than a motorist, in part because they don’t have the hassle of finding parking spaces.

The bicyclists also save Loaves and Fishes the cost of buying parking permits.

Concept tried before

Bicycling magazine credited Austin with launching the nation’s first Meals on Wheels program using bicycles, after that program started last September.

However, some enterprising Portlanders had been doing it on their own initiative before that. Retired teacher John Carpenter rigged his own bike trailer in 2004 to deliver Meals on Wheels out of East Portland’s Loaves and Fishes program. Rhoda Moore had rigged saddle bags and a trailer to deliver meals in North Portland. A team of New Seasons Market employees had delivered by bike near their store in Northeast Portland.

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