Post-Helene, Clyde church still serving free meals
(From left) Brant Grant, Jesse Young, Denise Teague, Amanda Teague and Jeana Brown serve meals at Clyde United Methodist Church.
Lily Levin photo
Accessorized with purple-rimmed glasses, dangly beaded earrings and a well-worn Café Du Monde apron, Denise Teague brings the humility and unwavering tenacity needed to sustain Clyde United Methodist Church’s community kitchen since the earliest days following Hurricane Helene.
Day in and day out, Teague — often alongside her daughter, Amanda, and church groups or other community members — prepares and serves meals, loads and washes dishes and does the heavy labor of keeping this entirely volunteer-run enterprise afloat.
Teague runs a regional engineering firm with her husband and works as its finance manager. She didn’t have much work in the immediate weeks following the hurricane; her clients were also recovering from the storm. But as she spent more time at the CUMC kitchen, Teague and her husband began discussing transitioning her out of the finance role. She’s currently in that process.
Teague said working in the kitchen feels like what she was “called to do.”
She also recognizes that one year after Helene, local need continues, but there are few rplaces to turn.
The Canton Community Kitchen flooded during the storm and has not announced plans to reopen. Instead, the Pathways food truck serves meals — free of cost or sliding scale — once per week at its former location.
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Then there’s the CUMC meal service, open nearly every day and serving hot food buffet-style, both dine-in and to-go. Other than these services, Teague said, “there’s not another organization that’s feeding people [meals] currently in Clyde and in Canton.”
Kathy Garren accounts for one of the 173 meals the CUMC kitchen distributes, on average, between its 9 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. operating hours, no questions asked. She tries to visit as much as possible for a free plate.
“Sometimes I don’t get down here, but I’m here about every day … I’m on disability. I don’t get that much [from disability services],” Garren said.
Rather than taking her food to-go, Garren’s chosen to eat in the “dining room,” otherwise known as the church’s fellowship hall. Every table in the hall has a tablecloth and centerpiece: a small vase filled with colorful flowers. According to Teague, it’s all part of an effort to make the place seem a little more like home.
Volunteers at the kitchen even brought out reusable dishes for anyone dining in — in place of throwaway plates and silverware — as soon as CUMC had potable water.
“That provided the feeling of, ‘This is stable. This is steady,’” Teague said.
There’s also the community built when people gather to eat.
“I know most of [the people that] comes here, like Richard,” Garren said, pointing at a man making friendly conversation at an adjacent table.
Garren added that the space is an important social outlet for those who might not have anyone to talk to, like unhoused individuals. Many Clyde residents had their homes washed away during Helene. And not all have since recovered.
“You drive down the street and everything is perfectly normal, and then you go on a back street back there, and there are people living in half houses,” Teague told The Smoky Mountain News.
“I’ve never seen it this bad [as during Helene]… But this place has been a blessing,” Garren said.
CUMC origin story
Teague said CUMC initially served as a drop-off site for Hurricane Helene water rescues. The rescued person would stay at the church awaiting their transfer to a Red Cross facility. At the height of the flooding, Swiftwater Rescue boats arrived at the top of the church’s front flight of steps. All at the church were stranded by that point, a condition that, luckily, didn’t last.
“The thing about mountain waters: they come in fast, and they leave fast,” Teague said.
The church quickly became a depository for all kinds of supplies, so volunteers set up a distribution site — sans water and electricity — beginning that Saturday during the storm.
Teague said that though she’s not a member of the CUMC congregation, she leads a Girl Scout Troop there. Having heard about greater need in the Clyde area, early that Sunday, she and her husband set off for the church.
CUMC had another new visitor that day: an Asheville-based chef. The chef’s apartment had been destroyed, and his restaurant had been destroyed, and things were chaotic in Asheville.
“So he started walking west, and he walked all the way here,” Teague said.
The church still had no electricity, but there was one propane stove, and the chef was eager to help. Volunteers made spaghetti and sandwiches that afternoon, Teague recalled.
But CUMC wasn’t done receiving guests. Along came the firefighters — whose neighboring command center had been badly damaged — seeking a place to stay.
“They moved in … They had their command center right outside this [fellowship hall] door,” Teague said, adding that the firefighters brought the internet with them. Another perk: because first responders were prioritized by the power grid, the church got electricity on Sunday afternoon.
“We started being able to cook, and from there, it just happened,” Teague said.
Folks came to help from churches all over the area, and by Monday, she said, “there were probably 15 volunteers.”
Denise Teague has been serving food at the church ever since.
One year later
Countless groups jumped in to help with flood recovery during the few months after Helene, so Teague said at first, the kitchen sustained 100 meals per day. This effort was aided by a string of connections that led all the way to Raleigh and Big Ed’s restaurant.
“I could order anything I needed to through the restaurant, and it would be shipped here, and they would pay for it from October until January,” Teague recounted.
Demand, however, began increasing as early as February — at an average of 10 meals per month.
“We’re doing probably about 170 [meals] right now. Yesterday, we served 195. We’ve had some days where we’ve hit over 200 in August,” she said.
Now, the majority of CUMC food is supplied by the Haywood Christian Ministries “waste stream,” which Teague described as “right before it goes to the farmers to feed their pigs.”
The contents of the “waste stream” depend on what is donated to HCM — and what it gets from MANNA Foodbank. Sometimes it’s cakes from Ingles or Walmart. Sometimes it’s potatoes and beef broth. Teague said she uses donated funds mostly to buy dairy products, to-go products, and sugar.
“Sugar is never donated,” she said with a chuckle.
As for volunteers, the CUMC kitchen prefers to have four or more present at any given time, a benchmark easily met throughout the summer with frequent visits from travelling church youth groups. Now that school is back in session, that help is less frequent.
Other groups still send staff Teague said, but she described one of the kitchen’s largest challenges as “coordinating volunteers and getting enough volunteers to be able to sustain [it],” especially as there are no paid positions. Securing future funding is also a work in progress.
“There are still some funds available, and we’re looking at grant funds and what will happen next,” she said.
Still, Teague isn’t sure what the kitchen looks like long-term. Even her own commitment to working there has been an in-the-moment decision.
“You asked, ‘When did I decide [to keep working here]?’ Teague told SMN. “Well, they would go, ‘We’re gonna stay open another month. Are you okay with that?’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I could do that.’”
