In preparation for Thanksgiving week, Campus Kitchen hosted Turkeypalooza — its largest event of the year — last week to help provide local families with meals during the holiday season.

“It’s a wonderful Wake Forest tradition, and people who might not normally volunteer get to volunteer because they want to be festive,” Samantha Martin, one of the student coordinators of Campus Kitchen, said. “It’s a really big and fun event, and there’s tons of people because there’s tons to do all the time. It’s all hands on deck.” 

Turkeypalooza is an annual event in which Campus Kitchen volunteers prepare more than 600 meals from scratch to donate to 10 local community partners, who then distribute the meals to individuals who otherwise would not have access to holiday meals. Their community partners include Hope 2 Thrive, Youth Collaborative, NC Faith Health, LCS, Samaritan Ministries, Shalom Project, Azalea Terrace, among others. Campus Kitchen, founded in 2006, engages a network of student volunteers to prepare and deliver meals made from excess food.

This event is much more labor-intensive than Campus Kitchen’s usual work. Rather than repurposing food from Harvest Table, Wake Forest’s dining service, all of the meals are made from scratch and served in both family-style batches and individual containers. The prepared Thanksgiving meals include turkey, green beans, stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potato casserole and pumpkin cookies.

Sophomore Couriyah Stegall said that she likes having the opportunity to make the food.

“I love Turkeypalooza because there are so many more chances to actually cook,” Stegall said. “For my other shifts, we get a lot of food donated, and we just package that, but for Turkeypalooza, we’re making over 600 meals, so a lot of it has to be cooked. Today, I think we made six batches of stuffing and three batches of sweet potato casserole.” 

Co-procurement officer for Campus Kitchen and senior Isa Krebs explained that Campus Kitchen receives its largest number of volunteers for Turkeypalooza to assist with the many days of work required to prepare hundreds of home-cooked meals. 

“This is definitely the largest volunteer base I’ve seen,” Krebs said. “Usually we’ll only have one to three volunteers for a regular shift, and for [Turkeypalooza], we’ll have around 10 volunteers, so it’s a lot more engaging for the overall Wake Forest community, which is super fun. We’re getting a lot of freshmen and sophomores who haven’t been able to get involved before, so it’s a good taste for them to see what [Campus Kitchen] is all about.”

Martin also explained that volunteers have high energy, creating a fun environment in the kitchen.

“We always have a good time on our shifts,” she said. “We play music, and we have fun. It’s just a fun environment, especially when there’s people in the kitchen for hours and hours.”

Krebs explained how important it is to Campus Kitchen to help people have access to holiday meals.

“Food is such a big aspect of Thanksgiving but also any holiday,” Krebs said. “It’s really important to make sure people outside of Wake Forest in the Winston-Salem community have access to nice holiday meals.”

Stegall expressed how important it is for students to give back, particularly during the holiday season.

“Thanksgiving is the holiday to be thankful, so I think it really teaches us that we can give back in ways we don’t realize — in ways as simple as decorating the boxes that we deliver the food in or cooking a meal,” Stegall said. “Taking two hours of your day to cook for people who will enjoy these meals for dinner is a great way to connect Wake Forest to the community.”