Cooking with Love for Soldiers: Making meals for over 2,000 IDF troops

Saar and Sidel each holds down a full-time job. Sidel is a medical administrator in a Maccabi clinic. Saar studied management and human resources. The company she acquired three years ago, A.A. Neiger, imports industrial equipment for Israeli manufacturers.

Together with Saar and Sidel, Shomrat Isaak, a social activist, handles marketing, using her experience and skills to make Cooking for Soldiers with Love more widely known.

The food-for-soldiers enterprise began in the first week of the war at Ma’ayan Tzvi, an urban kibbutz, population 750, adjacent to Zichron and founded in 1938.

When it appeared that the project was about to be shut down, three months into the Gaza war, Saar and her new friend Sidel took the reins, aided by Alon Shnirer, head of Zamarin, Zichron’s community center, whom Sidel has known for 45 years.

Saar: ”When I heard the project was being shut down, I couldn’t sleep. I said, ‘Please, don’t close it. Give me until Sunday. I will take it on. It’s on me! Logistics is my daily life.’”

I asked them how they first met.

Saar: “I met Idit at the Zichron community center while I was volunteering at The Association for Israel’s Soldiers, and Idit was volunteering in the previous incarnation of the project..”

Sidel: “It was like a mass of little ants in an anthill – so many volunteers who helped prepare the cartons for the reserve soldiers. Take for instance the special cakes. Galit wrapped them so beautifully that I began to call her “Shemo” [the name of a well-known Israeli bakery]. We became instant best friends forever.”

And that is not even the tip of the iceberg…

It takes a village – to feed soldiers.

The complex ecosystem that comprises Cooking with Love for Soldiers includes the volunteers who cook non-stop, deliver the food, and operate the shop that supplies the ingredients; donors, who contribute funds, in Israel and abroad, some on a monthly basis, and ingredients; the Zichron Ya’acov Council, which provides the rent-free premises, electricity, and exemption from tax; those who donated refrigerators and freezers; schoolchildren, who make drawings and loving messages to include with the food; Yad Ezer and the Rashbi Synagogue, which help transfer donations to the project; and the Beth-El Kibbutz, the Christian Zionist community of 800 in Zichron, which supports the project actively with all their hearts.

Saar: “I am in touch with the rasapim (command center sergeants-major) who provide the information: How many vegetarians, those who keep kosher, etc. I put this into an Excel spreadsheet. Then our cooks sign up and implement what is on the spreadsheet. We label everything carefully and deliver it as ordered.”

Sidel: “Logistics. Big time! We provide four categories: Meat; carbohydrates; salads; cakes and challot. No dairy. Only meat and parve. We ask our cooks to write if the food is cooked in a kosher home.”

IDF reservists assert that they don’t go hungry. There is food; it is sometimes provided as chamgashiyot [hot meals in aluminum pans]. But it is, of course, far from mother’s home cooking.

Saar, Sidel, and Isaak manage their complex system truly with love and understated skill.

Sidel: “Cooking with Love for Soldiers has a byproduct: community! We are very proud of it. We created a tight community, an army of volunteers who become ‘addicted’ to cooking for soldiers, from all walks of life, young and old. We got to make many new friends; it warms our hearts.”

There is a common thread that unites Cooking for Soldiers with Love and all the other initiatives that bring food to the soldiers. It is the community. All these initiatives are bottom-up, spontaneous, driven by good people who mobilize the resources and energy of their neighborhoods and communities.

During the Gaza war, we Israelis have rediscovered the immense power of communities. Neighbor helping neighbor; friend helping friend. Part of the cause has been the enormous vacuum created by the incompetence of many government ministries. Social services, like nature, abhor a vacuum, and volunteers spring up to fill the gaps.

There is a full-blown philosophy that describes this phenomenon. It is known as communitarianism. The late Israeli sociologist Amitai Etzioni was a key theorist.

According to Etzioni, communitarianism is centered on the communal definition of good. It stresses the role of community in social and political life and institutions. This contrasts with conservative values, focused on liberty and individual rights. The core idea is that close relationships within communities create enormous value – social capital, perhaps more important even than financial capital.

Social capital is defined as the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively. It involves a shared sense of identity, a shared understanding, shared norms, shared values, trust, cooperation, and reciprocity. Social capital produces an intangible though powerful public good, as the community unites for a common purpose.

I believe there is a profound lesson to be learned from Saar, Sidel, and Isaak, Cooking for Soldiers with Love, and all the culinary volunteers. It is this: Israel has accumulated immense social capital, springing from the cohesive nature of Jewish culture. That capital has been badly eroded by misguided, self-seeking politics following the Nov. 2, 2022 elections.

Napoleon’s alleged famous maxim is “Une armée marche à son estomac” (An army marches on its stomach).

There is no written record of Napoleon saying this; Frederick the Great of Prussia really did say it before him. Napoleon never practiced what he preached, failing miserably to feed his soldiers in campaigns in Russia and the Mideast, often forcing them to live off the land. Many think his ultimate defeat was a result of this.

The IDF, too, fights on its tummy. And to be very clear, the IDF provides quality food for its fighters. A combat soldier may consume as many as 7,000 calories daily.

As a reserve soldier during the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago, I recall eating the famed “louf” (canned meat loaf) for every meal, when it was available. Today, IDF soldiers get meat wraps, protein powders, energy gels, candies, snacks, individual soups, cookies, breakfast cereals, stews, vacuum-sealed fruits and vegetables, and yes, battle rations. But frankly, when some 350,000 reservists are called up on an emergency basis, getting supplies to each unit in the field becomes a massive challenge. Many reserve units are dispersed in the battlefield rather than at bases where there are organized kitchens.

I did some research on what Israeli and American soldiers are fed in the field. They get MREs (meal, ready-to-eat), which are individual food rations used for military personnel in combat or field conditions where other kitchen-prepared food is not available.

For American soldiers in combat – according to the US Defense Logistics Agency – MREs were designed “to sustain an individual engaged in heavy activity such as military training or during actual military operations when normal food service facilities are not available.”

A poll of US army veterans and active duty military members revealed that Chili Mac was the most coveted MRE among 24 recipes. It includes chili and macaroni, a kippered beef stick, cheese spread with jalapeños, crackers, carrot cake, Wild Berry Skittles, and a grape-flavored powdered drink mix. Not bad.

Each MRE has a three-year shelf life and provides an average of 1,250 calories — broken down as 13% protein, 36% fat, and 51% carbohydrates.

Israeli reserve soldiers get MRE’s for field rations that are mostly the same: A cardboard box with lots of cans, plastic cutlery, and nylon bags for garbage, including tuna and tuna salad (with tomatoes and chili), olives, white beans with tomato sauce, sweet corn, chocolate spread, halva, stuffed vine leaves with rice), peanuts, dried fruits, pineapple/peach preserves, hummus and chickpeas, along with white bread.

Veteran reservists recount that if you fry the tuna in its oil, it tastes like fried chicken. A few components are said by soldiers to be inedible, like the vine leaves and the hummus. The IDF has started issuing vegan MREs that include peas instead of tuna, and more hummus.

After October 7, the IDF’s budget for food has grown immensely. But the bottom line is: Soldiers, especially reservists, get a huge boost when home-cooked food is brought to them in the field.

I asked Saar and Sidel whether they can sustain their operation after more than 10 months of war.

Saar: “If the soldiers aren’t tired, then neither are we. As long as there is fighting, we will continue. It is the least we can do.”

Sidel: “Soldiers have left their jobs, their wives, their families, and give their all for their country. We are not tired – and it is the least we can do.”

I asked them what is their greatest need.

Of course – funding.

Sidel: “Sometimes we joke that we are Bobcats. [Bobcat is a compact excavator, able to go almost anywhere and do almost anything.] But often, we grit our teeth because it is very hard to raise funds.”

Let us embrace the efficacious model of Cooking for Soldiers with Love to create, expand, and enhance the social capital that for Israel, a small, embattled country, is so crucial.■