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Coming from a family of social workers, I’ve always assumed that charity should be distributed based on need, with those needing the most receiving the most. So, when a friend, Linda Miller, mentioned that, in the past three years, she’d made and then delivered lasagnas to more than a hundred strangers – in other words, people about whom she knew almost nothing – I was incredulous. I was even more taken aback when I learned that she’s far from alone. Since Lasagna Love, the organization supporting this effort, was founded in 2020, more than fifty thousand volunteers have made lasagna for about three million requesters in fifty states and four countries.
Curious about what motivated Linda, and by extension, thousands of others, I asked Linda to tell me her story. Here it is.
It’s 4:00 on a Friday afternoon and Linda Miller is standing in her immaculate Mountain View kitchen making the meat sauce and cheese layer for the 102nd Lasagna Love lasagna that she signed up to deliver, this one to a woman living in downtown San Jose. The next morning, she assembles her handiwork in a 9-by-13-inch aluminum pan, bakes it at 375 for an hour and a quarter, then gingerly places it into one of the large brown bags she has purchased for this purpose. (Standard grocery bags are too small.) She then puts the lasagna in the trunk of her white Toyota Venza and is on her way. When Linda drops off the lasagna at the woman’s modest home at 2:00 pm, the delivery time the woman requested, the lasagna is still warm.
Linda doesn’t know a lot about the requester except that she’s probably in her 70s, is on Social Security, and plans to share the lasagna with her husband. But learning the woman’s story isn’t the point. What matters to Linda is that someone requested a lasagna and she could provide it.
Requesters don’t need to explain their circumstances or meet eligibility requirements. They simply ask for a lasagna, and a volunteer, or chef in Lasagnas Love parlance, prepares and delivers it. The organization’s goals, according to their Web site, are “removing barriers to asking for help, ensuring dignity and support, and delivering kindness without judgement or qualifications.”
Personalized deliveries
When requesting a lasagna, a requester has the option of explaining why they want one. Linda reports that a little more than half of her requesters do. In those cases, Linda often personalizes their orders. When she signed up to deliver lasagna to an unhoused man living in his minivan – she notes that she made the delivery at 6 pm, after he finished work – she knew that he didn’t have a place to store a pan of lasagna, so she brought him an oversized portion along with bread, salad and dessert. When she learned that a woman had asked for a lasagna on the day of her daughter’s sixth birthday, Linda supplemented the order with a batch of homemade cookies with rainbow sprinkles. Requesters can mention dietary restrictions. Thus, Linda has made multiple veggie lasagnas and a vegan lasagna for a family with a lactose-free preschooler. And she’ll bake half a tray of lasagna if that’s what a requester asks for.
Linda uses the Lasagna Love web site to specify how far from home she’s willing to drive to make a delivery. She usually requests a radius of eight miles, which means most of her deliveries are in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara. But sometimes, when she has the “urge to bake”, and no assignments are available close to home, she accepts deliveries farther away. (While there are enough chefs in Northern Santa Clara County and Southern San Mateo County to meet the need – there are 12 chefs in Linda’s Mountain View zip code alone – there’s a backlog of almost two hundred requests in San Jose.) Once when she was willing to go farther afield, Linda agreed to make a delivery deep in East San Jose. After driving for 45 minutes, the lasagna rapidly cooling down in her trunk, Linda remembers asking herself why she’d ever agreed to that delivery. Then she spotted her recipients: a dad and his three small kids. “Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t drive to East San Jose to deliver lasagna. I drove to East San Jose to feed those three children. At that moment, it felt completely different,” Linda recalls.
Linda never asks recipients questions and rarely spends more than a minute or two chatting. But there are exceptions. Recently, a son requested a lasagna for his elderly Dad whose wife had passed away and was living alone. When Linda rang the doorbell, the dad answered in a wheelchair. He clearly wanted to chat, so she did. As Linda puts it, “He was just a really nice guy who was lonely and I could add to the kindness just by spending some time with him.”
Why this?
A retired accountant, Linda made her first Lasagna Love lasagna in 2023. The catalyst was the death of her brother Phil, at age 57. Phil suffered from mental illness starting in his mid-30s and, even though he was unable to continue to work, his condition remained stable for two decades, thanks to meds and counseling he received from the Los Angeles County Mental Health Department. But when department funds were cut and his counseling ended, Phil’s situation deteriorated; he was evicted from his home and spent the next several years in and out of jail. Linda had been out of touch with her brother for a year and a half – he didn’t have a phone so there was no way to get in touch – when she received a call from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office telling her that Phil’s body had been found behind a dumpster in a Burger King parking lot. When she got the autopsy report, she learned that, at his time of death, her six-foot brother weighed 135 pounds.
“My brother was a throwaway person. After he died, I decided I wasn’t going to buy into throwaway people, that everyone, no matter who they are, deserves dignity, which is why I’m able to suspend judgment and don’t worry about why somebody wants lasagna,” Linda says, her voice punctuated with conviction.
On occasion, though, being non-judgmental has its challenges.
Linda recounts the time her destination was a well-appointed home in an upscale neighborhood. “I walked up to the door with my lasagna thinking, ‘Okay, here I am driving my Toyota and I’m delivering to somebody with a new Mercedes in their driveway and a beautiful, big home.’ Then the homeowner answered the door. She was thin, her face drawn. Clearly, she was not well. That was my comeuppance.”
From a spiritual perspective, Linda adheres to Matthew 25:40 – “Truly I tell you, as much as you did this for one of the least of my brothers and sisters of mine, you did it for me” – viewing it as a call to service that she believes extends to everyone, regardless of their religious convictions. As Linda sees it, “We’re on this planet to take care of each other, to be the hands and feet of God, whatever your understanding of God is.”
A great weeknight lasagna
Linda says that, while her Lasagna Love lasagna isn’t a dish she’d serve at a fancy dinner party, it is a “great weeknight lasagna.” The price of ingredients for one lasagna is about $25, more than a 30 percent increase from when she started baking three years ago. But she refuses to skimp on ingredients, insisting that her meat sauce includes a pound of ground beef and half a pound of Italian sausage and that her cheese layer includes four cups of mozzarella mixed with plenty of parmesan and ricotta. But while her costs have gone up, her prep time has diminished, thanks to her adoption of Ina Garten’s lasagna hack: Instead of boiling dry lasagna noodles, she soaks them in hot water for 20 minutes.
Linda describes herself as a “collector of experiences.” She has set goals to attend performances of all 38 Shakespeare plays (She has seen all but Henry the VIII); learn more about California by visiting California’s 58 counties (She’s almost halfway to her goal); and cook her way through her favorite cookbook Love and Lemons. But, unlike these projects, she hasn’t set a goal for Lasagna Love. “I just want to keep doing it for as long as I can,” she says.
