Our first meeting was at Vivoli Café in San Miguel de Allende. I walked in and looked for a short person with red hair (her description) and heard someone call my name. A black fedora with feathers hid the red hair, but the wave of the hand beckoned to me. Alice Foster Minton, the former head director of Feed the Hungry San Miguel, at that time 79 years old with brown eyes and peaches-and-cream skin, wore small simple diamonds in her ears, a brass and silver necklace, and black turtleneck.  

Without ever having been farther south in Mexico than Monterrey, Alice and her husband Joe sold everything in New Orleans in 1991 and moved to San Miguel de Allende, where they had good friends. Alice had managed a New Orleans hotel, a B & B, had a B & B booking service, and was the coordinator of 350 volunteers at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the city’s oldest fine art museum. She liked being president of the garden club, Patio Planters, which may have helped prepare her to enjoy working with Feed the Hungry a few years later. 

Once settled in San Miguel, the Mintons joined St. Paul’s Church and Joe became a driver for Feed the Hungry. Alice, obviously tired of volunteer work, didn’t want to be involved at first. Before long, though, people learned of her extensive volunteer work and a year or so later, under pressure from good friends and Joe – and at a cocktail party organized just for this purpose – she was convinced to take over the leadership of Feed the Hungry.  

t that time, Feed the Hungry had what were called “feeding stations” and no money. Alice says that, in retrospect, everything was very primitive. She remembers a cook and tortilla maker at a school near the railroad station, a kitchen for the elderly in Colonia San Antonio, and a dairy farm near Los Rodríguez where the poor picked up donated food in bulk.  

The board of directors as we know it today did not exist, just people who helped. The 1991 job description for Feed the Hungry, written by Mary Challis, includes a coordinator, an assistant, a secretary for thank-you notes, a schedule chief for restaurant food pick-up and delivery, a person for vegetable pick-up at El Tomate, a person for chicken oil pick-up and delivery (there was a rotisserie on Insurgentes and the owner would collect the chicken drippings to be used in the beans and rice to provide extra nourishment), and a visitation committee to check on the feeding stations. Often the volunteer in charge did all of the above.  

That’s how Alice remembers it, too. Alice remembers details like buying garbage bags to store rice and beans to keep rats and bugs out, hiring cooks, firing cooks, picking up left-over food from restaurants, and announcing Feed the Hungry’s needs every Sunday at St. Paul’s Church. Alice says, “I was the chief cook and bottle washer and it occupied every minute of my day.” I showed her a Feed the Hungry letter that listed her as treasurer; she had no memory of that, but said she did everything but drive. And she recruited. “If people didn’t help, I would take a baseball bat and crack their knees.” 

As she reflects on her seven years with Feed the Hungry – two serving as the person in charge and five more conducting fundraising auctions – she is proud of starting a kitchen in the school for students with disabilities at the end of Stirling Dickinson street, Escuela de Educación Especial, and paying the cooks all year, including summers and holidays, not just the weeks they worked. “After all, they have children!”