Kalan HooksJul 2, 2026, 09:13 AM ET
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The sun is blaring with a high of 94 degrees on a Wednesday morning. Fans worldwide are piling in for the FIFA World Cup fan fest just outside of the southside of downtown Kansas City.
While fans and volunteers enjoy the festivities in the city, a group of passionate volunteers on the other side of downtown are participating in an operation. Their goal is to ensure that needy families receive meals while practicing waste reduction of fresh food.
Pete's Garden, a nonprofit organization in Kansas City, is reducing food waste and food insecurity and helping feed families in the area with unused meals from FIFA Fan Fest, Kansas City Stadium (also known as Arrowhead Stadium) and team hotels.
Just recently, the organization collected food from Lionel Messi and Argentina's team hotel. The team stayed at the Origin Hotel along the Kansas City riverfront. According to Tamara Weber, founder and executive director of Pete's Garden, their records showed that the organization picked up donated food from Argentina's hotel on five days in June, with June 3 being the first day and June 24 the most recent. She described the food as an "Argentinian chicken dish."
"I'm like 'OK, that looks good.' We take all the food that's not served at the stadium, watch parties, team hotels, which has been really fun because we can see what the teams ate for dinner the night before," Weber told ESPN.
When Kansas City was announced as a World Cup host in 2022, Weber's mind instantly began scheming. She used the 2024 NFL draft as a mock-up of what to expect from the World Cup and decided to triple the quantity in preparation for the event which takes place every four years. In doing such, she built an operation that serves and saves thousands of families in Kansas City.
Inside the kitchen area of Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral Memorial Garden is a team of around 13 volunteers helping pack dozens of containers with high quality food. On this particular day, shrimp scampi, spaghetti and pasta are on the menu.
Weber, a Scranton, Pennsylvania, native, grew up in a home where her parents served home-cooked dinners daily. Her father, Pete Sluk -- whom the organization is inspired by, according to Weber -- started a backyard garden where he planted fresh fruits and vegetables. But Weber said that Sluk would always plant more than needed and sent her with bags of fresh vegetables to give to their neighbors.
The purpose was to not waste food. The memory stayed in Weber's mind and stuck with her through her move to Kansas City in 1998, when she began working at Hallmark.
Weber, a wife and a mother of two, carried the same routine of making homemade meals on a regular basis. But in her mind, she felt for people who might've lacked resources when it came to taking care of their children. She felt their pain with how much she was working.
"I just started feeling like zero percent, like this is so hard for me," Weber said. "I started asking myself, 'What does this feel like for a single mom who can't live on minimum wage?' You can't put a meal on the table for a couple of kids like that."
It wasn't until Weber's daughter, Grace, who was an eighth grader at Pembroke Hill School in Kansas City, took part in the social justice club at the school.
Weber decided to attend a meeting where the topic was about food waste and watched Anthony Bourdain's 2017 documentary "Wasted! The Story of Food Waste," which is an investigation on why food gets turned into scraps and ways to preserve food to prevent wasting it.
Seeing the amount of food wasted in the documentary bothered Weber. She and her daughter wanted to take action.
"As I was learning about all this food waste, I'm like 'Well, why can't it get packaged up and redistributed as a family meal?'" Weber said.
They began looking for places around Kansas City to volunteer specifically in food waste but didn't find many opportunities. Her mind shifted to her time at Hallmark, where the company's employee dining room packaged up food for employees to buy as a take home dinner. She wanted to take the idea and make something of her own that served the families in her community.
Weber created a pitch deck to Operation Breakthrough, a Kansas City nonprofit organization that specializes in assisting children and families in poverty through emergency aid and education.
Operation Breakthrough approved of Weber's pitch, and Pete's Garden got underway in 2020, until the coronavirus pandemic halted the operation.
Pete's Garden returned in 2021, partnering with the Kansas City Chiefs, Royals, Sporting Kansas City and the more recently, Kansas City Current.
John Martellaro, a frequent volunteer at Pete's Garden, said the food that comes from the sports franchises and teams is rich in quality.
"The stuff that comes in from the teams is just outrageous," Martellaro told ESPN. "What I really like is how nutrient-dense some of this food is. ... It's packing plenty of protein -- vegetables that loaded with vitamins and even though some foods have a nice amount of calories, those hungry people need those calories."
While Pete's Garden is benefiting multiple families through the World Cup, Weber plans to continue serving Kansas Citians through the operation while helping other cities set up their programs using the Pete's Garden playbook after receiving a federal grant for the program.
"What we're doing is pretty unique and now that our city is doing this kind of work, the idea is that we can develop a toolkit for other cities to use and replicate," Weber said.
Source: https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/49242532/world-cup-2026-kansas-city-petes-garden-food-distribution-argentina-lionel-messi