Another year, another 'pasta party' feeds the hungry

VINELAND — Almost faster than you can say orecchiette, five years have gone by since Dominic and Sebastian Mercado decided as a pair of young teenagers to explore community service.

The result was a food collection drive the brothers call “Dom’s Pasta Party.” Once a year, the brothers collect enough pastas and sauces to fill a box truck and its cargo stocks shelves at the Vineland Soup Kitchen, also known as Spirit & Truth Ministries.

Cash donations also are welcome, and they totaled close to $10,000 this year. An enormous boost came when someone pledged $5,000 as a match for every dollar tallied by the Mercados, including a GoFundMe solicitation.

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“This year, we probably collected the most we have out of all the years, between the number of actual (food) donations and cash donations,” Dominic Mercado said Thursday. “We filled an entire truck, as we do every year.”

The origin story for Dom’s Pasta Party starts in 2020. Dominic Mercado’s birthday was approaching, but right at that time COVID-19 was wrecking normal routines.

“So, we couldn’t have people over at the time,” he said. “But at the same time, me and my brother wanted to help the community. So, we decided to help the Vineland Soup Kitchen and collect pasta and sauce. We thought it would be an easy collection, and it kind of gave it a theme. Because we didn’t really want random stuff from people that were cleaning out their pantry.”

It helped that the Soup Kitchen, working out of a downtown church, also does a pasta dinner once a week.

Dominic, now 16, is a sophomore at Cumberland County Technical Education Center. Sebastian, now 18, since has graduated CCTEC and is a freshman at New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Friends from CCTEC are part of the crew. And this year, Miss Cumberland County Rylee Hawerton and Miss Vineland Eve Ortiz also pitched in.

This year’s food drive also included collections run at two schools, Our Lady of Mercy Academy in Newfield and Future Leaders of Tomorrow in Vineland.

Carlos Mercado, a city firefighter, said his sons would like others to adopt the food drive idea.

“It’s relatively easy,” Carolos Mercado said. “Dominic started with a little sign outside the house he still uses to this day and social media.”

Dominic Mercado said more was done this year to advertise, and it seems to have paid off.

“Originally, it was just put out on my dad’s Facebook and stuff like that (and) spread through word of mouth,” he said. “This year, we created an Instagram page where I was able to make posts about when it was, where it is.”

Five years later, Dominic Mercado sees the collections going on for a long time. And hopefully, he said, others will try their hands at it.

“We encourage everybody to support their own communities,” he said. “Collect the same things, or whatever theme or things they want to collect. And basically, just copy-and-paste our idea and put it out, so we’re helping more places than just the Vineland Soup Kitchen.”

Joe Smith is a N.E. Philly native transplanted to South Jersey 36 years ago, keeping an eye now on government in South Jersey. He is a former editor and current senior staff writer for The Daily Journal in Vineland, Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, and the Burlington County Times.

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This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Smell of success: Pasta, sauce food drive delivers again in Vineland