Post-Helene Meals
Denise Teague serves meals at Clyde Center UMC and has no plans to stop. (Photo by Andrew Marshall/The Mountaineer)
The Mountaineer | July 24, 2025
In Helene’s immediate aftermath, floodwaters lapped at Clyde Central United Methodist Church. But that just made it easy for first responders — they paddled rafts up to the church doors to deposit waterlogged and weary evacuees.
Sometime shortly after that, as the Pigeon River slowly receded, Denise Teague wandered through the doors looking to help out wherever she could. With some other dazed volunteers, she cobbled together an ad-hoc dinner for aid workers and anyone else who needed the food, and served it out of Clyde Central’s Fellowship Hall. Nine months and over 25,000 meals later, Teague has essentially never left.
She’s still slinging casseroles for anyone who needs a bite. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m., if you’ve got an empty belly, Teague and an ever changing platoon of volunteers will take you in, sit you down, and get you fed.
Single servings of pie cluster under a hand-lettered copy-paper sign reading “dessert.” The final four letters are cramped together as they near the paper’s edge. The kitchen bustles and steams and feels cramped even when there’s not enough bodies in there, as is sometimes the case. The surroundings are a little utilitarian, as fellowship halls tends to be.
But there’s fresh flowers on the tables every day. And the food is hot and as homemade as Teague and her collection of country grannies, aunties, and mamas can make it — which is to say, delicious.
“It’s a place where people can come and feel comfortable and feel invited and feel welcomed,” said Teague, who works as a finance manager. “ I don’t care who you are, what you are. I don’t care about your ethnic background, your social background, your gender identity. I don’t care. If you want to come in here and visit and sit and eat and be a part of this community, we want you here.”
Knowing where things are
Like many stories told of “the storm,” Teague’s has surreal elements that tend to surface unexpectedly.
Would you be surprised to hear that Teague’s co-cook in those early days was a chef from Asheville who lost everything to the water and just started trudging westward, eventually winding up in the Fellowship Hall of a Methodist church in Clyde?
You probably wouldn’t be — that’s just the sort of thing that happened in those drenched and muddy early days.
Their first meal, cooked the Sunday after Helene washed over Clyde, was spaghetti and peanut butter sandwiches. Half of it was prepared outside over propane stove, then the power came back on and they finished it up inside.
The next day, there were more volunteers, more refugees, and more meals to cook. And somehow, Teague ended up in charge.
“The reason I’m still here is that because on the second day, I knew where things were. And people would say, ‘where’s the pots?’ And I’d say, ‘they’re in that corner cabinet.’ ‘Well, where’s the spoons?’ ‘They’re in that drawer over there.’ And I just kept telling people where things were,” she joked.
She’s been running the show ever since.
Teague has about as much experience captaining a kitchen crew as the average person: zero. Well, she clarified, other than growing up in a big family on a farm.
But that seems to be all she needs.
Every five minutes or so during her interview, she’d pause and shout something like “don’t carry that by yourself,” or “the pineapples go on the other shelf.” She swore that nine months in, most of her regular volunteers can more or less get lunch on the table by themselves.
“I’m just a resource at this point,” she said.
But that’s like saying the sun is “just a resource” for the planets that circle it. Even when Teague’s not directly organizing the culinary chaos, you can feel her subtle gravity steering the proceedings along ordained orbits. Ensuring macaroni becomes thoroughly cheesed. Helping bruised, donated peaches undergo the subtle alchemy of cobbler.
A community of cooks
The work going on in Clyde Central’s Fellowship Hall — call it a ministry, call it a community kitchen, call it whatever you want — is the best kind of unassuming. Everybody pointed to somebody else when it came time to offer praise.
Teague rightfully noted the whole thing would fall apart without volunteers. Some are individuals working odd schedules. Some, retirees. Some, fully-formed crews from other county churches. Teague reckons 12 to 15 churches send people over every week.
Sometimes, even the people she’s feeding get up to lend a hand.
The volunteers point right back at Teague, a woman still holding down her full-time job handling accounts payable, accounts receivable, and payroll for a 17-employee company while she’s putting in eight hours a day feeding the hungry. She wakes up early, gets as much done as she can before she shows up for duty, then steals a few clandestine minutes pecking away on her laptop whenever she can throughout the day.
“Miss Denise is such a selfless person,” said Caylym Turner, a volunteer from Alabama who was in town to help Clyde residents with yard work needs. “She’s an awesome person. Any of us could testify to that.”
And everybody pointed out that none of it would be happening without food, cash, and supplies — things that come from a partnership with Haywood Christian Ministry supplemented with donations from private individuals, contributions from church-run food pantries, a donation box inside the hall, and other sources.
If the meals are going to keep coming, Teague said, the operation needs weekday volunteers and cash donations to continue. And one thing everybody agrees on is that the meals need to keep coming.
Survival mode
Meals at Clyde Central peaked at 300 a day in the weeks right after Helene. That started dropping as the months rolled on, but after the turn of the year, things changed. As other aid organizations operating in Haywood County started to close down, more and more folks started showing up at the Fellowship Hall. Daily meals rose again from 120 to 130, then 140, then 160.
There’s a battered map of Haywood hung on the wall near the entrance to the Fellowship Hall. If you feel inclined, you can place a thumb tack on the mountain, valley, or hill from which you hail. Unsurprisingly, about half the tacks are clustered in Clyde.
“ We have a lot of working poor. People who have steady jobs who were not in stable positions pre-Helene, and Helene did a number on them, and they haven’t really recovered from that. And it will be a long time before they do, financially and psychologically,” Teague said. “Then we have some very hard-hit people who lost homes, lost belongings, lost cars, that are still working diligently toward recovery. Some of the people we serve are still living in campers. Some of them don’t know how they’re going to recover. They haven’t really even started recovery. They’re still in survival mode.”
Clyde Central’s new pastor, Kelly Crissman, who’s only been at the church for a few weeks, says he has no plans to shut down the meals any time soon.
“It’s just a remarkable ministry,” he said. “I stand a hundred percent behind (Denise) and this ministry here. This is a powerful ministry. And a powerful statement to the community. And I’m so glad that we can do this.”
When your neighbor is hurting, your choices pretty much boil down to two things. Do nothing, or do something.
“ So to me, the one thing I can do is provide them meals every day,” Teague said.
And so she does. One hundred and sixty meals a day. No questions asked. Come as you are. Take what you need. Chat up a stranger, wave to a friend. Or not, it’s your choice. Nobody preaches and nobody asks about your salvation. Nobody cares who you love or how you live your life. Everybody leaves full.
It’s tonic for the body, and strong medicine for the spirit.
In Clyde, they’re serving up soul food.
This article is republished with permission from The Mountaineer, Waynesville, North Carolina.