Yolanda Price was 41 years old, recently divorced, and $3,000 away from losing her apartment when she backed her cousin's borrowed SUV up to a hospital loading dock at 6 a.m. and started selling red beans and rice out of a portable steam table.
That was April 2020. The city of New Orleans had just shut down. Yolanda's catering business — built over a decade of church suppers and Mardi Gras parties — had collapsed overnight. Every booking for the next four months canceled in a single weekend.