While delivering remarks Thursday at the groundbreaking ceremony of Project Angel Food’s The Chuck Lorre Family Foundation Campus in Los Angeles, Chuck Lorre revealed he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis when he was just 22.

“When I was a young man, I was really really very ill. I was severely ill with ulcerative colitis. I weighed about 110 pounds and was told I needed a colectomy,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know where to go. I had no money, no insurance.

“I managed to find my way to the Cedars of Lebanon, which was a teaching hospital,” he continued. “I was fortunate enough to get an anesthetic-free colonoscopy in front of a classroom of students.”

He joked that the experience served as “great preparation for a lifetime in television.” 

The TV impresario praised the nonprofit for its commitment to dismantling food insecurity for adults and children affected by life-threatening illnesses. “During the pandemic, I learned about Project Angel Food,” he said. “It is a food delivery system tailored to people’s health needs. I was like, ‘I want to be a part of this because this is personal.’” 

He said his colitis was put in remission “after about six months on a wonderful nutrition program, and I’ll never forget that – it changed my life,” he said, adding, “It wasn’t Western medicine” that improved his health, but rather, “it was food.” 

Construction of the new $51 million campus — the Lorre foundation donated $10 million — is expected to begin in January and be completed by 2027. Founded in 1989 as a service for people with HIV and AIDS, Project Angel Food has served more than 17 million meals. It delivers medically tailored meals daily to 2,500 Los Angelenos.

Sheryl Lee Ralph and Jamie Lee Curtis also shared their praise for Project Angel Food at the groundbreaking. Ralph remembered her peers who were affected by the AIDS epidemic. “For so many of them, there was no help, no love, no food — there was nothing but the worst that people could show other human beings,” the “Abbott Elementary” star said.

“We’re here together because a group of people said, ‘We don’t know what to do, but we know what we need,’ which is love and food,” Curtis added. “They weren’t doctors or scientists, they weren’t going to be able to come up with a cure. They were facing the same amount of hatred and misinformation that was being spewed about a population, and they said, ‘Let’s feed them.’” 

“When we put people first is when real change happens,” said Ralph. “Everyday, Project Angel Food puts people who need help first. I don’t want us to ever forget that there was a time when people who needed help — gay people, men, women, of all different colors. It is when we consider each one of us as human beings is when change happens.” 

Ralph recalled some of the first gay men she knew who died of AIDS, including a couple who lived across the street from her apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City. She also met a man at a hospital in Harlem who had a sign on him that said, “Do not touch.” “I do not know what drew me towards him, but he looked up at me and I hugged him,” Ralph told Variety. “He literally melted on me.”

Curtis said the first persons with HIV she knew was the late Richard Frank, one of her costars on the sitcom, “Anything But Love.” “He had a makeup artist walk up to him with a baggie and in the baggie was a sponge, some powder and a hairbrush,” Curtis remembered. “And she looked at him and said, ‘I don’t have to touch you.’ I watched him go on tour with a play when he was so sick and trying to continue to do his art. He and his husband, George, died when they were 41 years old.”

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