It's good to do things where you can witness and verify what's going on, but soup kitchens are many orders of magnitude less effective than distributing insecticide-treated bednets to combat malaria, or Givewell's other recommended charities.
Or, every one of us could do something different, instead of loading all our eggs in one Red-Cross basket? Sorry. I don't see a reason for this disagreement. Anyone that donates time and/or money to help other people, whether they are on the corner of the street they are standing on right now, or literally thousands of miles away, is a good person in my book.