Better Food, Better Lives

View the September 2011 Specialty Food Magazine

Following our cover story “Chefs on a Mission” in the May issue of Specialty Food Magazine, I received an email from Chef Virginia Willis, author of Bon Appétit, Y’all! Recipes and Stories from Three Generations of Southern Cooking (Ten Speed Press, 2008) and creator of the My Southern Pantry product line, inquiring as to why we didn’t include any women chefs in the feature.

It was a fair point. Our goal was to highlight some of the standout achievements among the chef community in changing the way America eats, and chefs such as Jamie Oliver, Dan Barber, Bill Telepan and Michel Nischan certainly deserve recognition for their activism in everything from combating childhood obesity to advocating sustainable ingredient sourcing to creating nonprofits that encourage farmers’ markets to accept food stamps. But of course the field is not limited to the six chefs featured in the article. Here are just a few female chefs making enviable progress in school-lunch reform and nutrition education for the underprivileged.

• Stephanie Pearl Kimmel, founding chef and owner of Marché in Eugene, Ore., was one of 100 chefs nationwide chosen to participate in First Lady Michelle Obama’s kickoff to her Chefs Move to Schools initiative, part of a campaign to fight childhood obesity. The program pairs chefs with school districts to deliver healthy meals that meet dietary guidelines and fit within school budgets. The curriculum includes teaching children about making good food choices.
  
  
• Ann Cooper, a.k.a. The Renegade Lunch Lady, is a longtime advocate for food reform for children. She founded Food Family Farming Foundation (F3), a nonprofit working with farmers, producers and schools to create a sustainable model to transition K–12 lunch programs away from processed foods. F3 operates The Lunch Box (thelunchbox.org), a web resource that provides free recipes and community connections to support school-lunch improvements.
  
  
• Gina Keatley, CEO and director of nutrition at Nourishing NYC, a nonprofit community food program, has been recognized for her philanthropic and humanitarian work by the James Beard Foundation and American Culinary Foundation. Keatley founded Nourishing NYC in 2008 to address poor nutrition and health in New York City’s low-income neighborhoods. The organization provides meals and nutrition education throughout the city.

That leads us to celebrity chef Cat Cora, who is the founder of nonprofit Chefs for Humanity (CFH), an organization modeled after Doctors Without Borders. Through CFH, the culinary community raises funds and provides resources and hunger relief in emergencies and humanitarian crises such as the earthquake in Haiti. Cora talked about the importance of giving back in her keynote address for the 2011 sofi Awards at the Summer Fancy Food Show.

You can also learn about the people behind those sofi Award–winning products, many of whom were inspired by their own philanthropic pursuits, from raising awareness about women’s heart disease to finding gainful employment for women in African villages at foodspring.com/sofiawards. They are an excellent representation of the specialty food trade, which as a whole gave back in a record-setting way at the recent Summer Fancy Food Show in Washington, D.C., by donating 153,000 pounds of food to DC Central Kitchen—the community kitchen and job-training organization’s largest single donation in its history. More details about this historic donation can be found on specialtyfood.com/onlinehighlights. |SFM|

By Denise Purcell
Editor, Specialty Food Magazine
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