At home now in the kitchen
Chef Cecil Morris Jr., 46, of Mobile, Ala., knows what it’s like to be on both sides of the soup kitchen line.
He was homeless and addicted to drugs and alcohol in 1992 when he entered the local Salvation Army’s adult rehab center.
After a year in the program, Morris asked the chef in charge of the kitchen to teach him how to cook. That chef gave him the skills he uses today as the culinary arts director at the Salvation Army in his community, which serves more than 400 meals daily.
Morris now teaches other unemployed people his trade. “I believe this is my calling,” he says. “I believe I was placed here for a reason. I’m a light to guys who knew me from the street. They see me now, and they see how far I’ve come.”
Across the country, many skilled chefs at homeless shelters and social-service kitchens are offering free culinary arts courses to the homeless, unemployed and underemployed. Most of the chefs teach students the ABCs of working in a professional kitchen – everything from knife skills to sanitation to making soups and sauces. The goal: to help lift people out of poverty and get them back on their feet.
Although there is no official tally on the number of trained chefs working full time to serve the needy, there may be as many as 500, and an increasing number of them are offering culinary training to unemployed and underemployed clients, says chef Jeff Bacon, 42, of Winston-Salem, N.C. He is on the board of directors for the American Culinary Federation, an organization of professional chefs and cooks.
Sometimes the chefs are volunteers who become employees, and some chefs are “rebounding” from their own problems and want to give back, Bacon says. That’s what happened to him.
Bacon spent three years in prison for drug-related offenses, then turned his life around and earned a bachelor’s degree in nutrition and food service management. He’s now executive chef of the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina. He’s in charge of the preparation of 14,000 meals a month for various shelters and nonprofit agencies and teaches a 10-week free culinary arts course.
“God saved me for a reason from the mess I got into, and I would be greatly remiss if I didn’t give that back to folks,” he says.
He says placing his students in the food service industry isn’t always easy because many of them have criminal records and poor work history. At the end of their first year in their cooking jobs, about 65 percent are still employed, which he says is a commendable number.
It wouldn’t be possible to do all this if it were merely a matter of “human function,” he says. “It’s divine intervention, every class.”
Nationwide, other professional chefs are teaching cooking skills to the unemployed:
Chef Marianne Ali, 52, a former heroin addict, is the director of culinary job training for D.C. Central Kitchen in Washington, one of the first community kitchens to offer culinary classes. She and her staff teach a 12-week course four times a year. About 500 students have completed the program over the past 16 years.
Ali says about 80 to 90 people apply for the 25 slots offered for each course, and many of them are just out of prison or in long-term substance-abuse programs. Candidates go through an initial interview, drug screening and a three-day trial period to see if they are a good match for the program. Those who do the best are often those who have a place to live and have support from social workers, probation officers or case managers, she says.
Some students struggle with learning the skills, she says. “People come from different levels of educational background. A lot of them have a history of substance abuse, so retaining information is a huge challenge. We do a lot of repetition.”
Besides cooking classes, the students go to sessions that teach “empowerment” and job searching skills, she says.
Chef Patti Beard, 55, left a well-paying job at a culinary arts school to become the executive training instructor at Clara White Mission Training Center in Jacksonville. She oversees meal preparation for 400 to 500 people a day and teaches culinary arts classes.
Some students start the course believing they know how to cook already, she says, but they quickly realize how much they have to learn. Most have no idea how to make a sauce or soup from scratch. They are amazed at the difference in taste between homemade soups and canned or packaged products, she says.
An important part of the class is teaching proper sanitation and hygiene. “We emphasize that they have to bathe daily. They have to wash their hands. We have them wear gloves.”
Beard can relate to her students because she came close to being homeless herself when her bed-and-breakfast business went belly-up after 9/11. “I know how it feels to lose almost everything you’ve ever worked for.”
She also understands the sense of satisfaction students receive from their work. “It gives them a sense of accomplishment to turn a piece of raw meat into a fabulous-looking meal.”
Not everyone succeeds after completing the course. “A lot of them aren’t ready to change their lives yet, and they fall back on their old habits,” she says.
But Beard has seen major transformations. “I’ve had men come out of prison who have done nothingbut been in prison their adult lives, and now they are working and being productive. It has changed many people’s lives.”
Chef Anthony Pardi, 55, who was once the chef of an exclusive restaurant in Silicon Valley and owned his own restaurant in Palo Alto, is now in charge of the Salvation Army’s Central Kitchen in San Francisco.
His meals, which include Thai coconut red curry chicken with jasmine rice, and ginger pepper sauteed beef, are prepared at one location and distributed to the Salvation Army corps around the city to be served to 450 home-bound people and low-income seniors every day. Pardi also offers cooking courses to about half a dozen unemployed people at a time.
His students work hard in the on-the-job training program. “Every day there are a lot of vegetables that have to be washed and sliced and diced,” he says. “It’s 200 pounds of carrots one day, and 100 to 150 pounds of onions that need to be peeled and sliced the next. Chicken or stew meat has to be cut up. We try to teach them basic cookery techniques. Today I was showing them how to make pickles.”
Pardi, who took a big pay cut to take the job, has no doubts about his decision. “This is a feel-good job,” he says. “It’s rewarding to hear that people are eating and enjoying the food. These are people who could probably not even afford to eat in any of the restaurants I’ve worked in.”
Timothy Tucker, 33, who has a culinary arts degree and used to work at a five-star restaurant, serves 400 meals a day at the Salvation Army’s Center of Hope homeless shelter in Louisville, and teaches a 10-week culinary training course.
Cooking is “long, hard work,” Tucker says. “It’s very demanding, very stressful. But for the ones who can handle it, there is a great career ahead of them.”
His goal is to help students become competent line cooks so they have the basic skills to survive in a fast-paced restaurant. If they can survive that, they may have the ability to become a chef, he says.
Tucker and his small staff, volunteers and cooking students, serve healthful meals made from scratch, everything from baked chicken served with fresh vegetables to lasagna loaded with veggies from the organic garden on the site.
“What we do is perform small miracles every day,” he says.
Waking up to the joys of life
Morris, the chef at the Salvation Army Mobile Area Command, has come a long way from his homeless days. He has won several local competitions and an award from Food Network star Paula Deen for his barbecue ribs.
But it’s his past that ties him to the present.
“People come in and I know how they are feeling - the despair. It’s rough when you are on drugs and alcohol and have nothing to turn to.”
He says it’s rewarding to teach people to cook and help them turn their lives around.
“It’s a joy to be part of a person waking up,” he says. “I can’t imagine where I’d be if I hadn’t woken up, if I had been asleep all my life.
“Each day that I rise out of the bed, I thank God, and I know he is using me as tool. Society had given up me, but he had never given up on me.”
