“I didn’t know nothing about goat cheese before, but it’s pretty good, you know,” said Hicks, 23. “I’ve tried a lot of new things since I’ve been here.”
He was surrounded by people trying new things — being sober at work, showing up on time, getting a grip on their anger or shyness.
Marvin Blackweasel, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe, stood over an industrial mixer, dumping thyme, tarragon, parsley and chives into the fresh cheese — learning to cook after decades of alcoholism. He lost a landscaping job nearly three years ago, and at one point was living between a retaining wall and a cluster of trees in West Seattle.
At a metal table nearby, Andy Osterman laid a ruler beside a rectangle of chilled fennel crust and cut it in a precise grid for the entree — one square for each 4-ounce pork medallion. Osterman, 41, has struggled with a bad temper and a domestic violence conviction, and said he’s starting over after becoming a victim of the recession. He was laid off by a moving company and found himself unable to afford the room he was renting in a friend’s house.
Double-checking their work was FareStart staff chef Sam Clinton, who had once himself been homeless after blowing a promising culinary career and swanky condo on a cocaine habit.
“The students here keep me grounded,” he said. “If you want to be sober, you need to be with people who want to be sober.”
Since it was founded in the early 1990s, FareStart has helped thousands of troubled and homeless people by training them to work in the food industry. Its students have cooked millions of meals delivered to shelters, senior centers and daycares along the way. Now, with its profile raised this year by a James Beard Foundation Humanitarian Award, the program is expanding its influence by creating a network for like-minded programs across the country.
From traditional soup kitchens to programs like celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s three Fifteen restaurants, which train at-risk youngsters to be chefs, food has long been a vehicle for improving people’s lives. But FareStart and others in its new network, called Catalyst Kitchens, take it a step further, based on the powerful notion that they can accomplish three goals at once: feeding hungry people, providing housing and other support to those on the margins of society, and giving people the skills they need to lift themselves out of poverty.
Launched this year following a pilot project, Catalyst has 20 members, including Chicago’s Inspiration Corporation and Washington’s D.C. Central Kitchen. Some, such as Liberty’s Kitchen in New Orleans and Life’s Kitchen in Boise, Idaho, have created or expanded their programs based on input from Catalyst. Benefits for the member organizations can include discounted or free items from Catalyst sponsors, including job postings on Monster.com, cut-rate Starbucks products and culinary training videos from rouxbe.com. Catalyst also evaluates the organizations and gives them suggestions.