While working in the catering industry, Chef Jagger Gordon realized there was a problem with perfectly good food being thrown out and wasted.
“Being a chef and a caterer,” he tells the Toronto Sun, “it’s hard to ignore the copious amount of waste in the industry and the many people who live on the streets hungry for food. No child, woman, or family should go hungry in our community”
So, working out of his commercial kitchen, Chef Jagger begins using soon-to-be expired products to cook food for his city’s needy. All of the food being used is more than edible; it just can’t be sold at a retail level.
Chef Jagger’s little kitchen experiment is the basis for the Feed it Forward Soup Bar, Canada’s very first pay-it-forward restaurant.
To make the soup and sandwiches served at The Soup Bar, Chef Jagger scours local grocery stores for blemished products and discounted meats.
These ingredients are then transformed into delicious, filling meals for the city’s needy. Chef Jagger explains the process:
“There might be a bruise on [the food], there might be an end that’s not looking too healthy. We cut it out and we utilize the perfectly great stuff about it and provide nutritionally balanced meals.”
He also details how the not-for-profit restaurant’s system works, explaining:
“Anyone that can afford to pay anything can pay what they can, and, for every $2.50 that is donated, [it] basically buys a poker chip that allows someone to use that, [someone] who doesn’t have any money or currency.”
In Canada, $31 billion worth of food is wasted every year. In the US, that number rises to $160 billion.
“Edible food that we put into landfills can be donated, ” Jagger says. “We can feed world hunger times 3 every year.”
Since the Soup Bar’s successful opening, Chef Jagger Gordon has been busy growing 20,000 pounds of organic vegetables.
These ingredients are set to stock his next project— a Feed it Forward grocery store.
When asked about his clientele by CBC, Jagger says he gets a lot of families and single mothers, but he also gets a lot of students.
As a result, he’s also launching a project to address hunger among college kids. He will be using discarded foods to create stereotypical college student meals: a variety of frozen entrees.
Although the Feed it Forward Soup Bar is the first of its kind in Canada, it’s definitely not the first of its kind. Don’t forget to also Rosa’s Fresh Pizza in Philadelphia and Karma Kitchen with over 20 locations worldwide!
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Feed It Forward Soup BarMeet the Chef behind Canada’s first pay-what-you-can restaurant
Posted by Indie88Toronto on Thursday, 6 July 2017
