Below the Surface: Cooking for a Cause
by Jessica Carpinone, Owner, Bread By Us
Sunday March 15th, 2020 was a day that I will remember for a very long time. After a really intense day of serving panicked customers attempting to stockpile bread while my colleagues baked, served, and sanitized seemingly all at the same time, 4 of us sat down exhausted. Given the levels of anxiety within myself and the team, I knew today would be the last day we served the public for a while. We needed to make some tough decisions and I needed some of my trusted staff to help me do that.
During that round-table with a few staff members, there was a consensus that business as usual was not going to be possible for a while. And in true form, barely missing a beat, one of my staff members piped up and said “What about all of our Suspended[i] customers? Unsurprisingly, we admitted that we all shared this same concern. We were deeply concerned for our clients who depend on goodwill. Where would they go? Would they be ok?
Within about 10 minutes we had a plan. We would call the Parkdale Food Centre and ask them if they could accept/handle a continuous supply of bread. We would fundraise through community support. We felt good about this allocation of resources. We instinctively knew that the pressure on the Food Centre would likely increase in the coming days. We knew this was a crisis, and we knew we had the tools to help. We knew we could rise to the occasion.
All told, our fundraiser raised over 17K within a few weeks. We have sent thousands of loaves of bread to the Parkdale Food Centre, who have distributed it to emergency food cupboards and shelters across the city. This partnership was so successful and important, that we have committed to continue it through until the end of August 2020. We are consciously deciding to continue with this initiative for a couple more months rather than fully re-open. I’d hoped to share some of the reasons why in this piece.
The story about our fundraiser and our efforts isn’t just about what we’ve given. In fact, I wanted to share what this venture has given me. About 2 weeks into the pandemic, I started to feel a shift in my mood that I honestly have not felt since I first stepped into a professional kitchen back in 2011. The feeling that my job matters—really matters. I’ve always known this deep down, but I rarely feel it as a result of my actual work. I come from a very food-centric culture, where food is not just nutrition. It is medicine. It’s also a celebration. A ritual. It is what you give to families who are grieving a loss. It is the centre of life. It is deeply ingrained.
I entered into this field at a time where the act of making food was healing me. It was a difficult period in my personal life and making food for people gave me a renewed sense of purpose, so I decided to ditch a career path after years of studying biology, and jump into the world of professional cooking & baking. “Cooking for a Cause” has allowed me to return to baking, not as a form of commerce or as a means to make a living, but to help people in a crisis. It has lifted my spirits and allowed me to reconnect to a sense of purpose. It reminded me that food is fundamentally not a commodity. I felt something inside of me start to heal.
Other cooks and bakers who have since joined Cooking for a Cause or other similar initiatives, have said the same thing. That cooking outside of the apparatus of consumer capitalism, even if for a brief moment, has affected them emotionally. It has made them re-evaluate what they want for their careers, and their workplaces. If our industry is literally crumbling before our eyes, but our need and desire to feed is ever-present (not to mention the wealth of infrastructure and expertise), how can we re-imagine the food industry to make it more accessible, secure, and nourishing in a reciprocal sense?
These are some of the questions that my peers and I are pondering deeply now. Many of us have been catapulted into conversations and reflections on food security. We are wondering how we can extend the element of community service into permanence. How can we re-imagine our role within society from serving part of it, to serving all of it? What are the hurdles to achieving a better balance and how can we dismantle them?
The answers to all these questions are bubbling up inside our imaginations, but I can tell you that many of my conscientious peers are also some of the most creative people I know. You can rest assured that we will see some interesting re-imaginings of our industry in the coming years, starting today.
[i] Our “Pay-it-forward” program, aka “Suspended” program has allowed us to serve low-income members of the community who enjoy our products free of charge thanks to generous contributions from our paying customers. We have come to know many of our neighbours this way and they are as valuable to us as any paying customer. They were in this community before we were. It is as much theirs as it is ours, and we believe that they deserve to enjoy the fruits of our labour as much as anyone.
