Egger sees the difference between DC Central Kitchen's approach and that of more traditional "restaurant gleaning" operations as that between pity and empowerment. Many perishable-food recovery programs seek volunteers from the affluent community and distribute gleanings as an act of charity. The workers here, in contrast, see food as the program's day-to-day concern, but jobs and lives as its long-term priority.

Located in the sprawling Community for Creative Non-Violence shelter for homeless men just a few blocks from the Capitol, DC Central Kitchen takes advantage of the shelter's 20,000-square-foot kitchen facility in return for providing 1,400 meals for shelter residents daily. It also draws most of the men for its food-service training program from the shelter, looking also to facilities for homeless women to ensure that both sexes are represented in training. An additional 1,000 meals or more daily are distributed to more than 30 other emergency-feeding programs throughout the District of Columbia and surrounding areas, and all this is accomplished with a staff of seven, working on a $250,000 annual budget.

Hilton Hunter, a trained chef with 10 years' experience in Washington restaurants including the posh Watergate Hotel, oversees the training program, which takes 10 students at a time through a 10-week course, using a curriculum devised in partnership with the Cornell School of Hotel Management. The curriculum includes practical experience preparing meals in the organization's kitchen and classroom work on cooking theory ranging from sanitation to safe use of knives and moving on to making stocks, baking and all the other skills a trained chef needs. The still-young program already boasts considerable success, with all but a few graduates having moved into restaurant jobs and kept them.

"It's hard work," said Greg Miller, a young, formerly homeless man from North Carolina who completed the program last winter and is now a line chef at J. Paul's restaurant in Washington. "It's hot. You get the hair burned off your arms, grease burns . . . and I love it. I go in, I work hard, and I'm trying to improve myself." Indeed. He's earning $8.50 an hour, working hard, and Hunter said his employers are very pleased.

"Waste is wrong," Egger said. "Everybody knows that. Be it food, money, or men and women, we can't afford to waste any of them."

(Last visit: Winter 1996)

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

Browse his book, Reinvesting In America, at Amazon.com.

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