10 Chefs Who Are Bringing a Food Revolution to America

1. Mario Batali

Home base: New York, N.Y.
Noted for: Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca, Del Posto, Otto Enoteca Pizzeria
Cause: Hunger relief
How he’s changing America: With a slew of Manhattan restaurants, regular television appearances and famous friends like Gwyneth Paltrow, Mario Batali is hands down one of America’s most visible chefs. But behind the scenes, the man in the orange Crocs is equally hard at work at the Mario Batali Foundation, which has taught low-income families about nutrition and healthy food preparation since 2008. Batali has also raised nearly $8 million in the last decade for the Food Bank for New York City, a nonprofit hunger-relief organization where he serves on the board of directors. In 2013, the Mario Batali Foundation partnered with the Food Bank for New York City to create the Community CookShop, a program that has taught more than 1,400 people at 24 food pantries and soup kitchens how to maximize their food budgets and cook nutritious meals.

2. José Andrés

Home base: Washington, D.C.
Noted for: Jaleo, Zaytinya, Minibar by José Andrés
Causes: Hunger relief, culinary training
How he’s changing America: When José Andrés moved to Washington, D.C., one of the first people he met was Robert Egger, founder of DC Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing poverty and hunger in the nation’s capital. Humbled by the group’s efforts, Andrés began helping on a number of their initiatives, including a culinary training program that teaches homeless vets and former prisoners food preparation and cooking skills so they can find jobs in the restaurant industry. In 2010, Andrés formed World Central Kitchen, which aims to replicate the success of DC Central Kitchen on an international scale by teaching vulnerable citizens how they can grow, cook and preserve their own food and become self-sustaining communities. “As chefs, we are in a position to influence how people eat and how they think about food,” Andrés says. “Yes, we cook for the few in our restaurants, but we have the power and knowledge to cook for and feed the many.”

3. Cat Cora

Home base: Santa Barbara, Calif.
Noted for: Kouzzina by Cat Cora, Cat Cora’s Kitchen
Cause: Hunger relief
How she’s changing America: In 2005, Cat Cora made history by becoming the Food Network’s first and only female Iron Chef. And yet the Mississippi-bred chef may be best known for her work as president and founder of Chefs for Humanity, an organization that aims to provide nutrition education and hunger relief around the world by rallying culinary experts to raise money for disaster-affected populations and to teach low-income communities about healthy eating habits. In 2005, Cora and fellow chefs worked with the American Red Cross to help feed victims and volunteers of Hurricane Katrina, which left a trail of destruction in her home state of Mississippi. More recently, Cora has partnered with Michelle Obama on the first lady’s Chefs Move to Schools program, which invites chefs to help eradicate the childhood obesity epidemic by creating healthy meals and menus.

4. Bill Yosses

Home base: Washington, D.C.
Noted for: White House executive pastry chef
Cause: Food literacy
How he’s changing America: Many chefs would consider a tenure in the White House to be the gig of a lifetime. Bill Yosses can claim that honor twice, as he has whipped up delicious desserts for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama as the White House executive pastry chef. This summer, Yosses will depart 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for New York City, where he plans to form a foundation to promote healthy eating habits for adults and kids alike. “There’s much talk about STEM in schools — science, technology, engineering and math,” Yosses told The New York Times. “Food knowledge should be part of a complete curriculum.” And while the White House kitchen will no longer be his domain, its hallowed halls won’t be far from his mind. Yosses’ plans are reportedly inspired in part by Michelle Obama and her White House garden, which provided ingredients for healthier desserts during his stint.

5. Michel Nischan

Home base: Fairfield, Conn.
Noted for: Wholesome Wave
Cause: Sustainable farming
How he’s changing America: Though he grew up in the Chicago suburbs, Michel Nischan spent the summers of his formative years on his grandfather’s farm in Missouri. There, he learned how to raise animals, can veggies and drive tractors. “It’s where my passion for food comes from,” Nischan says. “It’s also where I learned about the role and importance of people who produce that food.”
In 2007, Nischan co-founded Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit that partners with farmers across the country to provide underserved communities with better access to locally grown foods. Wholesome Wave is perhaps most famous for its double- value coupon program: Food stamp recipients get double the value of their government-issued food dollars if they shop at participating farmers’ markets rather than traditional grocery stores. In 2011, in an effort to lower obesity and boost health, Wholesome Wave launched its fruit and vegetable prescription program, in which doctors write patients “prescriptions” for fruits and vegetables that can be cashed in at farmers’ markets. The program was introduced in Massachusetts, Maine, California and Rhode Island (New York City adopted it in 2013).

6. Ann Cooper

Home base: Boston, Mass.
Noted for: The Lunch Box
Cause: Healthy school lunches
How she’s changing America: Ann Cooper realized there was a problem with our food culture when her own niece informed her that strawberries were grown on trees, not bushes. Since then, Cooper has become an advocate for childhood nutrition, a fight she’s led for more than 20 years. “So many of our kids don’t know where real food comes from — that it doesn’t come in plastic wrap in a box,” Cooper says. The Boston-based chef has been dubbed the “Renegade Lunch Lady” for her efforts to bring healthier foods to the public school system, having launched several nonprofits and websites in support of these initiatives, including The Lunch Box, an open-source community that provides free recipes, video cooking tutorials and other tools to families who want to eat better. In 2010, Cooper also teamed up with Michelle Obama to start Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools, an effort to bring 6,000 salad bars to school cafeterias across the country.

7. Christina Tosi

Home base: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Noted for: Momofuku Milk Bar
Cause: Immigrants
How she’s changing America: One of Christina Tosi’s earliest dreams was to own a bakery. In 2011, she checked that item off the bucket list when she became chef, owner and founder of Momofuku Milk Bar, the dessert branch of David Chang’s Momofuku restaurant group. It’s only fitting, then, that her philanthropic efforts are with an organization that also loves baking: Tosi serves on the board of Hot Bread Kitchen, a Spanish Harlem-based nonprofit that trains low-income, immigrant women in artisanal baking skills, which can help them secure management jobs within bakeries, where minority women are particularly underrepresented. (In New York City alone, just 500 of the area’s 6,000 bakers are minority women.) Founded in 2007, Hot Bread Kitchen has already helped 12 of its 39 trainees find full-time work as bakery shift managers, with plans to train 30 new participants this year.

8. David James Robinson

Home base: Columbia County, N.Y.
Noted for: “Learn How to Cook (and Eat Your Mistakes)!” DVD program
Cause: Job training for veterans
How he’s changing America: Having cooked for more than 35,000 guests in his career, including presidents, Academy Award winners and professional athletes, chef David James Robinson has a wealth of culinary knowledge to share. His DVD program “Learn How to Cook (and Eat Your Mistakes)!” offers beginner chefs lessons from food prep to chopping. A spin-off, called Culinary Command Training, is a 45-day program for vets and select active-duty soldiers eager to learn skills that would prepare them for a culinary career. The program, which takes place twice a year in Chatham, N.Y., is free for military participants and funded by donations.

9. Hugh Acheson

Home base: Athens, Ga.
Noted for: Five & Ten, The National
Cause: Food security
How he’s changing America: Hugh Acheson lives in Athens, Ga., about an hour’s drive from Atlanta, where more than half a million people live in food “deserts” —communities where citizens, the great majority of whom receive benefits from the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), live more than a mile from the nearest grocery store.
Acheson has been one of the loudest advocates for those living on SNAP, donating money to organizations that help underserved communities access nutritious foods and running cooking demos for low-income citizens who want to learn how to make the most of their food stamps. “People forget that SNAP is supposed to supplement — not serve as 100 percent of anyone’s food budget,” says Acheson, whose demos focus on how to make sustainable meals from vegetables and grains, which are considerably cheaper than meat. “I don’t want to raise a bunch of chefs in America,” he says. “I just want to raise a bunch of people with basic cooking skills so they can feed themselves.”

10. Rick Bayless

Home base: Chicago, Ill.
Noted for: Frontera Grill, Topolobampo, Xoco
Cause: Local farmers
How he’s changing America: With multiple restaurants, cookbooks and even his own PBS show dedicated to Mexican cuisine, it’s no wonder that Rick Bayless was invited by the Obamas to be the guest chef at an official state dinner in 2010 for Felipe Calderon, then president of Mexico. But he’s not letting that national attention get to his head. For decades, Bayless has helped out small farmers who supplied food to his restaurants, and in 2003 he founded the Frontera Farmer Foundation to support local Chicago farmers through grants for capital improvements; to date, the foundation has given $1.2 million to 71 farms. “They’d tell us they needed a little help with this project, with that project, and we wanted to see them thrive — not the least bit because we wanted to continue getting product from them — so we’d help them out whenever we could,” Bayless says. “And eventually we thought, ‘Hey, this is part of our mission, it’s part of what we
do, we should just make it official.’” But for Bayless, the decision to support farmers goes beyond his three Chicago restaurants. “I just didn’t want to see our food systems go completely corporate and globalized,” he says. “I wanted to eat food that was grown in the Midwest, the same way people in Mexico eat food that was grown just a few miles away…the same way we all used to do that. It’s about health, it’s about the planet’s health, it’s about flavor, it’s about stories and it’s very much about people, the farmers who make their living growing food for us to eat.”
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Michel Nischan, CEO of Wholsome Wave, has become a NationSwell Council member.

These Women Invented a Toy That Truly Includes Every Child

Toys are not created equal.
Just look down any aisle at your local Toys “R” Us. From Hot Rods to Barbie dolls, finding a toy that’s appropriate for the kid in your life is difficult enough — even more challenging if that child has special needs.
Enter Maeve Jopson and Cynthia Poon, Rhode Island School of Design grads who started Increment, a company dedicated to creating toys that fit all kids, especially children with physical impairments.
Their first product, O-Rings, includes four colorful, stackable rings of different sizes, weights and textures. Watch the video below. Kids of all abilities and ages can play with them in games from ring tosses to obstacle courses.
MORE: This Grandmother Is Helping People with Down Syndrome Gain Confidence
The O-Rings were inspired by a girl named Megan, who is blind and has other motor impairments that impact her balance, according to the company’s IndieGogo campaign. Megan had difficulty playing with toys with her seeing friends.
It’s a problem many kids with disabilities face — they want to socialize with their peers, but the proverbial playing field remains uneven. And young children may not understand how they need to change their play to include other kids who have different skill sets.
Jopson and Poon consulted children, parents, teachers and therapists, and created a toy that won Megan’s approval.
“We have seen the amazing benefit [the toys] have had on kids, families, communities, and the culture of learning in Rhode Island,” the team writes on this Awesome Foundation post. “We strive to create products that have a similar impact, and we believe in bringing inclusive play and accessibility into the heart of the massive toy market.”
The duo, recently featured by Women You Should Know, hopes to raise $30,000 to produce the first 150 sets of O-Rings. They envision eventually creating an entire line of inclusive toys.
Looks like there may be one toy that’s created equal after all.
[ph]

This College Baseball Team Steps Up to the Plate For Their Cancer-Stricken Teammate

The diagnosis of cancer can be a sudden and devastating blow — especially when it comes at such a young age and to such a healthy, active individual.
As the Associated Press reports, Ohio State freshman pitcher Zach Farmer had been feeling sick for about a week before he went to see the team doctor. He thought he had mononucleosis, but instead, a blood test found abnormalities in his blood. His diagnosis? Acute myeloid leukemia. As a result, the young man is missing the remainder of the baseball season as he undergoes treatment.
However, less than two weeks after the announcement, Zach’s team stepped up in the most incredible way in order to get their fellow Buckeye back on the mound.
MORE: Meet the Incredible Octogenarian Who Continues to Save Hundreds of Lives With Her Selfless Gesture
Led by senior captain Tim Wetzel, 37 players, two coaches, and other officials signed up to have their bone marrow tested in an effort to find a match for Zach — just in case a transplant is ever needed, the Columbus Dispatch reports.
“As soon as we learned Zach’s diagnosis, I told Coach about this,” Wetzel (who’s been on the national bone marrow registry for 18 months) told the Dispatch. “Everyone was on board with this. This puts the game of baseball into perspective. This is more about the game. Winning and losing is important, but right now Zach is in a battle for his life. We’re trying to help get him through this.”
On their day off from baseball practice, the team went to the doctor’s office to have their cheeks swabbed and to fill out the appropriate forms for the national Be the Match bone marrow registry.
As Yahoo! Sports notes, even if no team member is a compatible match for Zach, just by being on the national bone marrow program means that they could potentially help someone else in the country who’s fighting the disease.
ALSO: The Spirit of This Amazing College Student Lives On After Her Life Is Cut Short
According to the Dispatch, Farmer has undergone his first round of chemotherapy at The Ohio State James Cancer Hospital; if he goes into remission, he will become eligible for a potentially game-changing bone-marrow transplant.
 

No Lunch Left Behind: One Mother’s Moving Mission

“Don’t Deny Kids Lunch, Dowagiac Schools!”
That’s the message one Michigan mother is spreading after a school official threw out her teenage son’s meal over a $4.95 debt on his account. Even though the outstanding debt was paltry, it warranted the punishment per school policy, which denies hot lunches to students who owe any amount of money on their accounts. For Dominic Gant, a junior at Dowagiac Union High School in Dowagiac, Michigan, the incident was understandably humiliating because it happened in such a public way: “It was really embarrassing, especially in front of the whole class,” he told ABC 57.
The situation didn’t sit well with Gant’s mother, Amanda Keown, who immediately contacted school officials after she heard about her son losing his lunch. When they referred her to the school’s standing policy on outstanding debt, Keown took action on her own, paying off her son’s balance — and every other student’s lunch debt at the high school. Her check totaled around $200 and helped nearly 20 students, but for the frustrated mom, it’s about so much more than just the money.  “I realize I didn’t have to do that,” Keown said of her donation. “But I don’t want another kid going through what my son went through.”
Now, Keown is taking it one step further, starting a petition to change what she considers an unfair policy. “I want guidelines set in place for all of the Dowagiac Schools,” she writes on the petition, which has garnered nearly 20,000 signatures since Keown launched it on Monday. “No child should be denied food EVER. Under no circumstances. If there is a case where the child owes more than $10.00 then he needs to be offered a cold sandwich at the very least.”
It’s unclear whether Keown’s petition will change Dowagiac school lunch guidelines as of yet. But her actions are undoubtedly heartwarming — and will hopefully inspire other parents to take action on behalf of their kids in the future.

This Woman Proves You Don’t Have to Be A Hoodie-Wearing Male to Make It in Today’s Tech World

When Angela Benton, CEO of Black Web Media, looked around Silicon Valley, she didn’t see many faces like her own. Statistics support her observation: A survey of 150 Silicon Valley companies by the law firm Fenwick & West found that almost half of them had no female executives.
Benton would look around at the tech companies she was working for and think, “Wow, I am the only African American and the only woman in my department. It just can’t be only me!” she told Myeisha Essex of the Chicago Defender. Seeing the lack of diversity drove this 32-year-old African-American coder and entrepreneur to start Black Web 2.0 and the NewMe Accelerator.
Through Black Web 2.0, a website Benton launched along with Markus Robinson in 2007, she keeps others informed about African-Americans involved in technology and new media companies, with the goal of making people interested in these fields feel less alone. NewMe, an accelerator founded in 2011, helps women and minority entrepreneurs find the mentorship and capital needed to start new businesses. So far, NewMe has helped raise $12.9 million for the start-ups it works with.
“There are great entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily look like the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world,” Benton told Essex. “I don’t think the [tech world] is behind necessarily, I think they are working on patterns. So if everyone who is successful looks like Mark Zuckerberg, they are going to continue to fund and support more things that are like that. What a lot of people think, especially when they think about entrepreneurship, it’s very risky. When you start to talk about investors and capital, people are investing in things that are most likely to succeed. So when they are doing that they are taking notes from other things that have been successful. So it’s really like this self-perpetuating problem, at least until we really break through.”
MORE: These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected With An Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds
 

Moving to the Suburbs? 5 Ways to Survive Urban Sprawl

Living in the suburbs gets a bad rap. Many would say for good reason: People who live in the far-flung suburbs are less socially connected, less happy and not as healthy as those residing in cities. Suburbanites also have less economic opportunity and spend a bigger chunk of their income on housing and transportation (how’s that commute working for you?). As a recent survey by the nonprofit coalition Smart Growth America puts it, metro areas with “more compact, connected neighborhoods are associated with…a better quality of life for everyone in that community.”
We’ve been debating the pros and cons of suburban existence for some 60 years in the United States — ever since the term “urban sprawl” entered the popular lexicon. But if you ask Robert Bruegmann, a professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of “Sprawl: A Compact History,” suburban living is neither an American phenomenon nor a new one. Bruegmann cites evidence of people living in the suburbs during the Ming Dynasty and in ancient Rome — then, as now, sprawl was prompted by the desire for space and privacy. Bruegmann also argues that while sprawl is no perfect solution, its social and economic benefits vastly outweigh its problems.
It’s a lively and ongoing debate, well worth exploring, but meanwhile, half of the American population currently lives in the suburbs, according to the U.S. Census, either by choice or by circumstance, and they’re not likely to be heading back into the city anytime soon. So what can we do now to infuse our sprawling suburbs with the same sorts of social, psychological and economic advantages that make cities so alluring? Below are five ways to bring vibrancy to life in the ’burbs — including some advice on how to deal with the long commute.
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
[ph]
 

Back to Basics: How One Health Nonprofit is Rethinking Clinical Care

As Americans adjust to a new healthcare system, some providers are beginning to dig deeper into the social conditions that may lead a patient to seek medical treatment in the first place. They’re finding that sometimes, a prescribed antibiotic is simply not the answer.
That’s the thinking at Health Leads, a Boston-based organization that partners with healthcare institutions to provide non-medical assistance for vulnerable patients.
Why this new method of treatment? Too often, doctors end up prescribing medication, but instead of getting better, the patient actually worsens as he or she continues to live in poor conditions. The cyclical nature of this process leads to patients returning to seek more treatment, which then becomes a costly venture for hospitals. (For example, instead of giving medication to someone living in a car, what that patient may really need is access to proper housing or heat instead.) But what if doctors “prescribed” healthy food, housing or other basic needs?
MORE: The Checklist That Can Reform Healthcare
At Health Leads’s institutions, after seeing a doctor, patients are directed to meet with volunteer “advocates,” which typically are college students. These volunteers work with these patients to get them better access to public benefits and community resources. Their goal, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, is to transform the way institutions deliver health care by addressing how social factors can shape healthy living.
But the program, which connects 1,000 student volunteers with 14,000 patients and families, is keeping its focus small. Rather than expanding on a large scale, the project is partnering with just a few institutions — such as academic medical centers and for-profit hospitals — to create models for other institutions to emulate. Health Leads is also focusing on collecting data from its partnerships to further support transformation across the health care industry.
“Going small may not be glamorous,” Health Leads’s Rebecca Onie, Sarah Di Troia and Sonia Sarkar write. “But if we can couple a powerful on-the-ground demonstration with pathways to change the sector, we will have the opportunity at last to transform health care for patients, physicians, and us all.”
While addressing social conditions like public safety, economic inequality, and food security is nothing new, it’s important to see organizations like Health Leads make the connections between healthy living and health care.

Today’s Classrooms Are Now Teaching Tomorrow’s Techies

Remember the days when you were better at explaining the internal workings of an iPhone app than your 12-year-old niece was? Well, take note: Your superiority in that department is headed the way of the VCR.

As the New York Times reports, across the country, public school systems in major cities are shifting their thinking on computer programming classes, bumping them up from elective-only status to full-fledged requirements for all students.

Take Chicago. Within five years, the Windy City’s public schools plan to make computer science a prerequisite for graduation. Additionally, the district plans to offer coding classes in a quarter of its elementary and middle schools by that time as well. In New York City, the coming school year will bring 60 newly-trained teachers (across 40 schools) to impart computer programming on students.

And this tech movement doesn’t stop with just major metropolitan areas. In nine states, students can earn now core math and science credits when they sign up for computer classes.

A nonprofit called Code.org is doing its part to push the mainstreaming of basic coding classes in schools by offering free curriculums for teachers’ use. These programs game-ify the arduous task of young children learning to code by using, for example, the popular app Angry Birds in an effort to make lessons fun. To do this, the curriculums developed by Code.org — which is funded in part by big tech names like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — borrow from a visual programming language called Scratch, which was developed within MIT’s Media Lab in 2007.

So what can you learn from all this? Well, it sounds like now’s a good time to start spoiling your niece. After all, she’s going to be the one you’ll be calling for tweaks to your website in just a few short years.

These Reading Programs Are Going to the Dogs

Early readers need encouragement, not judgement. And what’s more reassuring than a wagging tail, sweet puppy dog eyes, and a rapt audience that will never utter a discouraging word?
Nothing that we can think of. And that’s exactly why innovative programs across the country are bringing man’s best friend into schools and libraries for reading lessons. The well-trained, albeit furry, audience members give kids an outlet for their newfound phonics, and the pooches — with their toddler-like need for attention — lap it up.
In Augusta, Wisconsin, the Tail Waggin’ Tutors visited Augusta Elementary School, giving children 15-minute stints to read to a pooch. “We look for every possible way to motivate kids to love to read,” reading specialist Nancy Forseth told the local Leader-Telegram. “Who doesn’t love dogs?” Clearly, most children, as some 90 kids signed up for the program, she said.
In Anchorage, Alaska, through the Pawsitive Reading Program, pets visit a local library once a month, the Anchorage Daily News reports. The kids don’t even realize they’re working and learning sometimes. “She thinks she’s helping the dogs to read,” one mom says, of her precocious tyke.
The added bonus? (Beyond the reading thing, that is.) Shy kids, and those fearful of dogs, slowly start to come out of their shell.
For both dogs and their owners, these programs are staffed solely with volunteers. But for those involved, the petting, hugs, and smiling kids are certainly payment enough.
Plus, who can resist the photo from the Kasson, Minnesota, Post-Bulletin of a kid reading the modern classic adventures of Pete the Cat to an attentive, dog-show-worthy border collie?
Certainly not us.
 

Cooking Up Change at an Illinois Prison

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll never go hungry, the old saying goes. And while it’s hard to fish while incarcerated, organizers of a new program at the Cook County Jail, hope the same general philosophy holds true for teaching a man to cook.
A 90-day pilot program, which requires three hours each day, aims to teach inmates employable kitchen skills, DNAinfo Chicago reports. The added bonus? Work ethic and food lessons that can be used throughout the participants’ lives.
This jailhouse prison kitchen remains a far cry from a chef’s prep station, however. Knives are tied down; there’s not a soufflé in sight. But inmates find the lessons revelatory. (For some of the men, the first class marked their first whiff ever of fresh basil!) Some say the basement cookery stands as their first practical job skill education. They’re not only learning nutrition facts (think: olive oil instead of a fast-food fry-up), but how to employ all of their senses as they see, touch, smell, and taste.
“In three months, I can’t do miracles,” chef and teacher Bruno Abate told DNAinfo Chicago. “My mission is to transfer to them the love of food.”
Lieutenant. D. Delitz, who oversees the program, chose 24 participants out of a pool of 70 applicants.
Cook County hosts a broad range of programs for inmates, including seminars on parenting for men who had few, if any, male role models in their lives, reports WTTW. Organizers of the so-called Alpha Parenting Course (which is getting quite a bit of attention), say they believe theirs is the first such prison-based parenting counseling sessions in the nation (a similar one was discovered on the other side of the world, in New Zealand).
“These guys are definitely street smart but something like being a father has never been passed down,” Ebenezer Amalraj, a volunteer, told WTTW. “We want them to take our lessons, pass it on and have an influence on their legacy. We want them to make a difference and break the cycle.”
No word on whether inmates overlap between cooking and parenting. But now there’s hope that as they emerge from their sentences, maybe they’ll be able to make a better life for themselves — and their families.