Jeff Bacon has worked in kitchens his entire life, but it was only after a brush with the law that he realized food could change lives. “I ended up mixed up with drugs and alcohol, running with a wild crowd, losing job after job … I was great at what I did, but I wasn’t a very good person,” Bacon says.
After serving two years in prison for drug possession and resisting arrest, Bacon says he experienced a spiritual awakening. “I firmly, firmly heard from God, ‘This is not what you’re supposed to be doing with your life. You need to do something more, and you need to give back the second chance that you got.’”
Bacon wanted to use his passion for food to give back to the community of Winston-Salem, N.C., where one in seven people struggles with hunger. After years of pitching the idea of a culinary training school, Bacon was finally able to launch Providence Culinary Training Program through a partnership with the Second Harvest Food Bank.
The program trains people in all aspects of food service, and students prepare meals for local community members in need. “It’s not the food scarcity and the food insecurity, though that is a crushing and urgent and acute problem… but it’s the root causes,” says Bacon. “[It’s] the root causes of poverty, the inequalities of our society — we’re not just ill-prepared to deal with them, we’re ill-prepared to even discuss them intelligently.”
Through the Providence program, students receive 12 weeks of culinary training, as well as connections in the food industry and opportunities for long-term internships and jobs. Many of the participants enter the program facing obstacles to stable employment, such as a criminal background or a lack of higher education. But after completing their training, 87 percent of graduates retain steady employment one year later.
Watch the video above to learn more about the Providence program and meet some of the people who have turned their lives around through it.
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Tag: Food Industry
A Software Program Yelps About NYC Restaurants That Violate Health Code
The five boroughs of New York City boast a wide range of food options — from halal street food to world famous culinary cuisine. With help of online review sites like Yelp, residents can navigate the overwhelming number of dining options.
And as it turns out, these user-generated commentary sites can be used for more than figuring out where to book a table on a Saturday night.
As New York’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene figured out, these online reviews are an important source in discovering restaurants violating health code.
Using a software program created by experts at Columbia University, the city mined 300,000 Yelp restaurant reviews (between July 2012 and March 2013) where patrons complained of vomiting, diarrhea, or other details following a meal that could signal food-borne illness, according to the New York Times.
Their findings? Out of 893 possible cases that needed further investigating, 56 percent illustrated an incident akin to food-borne illness, according to a recent federal Center for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
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Though the method is not entirely accurate — there’s no way to tell if the food poisoning came from somewhere else — health inspectors were able to find three restaurants in violation of code.
One eatery was discovered to have bare-handed contact with ready-to-eat food, while another failed to properly clean work surfaces and was found to have cross-contamination of ingredients in the refrigerator. Health inspectors found evidence of cockroaches and mice at a third restaurant as well.
“With food-borne illnesses, it’s much better to reach people sooner,” medical epidemiologist Dr. Sharon Balter told the New York Times. “When investigating an outbreak, we want to know what people who got sick ate, who else was with them and what items they all ate together. If you wait, people forget.”
During the pilot program, officials culled potential cases using a week’s worth of Yelp data at a time, but now experts are combing through the data daily in attempt to prevent future outbreaks. Officials are encouraging other online review sites to contribute to the project to benefit public health.
And while the innovative, cost-effective experiment is fair from perfect, it goes to show that social media can be used for far more than just to #humblebrag or #tbt.