[GUEST BLOG] A Missing Ingredient? The Essential Role of Chefs in Food Recovery

We were just a few months into our emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the counters of the little commercial church kitchen I rented for my catering company were piled with boxes of donated food from a local soup kitchen. A chef friend and I sorted through the donations with wild excitement. And curiosity: why did they not want these ingredients?

There were fresh mushrooms and various fresh herbs. A case of frozen peas. We thought of the ground beef in the refrigerator, donated the day before by one of our farmer friends. And there were potatoes we picked up that morning from a local food bank.

Several hours later, a gorgeous shepherd’s pie was being packaged into a few hundred individual containers and then into insulated bags to go straight to people living outdoors in the hidden nooks and crannies of our city.

This scene repeats daily in our kitchen at Feed Louisville, now an 8,000-square-foot space across town from the one we quickly outgrew. We are a team of former restaurant chefs who cook 700+ hot meals a day for our local unhoused and food-insecure community, using mostly rescued food ingredients that come in from over 200 local chefs, restaurants, farmers, and grocers. We are a commissary kitchen, supporting the work of local human service agencies and grassroots organizations, who get the food directly to people who need it.

To make these meals, we take in everything—two bunches of radishes that didn’t sell at market, a few pans of penne marinara from a catered wedding, jars of perfectly good house-made Caesar dressing from a boutique grocer. It’s a crazy array of ingredients our chefs get to play with daily in our mission to keep good food from going to waste so we can feed people experiencing hunger. It’s an episode of Chopped in our kitchen every day.

As a restaurateur and chef for 30 years in our community, I believe the role of the professional chef in this intersection between food recovery and hunger relief cannot be underestimated. Food recovery isn’t simply a logistics problem. We have to know what to do with the food in that space between surplus and repurpose.

Food Recovery Needs Culinary Knowledge

Chefs possess knowledge of the inherent qualities of individual ingredients and understand how each responds, and where the synergy and cultural affinity are with other ingredients. Where can we fold in these two bunches of radishes? How can we stretch the jars of Caesar dressing to make a sauce for today’s chicken dish? A chef finds joy in these challenges.

This kind of culinary capacity can allow food recovery organizations to work at a more granular level. Two pans of pasta or a few heads of broccoli may not fit into a conventional redistribution system, but in the hands of a chef, they become ingredients with possibilities.

Professional chefs also understand the challenges with surplus because we have experienced them from the other side of the donation. Restaurant kitchens work hard to minimize surplus through cross-utilization, inventory control, and repurposing, but surplus is sometimes inevitable. No one wants to see their hard work go to waste.

At Feed Louisville, our partners know to call us when they find themselves with still-good food that is not going to paying customers. They trust our ability to handle food safely and get it to people with the utmost care. This model allows our community to make a dent in the more than 15 million tons of retail and restaurant food that goes into landfills annually.

Successful Food Recovery Maximizes Nourishment

But it’s not enough to measure how many pounds of food we have recovered. The real question is how much of that food we were able to turn into something nutritious for someone who needs it. With roots in the restaurant industry, chefs understand the parallels between hospitality and hunger relief. We don’t distinguish a person receiving a free meal from us as different from the paying customer in our restaurant dining rooms. We make meals with as much pride and attention to quality and food safety. All people deserve good food. That’s our underlying ethos.

We insist that the meals taste good and are familiar. That they bring comfort. We believe that food can be medicine, but so is pleasure. For many people, this is the only meal they will have today. We have to get it right.

Food Recovery Requires Discernment

Sometimes that means saying no to donated items, as our team did during the recent Cyclospora outbreak. A food recovery organization must inspect every donation with vigilance, evaluating for safety and freshness. We are not just a pass-through for surplus food. The team is the point of discernment between the marketplace and the food-insecure community, evaluating every donation out of respect for the people we serve.

Hunger does not mean receiving the worst of what’s left over.

The Essential Role of Chefs in Food Recovery

At its heart, food recovery presents a culinary challenge: what can we make with what we have in the safest and most delicious way for the people we cook for? That’s a question every professional chef must answer each day. We understand ingredients, how to work within constraints, how to make something from what is available, and how to say no when something shouldn’t be served at all. And we are trained to think about the dignity of the person eating the food. This is why chefs should be at the center of the food recovery conversation, not only as donors of surplus food, but as partners in designing how food is recovered and best used.

About the Author: Rhona Bowles Kamar is the founder and executive director of Feed Louisville, a non-profit organization she started in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Feed Louisville’s work lies at the intersection of hunger relief and food rescue, diverting perfectly viable food from the landfill to make beautiful meals for the food-insecure community. Rhona leads a team of professional chefs who daily prepare hundreds of hot meals that partnering human service agencies and grassroots organizations deliver directly to people experiencing hunger and homelessness.

Rhona is the former chef and co-owner of Ramsi’s Café on the World and previously owned Raising Hope Organic Farm, a USDA-certified organic farm. She was the recipient of the 2025 Partners in Philanthropy Non-Profit Visionary Leader award, the 2021 League of Women Voters Presidents Award, and the 2019 Today’s Woman Magazine Most Admired Woman. She has served on the board of the Organic Association of Kentucky and was a member of Les Dames D’Escoffier. She is currently a member of the World Central Kitchen Corps of Chefs.

The views and opinions expressed in this guest blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of ReFED.