When we hold our annual two-day WIRED festival, WIRED2015, on October 15-16 in London, some of the strongest talks will be from the WIRED Innovation Fellows -- 15 emerging stars we've brought together in fields ranging from rocket engineering to digital art.
This is the third in a series of profiles of 2015 TED Fellows, whose work has helped to inspire our own fresh class of WIRED Innovation Fellows. Read the first part and second part here.
David Hertz (Brazil) -- Chef and social entrepreneur
Hertz is using food to empower troubled communities, from Brazil's favelas to its prisons. He's a chef who founded Gastromotiva, Brazil's first "sociogastronomic organisation", which teaches favela residents to cook, and then to train others -- boosting their employment opportunities and spreading self respect along with skills through what he calls "a community based exchange relationship".
David Hertz, now 41, left Brazil to travel for seven years when he was 19. He came home with a new passion: food. "Gastronomy became the guideline of my life," he says. He trained to be a chef -- and realised that cooking could bring people together in all sorts of socially beneficial ways. "I visited a favela -- and thought, what if through cooking the residents could become what they're meant to be? By interacting with other people through cooking, you learn confidence, discipline, collaboration. So why not use gastronomy to empower people? I call it social gastronomy."
Hertz set up an organisation called Gastromotiva to offer free culinary programmes for disadvantaged youths. It has trained 1,200 cooks so far, many of them now working successfully in Brazil's restaurants, and who in turn are encouraged to go back to their communities to become "muiltipliers" and train thousands more. "My first trainee has a catering business that employs 20 people," Hertz says. "We've trained prison inmates and jobless immigrants. We've built a network. These people who never had a say are suddenly able to have a voice. Social gastronomy is a movement to help people accept themselves, and to recognise their unique assets. With food, we can transform millions of lives. Social gastronomy engages people into a more social and sustainable way of working around food."
Gastromotiva is partly about peer-to-peer education, training professional cooks and food mentors, but it's also incubating small community food businesses inside the favelas of Sao Paulo. Its social kitchens in favelas have attracted some of the world's top chefs to cook with locals. "People came from rich areas to the favelas to watch," Hertz says. His organisation has also developed healthy-eating programmes. "This year our goal is to train 1,000 people in four cities in Brazil and to reach over 50,000 people in workshops that multiply our methodology in low income communities," Hertz says. "We are also working on a social business related to our capacity building programmes."
Some of Gastromotiva's most striking achievements have been inside Sao Paolo's prisons, where prisoners develop skills that allow them to gain employment on the outside. It is also working with jobless immigrants. "We have a four-month course, taking in 300 hours, for the unemployed, and we have 3,000 applications a month. We pick those with the most potential to work in the business. There's about 80 percent employability, and just 5 percent drop-out." The movement is about to go into its fourth Brazilian city, with 25 full-time staff and around 50 part time, funded by grants and restaurant revenue. Next for Hertz is expanding the movement to Venezuela. "We're using food to generate love," Hertz says. "Healthy living lets people know they can be anything they want. People don't yet know the potential of food. Jamie Oliver came and couldn't understand how we can train so many people. I said, 'Jamie, it's a pyramid effect. Food is a community.' "I want to make gastronomy into the most powerful movement to empower people to build bridges. Food has a social meaning. I want chefs to get engaged."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
