Food for the Soul: Building ‘Shared Tables’ in the time of Covid-19
Interview with David Hertz, Award-Winning Chef and Founder of Gastromotiva
“A table or a kitchen, where people can eat together and stay together, are the innovation labs that can change the world.”
As the world is currently facing an unprecedented health and economic crisis, communities around the world have seen their lives restricted, putting the wellbeing of many at risk. In this interview series, Humanity in Tech explores the many faces of leadership during the age of technology and Covid-19.
By uncovering powerful stories of individuals who decide to shape their own paths, we inspire the reader to leverage their passions towards driving dialogue, action, and change in their communities and beyond.
In this inaugural publication, Alex Artiach interviews David Hertz, a Brazilian-born chef and internationally-recognized social entrepreneur. David’s social organization, Gastromotiva, leverages the power of food to end waste and hunger, empowering the most vulnerable and building community around a shared table. We spoke to David about Gastromotiva’s work and vision and how the organization has kept creating social cohesion at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic is pushing the people to stay away from each other.
Our conversation opened the door to a fascinating exchange around entrepreneurship, leadership, and dreams. David tells the stories of Urideia and Bárbara, individuals who have inspired him to keep creating opportunities for his community, using his skills and resources to empower others to develop through their own means. He finishes by talking about empathy and what it takes to be a leader, how to use our own passions as tools for social change, and how our own self and career development is intrinsically related to the act of giving first before receiving.
David co-founded Gastromotiva in 2006 and has created a model for transforming people’s lives through kitchen vocational training, nutritional education, business incubation, and food made with compassion. During the 2016 Olympics, David opened Refettorio Gastromotiva, a no-food-waste cooking restaurant school, in collaboration with chef Massimo Bottura (Food for Soul) and journalist Alexandra Forbes. Primarily based in Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and El Salvador, Gastromotiva is the catalyst force behind the Social Gastronomy Movement of which David is the visionary and co-founder.
David is an Ashoka Fellow, a TED Senior Fellow, and a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum. He has won The Social Entrepreneur of the Future by Schwab Foundation, GQ Man of the Year Award, and the Charles Bronfman Prize 2019 among many other prizes.
Edited by Alex Artiach and Tania Dias. Images courtesy of Gastromotiva.
[Editor’s note: this interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Alex is co-founder of MassMetrics, Tania is founder of Humanity in Tech, and they both believe in the power of stories to inspire]
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Founding story and the power of shared tables
Alex Artiach: I’m here today with David Hertz, the founder and director of Gastromotiva. David, the work you do is powerful. Can you share a bit more and tell us how it all started?
David Hertz: Food is my life. I cook, I feed, I dream. I wake up every day thinking about what food and people can do for one another. My work is to connect them both: to feed humanity with humanity.
Before choosing a career, at the age of 18, I went to live in a kibbutz in Israel. I was searching for a way to connect with myself. From there, I traveled and lived in several countries doing different jobs, such as construction worker, cook assistant, cook, hotel steward. In India, I learned a lot about respect for life and food, the ritualistic side of meals, seasonings, spices, and flavors. In Thailand, I conducted my first cooking class.
Seven years later I organized a Gastronomy course in Brazil and started to work in the catering and restaurant business. In 2004, when I already worked as a chef in renowned restaurants and buffets in São Paulo, I was inspired by the concept of a social business pioneered by Professor Muhammad Yunus. I saw the potential to adapt it to the culinary and hospitality world.
I had the opportunity to coordinate the Citizen Cook Project, in the Jaguaré slum, in São Paulo. And there, I met Gastromotiva’s first student, Urideia. She had a powerful life story and already knew how to cook at the age of 7, but she needed actual professional training to get a job. Urideia was my inspiration to start this journey. So we co-founded Gastromotiva and I started to teach people out of my garage, her and 4 more students.
During my time teaching in the Jaguaré favela, I learned that food can become a shelter. People living in communities need more than skill to enter the job market: they need kindness, love, encouragement, something that makes them overcome a past that no longer belongs to them.
From the project, Urideia, with all her life history, was invited to go to the UN, in New York, to speak alongside the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Anan, and to represent the 8th Millennium Goal — to achieve global partnerships for development. The aim of the conference was to inspire and engage leaders and decision-makers to achieve the millennium goals. With that experience, we saw our life mission unfold.
I wake up every day thinking about what food and people can do for one another. My work is to connect them both: to feed humanity with humanity.
Captivated by the concept of social entrepreneurship, we set up a buffet school to focus on training entrepreneurs who live in communities. This course became the essence of what Gastromotiva is today. Nowadays Urideia leads her own business and I continue my journey with Gastromotiva. Gastromotiva is a non-profit organization that trains less fortunate individuals: low-income youth, deprived of their liberty, immigrants, and women in vulnerable situations. We use food as a tool for social change. The idea is to promote sustainable and nutritional food education to generate social impact for individuals and in their communities.
A.A: You often talk about the power of a “shared table”. What does this mean and how does it direct the purpose of your work?
D.H: I believe that food is a strong tool to create bridges and break down barriers. Food inspires moments of connection and trust, building empowerment and opportunities for people who don’t yet fit into our society. Food has the power to nourish our bodies but more than this, it nourishes our souls. When we share the same table there is no cultural, religious, or racial difference. A table or a kitchen, where people can eat together and stay together, are the innovation labs that can change the world. Food rescues memories, gives us dignity, and has the power to transform.
At Refettorio Gastromotiva, a special project created in 2016 with Food for Soul’s chef Massimo Bottura and journalist Alexandra Forbes, we hope to support people living in vulnerability by providing daily dinners (appetizer, main course, and dessert) to 90 people per night. We serve them with dignity and compassion. Food feeds the body, the body feeds the soul, the soul connects us.
Gastromotiva articulates the power of food through our concept of “foods that transform” and shares its best practices with members of society, companies, governments, and international organizations. Hunger, food waste, lack of opportunities for socio-economic changes, and malnutrition are global challenges that demand joint actions.
We transform produce into meals in the kitchen, teach our students how to prepare recipes with zero waste and focus on ways to decrease the environmental impact of the food system. We teach students how to respect the food and the people they are preparing their meals for. How to create connections. And we are also preparing our students to get jobs and make their own choices in life. We believe that strong, confident, and free individuals become responsible for their own lives. Then they start to mobilize and engage in networks with other agents in Gastronomy.
Gastromotiva during Covid-19
A.A: Your work empowers people by bringing them together around food. How are you managing to carry out this work at a time when people are asked to stay away from each other?
D.H: We started the quarantine working from home to find solutions to continue supporting our public. We had to suspend Gastromotiva’s training courses all over Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, our daily Refettorio’s dinners for vulnerable people are on hold, for the safety of the Gastromotiva team, of our volunteers, and of all those we serve.
One of the emergency solutions we acted on was to turn the space of the Refettorio into a food bank, partnering and supporting neighboring institutions that continue to prepare meals and serve our beneficiaries. In partnership with more than 30 organizations, we have managed to feed 20.845 people in the past weeks.
We also launched “Solidarity Kitchens.” It is our project to fight against the pandemic where cooks (students and Gastromotiva’s alumni) turn their home kitchens into small delivery restaurants, serving, for free, the most vulnerable in their neighborhood. We already have four people who work full time and provide 420 meals each week.
I’ve been working with the Brazilian Social Gastronomy community to support cooks, chefs, and social entrepreneurs on the ground who are engaged in using food as a tool for social transformation. In this moment of crisis, we are meeting through video conferences to listen and share personal and professional experiences of community members and discuss how social technologies are being used by different local organizations. By sharing, we are able to adapt and replicate these practices in our own contexts. Every week the entire Gastromotiva team (Brazil and Mexico) has a one-hour meeting as well.
A.A: Classrooms around the world have gone digital. How have you been able to preserve or build on your education programs during this time?
D.H: We are turning all our education courses into virtual courses to support our students and share our methods, for free, with other educational institutions. The educational material that Gastromotiva is making available online for students are the videos from the ‘Comida Que Transforma’ web series. A series with zero waste recipes, produced by Gastromotiva and recorded in Refettorio Gastromotiva; in which several guests discuss a topic and prepare a recipe with their ingredients. We are also developing digital content, such as video classes with the collaboration of Gastromotiva teachers and partners and extracurricular content, such as PDF books, as well as organizing activities that students can develop at home. We share the content three times a week.
Gastromotiva is, like many institutions, using Google Classroom, a free digital platform, which allows us to share content, videos, PDF files, images, etc. In addition, it is possible to exchange information with students through a discussion forum and activities. As Gastromotiva does not yet have a Learning Management System (LMS) or a virtual learning environment, this was a very interesting alternative to enable this exchange. In addition, we have daily contact with students through Whatsapp groups, which is a digital tool that 93% of students have unrestricted access to. Therefore, this constant exchange of information has enabled the organization and our students to remain in daily contact, even during social distancing.
On leadership and creating social impact
A.A: As a chef by training, the obvious choice for you might have been to start a restaurant business. But instead, you set up a social enterprise. Why?
D.H: I already had some experience in the catering and restaurant business when I started doing social work. My first experience in this sector was being part of the Citizen Cook project, in the favela of Jaguaré, in São Paulo. It was the first time I had visited a favela and it moved me to work with vulnerable people and give them opportunities to thrive.
A.A: Sometimes people feel they need experience before they are able to build an organization and have a positive impact. What advice would you have for young people who want to step up in their communities?
D.H: First, it is important to know and to connect with the people you want to help. But before I was even thinking about becoming a chef or a social entrepreneur, I was a curious citizen of the world. I traveled to different parts of the globe to understand the purpose behind our existence. It was through this incessant search for knowledge that I found a way to reach the other, to narrow distances and to overcome borders - whether territorial or cultural - that would normally be considered impossible to overcome. As a social entrepreneur, my calling came when I first visited a favela. I met underserved and vulnerable people, listened to their stories, their life challenges, their dreams. I started to connect with and understand how I could use my own experiences and skills to support them.
The second step is starting to plan what you want to do. You break things down into the steps that you need to hit to achieve your plans. This part of the process will involve studying a lot, attending events in your area of interest, building your network, and making connections with people that share your values so you can exchange knowledge with them. To be successful in this, you need to be authentic and you need to be humble. To listen and to learn from other people — these are two skills that you need if you want to help and connect with people. That’s the starting point of entrepreneurship.
Everyone has the potential to be an entrepreneur and in Gastromotiva’s case, a social entrepreneur. People just haven’t discovered it yet inside themselves. Our students that cook for order, bake cakes in their homes to sell, they are already entrepreneurs. They just don’t know it. One of the goals of Gastromotiva is to give people the right tools so that they can empower themselves to become social entrepreneurs.
A.A: In a world that is rapidly changing, what do you believe is the role of community?
D.H: This crisis has revealed the collective task forces of communities and peripheries in the world. We are seeing volunteer groups mobilizing to donate food to those who need it the most; collecting basic hygiene products so people can correctly wash their hands. We see these actions especially in low-income communities. They are teaching us about true solidarity. Solidarity was always very much needed, but it comes out strong and instinctive among those who already have too little. We have to learn from them, particularly the values of empathy, humility, and positivity. As a society, we need to adapt to a more collaborative and sustainable way of living, respecting humanity and the environment.
To listen and to learn from other people — these are two skills that you need if you want to help and connect with people. That’s the starting point of entrepreneurship.
A.A: What advice do you have for people to help build communities?
D.H: It is important to seek like-minded people who share similar purposes and values to ourselves, that work on similar projects, so we can create a support network for critical moments like this one. Then we use our resources to communicate and share our stories, our experiences.
Since the beginning of the crisis, I’ve been participating in daily video calls with my team and our partners to listen and share our challenges and our solutions. This community creates a collective intelligence and enables us to identify best practices and adapt to our realities.
A.A: Is there a story that keeps inspiring you to build “shared tables” around you?
D.H: An inspiring and wonderful story is of my friend, Bárbara Ferreira do Santos, a Gastromotiva alumnus and social entrepreneur who has a brand called Caldo da Nêga. Bárbara started cooking for parties at 12 years old, in Morro do Fogueteiro, Rio Comprido, Rio de Janeiro, where she was born. She then ended up moving and went to live in a village right in front of some bars. Every Friday, people would gather there. They drank all night and had only a few “fried foods made from old oil” to eat. So she started to make a broth to offer them — her aunts’ recipe, who used to drink it to get the strength to go to the Carnival rehearsals and parades.
It was at an empty gas station in 2004 that Bárbara installed her first broth stand. “It was a wasteland. I weeded everything, removed stones and made space to set up my table with my broths. I borrowed 300 reais and made three broth options. On the first day, I didn’t sell anything. But I didn’t want to go home with the pots full and I decided to cross the street and offer a little taste of my broth to the staff. The next week, I sold everything. In less than six months, I had three stands, five options of broth and was serving 300 people per night”, she explained in an interview.
Soon after, friends told her that the Praça Condessa Paulo de Frontin, where Bárbara works to this day, had good movement on Saturdays. She took her broths there and they were a success. Only having word-of-mouth marketing, she made it into the 2014 “Guia Carioca de Gastronomia de Rua” (Carioca Street Gastronomy Guide). Her story was shared in a book and she started to become famous in the media and known in the chef circles, among the likes of Claude Troisgros, Flávia Quaresma, and Frédéric de Maeyer.
Bárbara started to invest more in her business: she took an entrepreneurship course and was in the first class of Gastromotiva in Rio de Janeiro. She created a logo and gave a name to her stand: Caldo da Nêga.
When asked if she’s ever going to open a restaurant, Bárbara answers that she likes to work on the street, where she can serve everyone from a homeless person to a businessman. She cooks for everyone, independently of socioeconomic status. Bárbara says “Caldo da Nêga is resistance and affection”.
Food feeds the body, the body feeds the soul, the soul connects us.
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Thank you for reading this interview!
We hope you get inspired to take action in a time where being connected to a community is more important than ever. To learn more about Gastromotiva’s impact and how to support them, please go to https://gastromotiva.org/en/.
As of now, Gastromotiva’s impact numbers during COVID-19 crisis through partners in Rio de Janeiro:
15.7 Tons of food distributed to Refettorio Gastromotiva’s partners
18.7 Tons of food donated by companies, restaurants, hotels, and individuals
26,188 meals served by partner network (estimate)
32 organizations and projects supported
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Editors’ note
If you liked this work, be sure to follow Humanity in Tech on social media
If you’d like to nominate someone anywhere in the world to be interviewed for this series, please email Tania Dias at tdesdias@gmail.com.
- Who we are looking for? Thought-leaders on the cutting-edge of environmental sustainability, employment, biotech, education, transportation, finance, mental health, culture and the arts.
- Why do it? We want to highlight the impact work you and your organization are doing. Our audience will be emerging leaders who are looking to learn about the future and understand their role in shaping it. You will be able to share your insight and advice with them while spreading awareness about your cause and work.
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More on Alex Artiach:
My father once told me “Son, don’t be normal. There is nothing fun in being normal. Whatever you do, be ABNORMAL!”; which translates to “Retarded” in Spanish. That was funny, yet I’ve lived by those words ever since.
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