Massimo Bottura, owner of 'Osteria Francescana', will be launching an “avant-garde soup kitchen” in Rio during the 2016 Summer Olympic Games to feed refugees and homeless people with the surplus food from the Olympic Village's catering service.
Bottura, has done something similar before, having used more than 15 tonnes of salvaged food to make 10,000 meals to feed the homeless and working poor at the 2015 Expo Milano.
For this project, called 'RefettoRio Gastromotiva', he will join with Brazilian non-profit organisation 'Gastromotiva', to raise awareness about food waste and hunger. The soup kitchen, which only took 59 days to build, has 108 seats and will be offering free meals to Rio's inhabitants from August 9 according to Eater.com.
Bottura will be joined by 30 other guest chefs over the period, including Alain Ducasse and Joan Roca, however the biggest issue for the team of chefs will not being able to prepare dishes in advance. Bottura expects there to be plenty of leftover bread, which he plans to use to make pasta, or to serve a milk and bread dessert similar to his famous restaurant dish 'Bread Is Gold'.
The soup kitchen plans to serve 3,000 meals, and when the Olympics is finished, 'RefettoRio Gastromotiva' will remain open as a culinary school for the next ten years.
“We create culture everyday in our kitchen. Culture brings knowledge and consciousness, and consciousness brings the sense of responsibility that leads us to create projects such as RefettoRio. That’s why I think the most important belief in the future, for a chef, is culture," he says.
