Timothy Tucker and the United Crescent Hill Ministries Kitchen
“If we teach somebody how to fish, that’s a lot better than handing them the fish,” Michael Leary, board member of United Crescent Hill Ministries (UCHM) said. Recalling Biblical images of feeding the hungry with no more than a few loaves of bread and pieces of fish, Leary is revising a millennia-old mission. More than giving people the food they need, Leary and those at UCHM are in the planning stages of developing food programs that will teach people how to cook and sustain their livelihood. The program will take place in UCHM’s on-site commercial kitchen. UCHM is teaming up with Chef Timothy Tucker to create a program that addresses community issues by teaching people what to cook and how to cook it.
Chef Timothy Tucker comes from the Salvation Army’s Hope Culinary Program, which has met great success on both the local and national level. Locally, Tucker was teaching members of the homeless community how to cook – how to make cuisine out of the raw materials of fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, legumes and herbs. The job-training program focused on providing kitchen skills in order to enable its participants to get good jobs in Louisville’s restaurant industry as cooks and sous chefs. Graduates of Tucker’s program are currently working at such local restaurants as 610 Magnolia, Nord’s Bakery, and Equus. One of his students even continued his culinary education at Sullivan University to become a chef.
The Hope Culinary Program, though not the first of its kind, also gained national recognition for its ability to empower members of the community with a marketable skill and get them jobs that they can keep. It has joined the ranks of similarly successful programs in Chattanooga, Boston, and Washington D.C.
The Hope Program’s continued success belies the continued need for culinary job training in Louisville. “We had a waiting list of over forty applications. We would have sixty and seventy people apply, and only fifteen of them would get accepted,” Tucker said. There is a need beyond what the Salvation Army’s culinary program can satisfy. “That’s why I’m doing this. It’s to support the need of Louisville,” Tucker said.
This program met such success not only because of the effective teaching, but the cooperation with others in Louisville’s ever-growing food community. Tucker, a graduate of Sullivan University, used their model for job searching and resume-building to help the graduates of the Hope program find jobs. He worked with chefs and owners of Louisville restaurants to help his graduates secure jobs. “As we showed that we were getting people jobs, it just got bigger and bigger,” Tucker said, as more chefs became interested in hiring his graduates. Tucker also received help from farmers, through donations of local produce. Tucker hopes to learn better how to tap into these resources through gleaning at farmer’s markets what goes unsold and unused.
Since 2009, Tucker has moved on from the program, which continues to graduate a class of students each year. After traveling in Italy with a stop at the Terra Madre Slow Foods Conference, Tucker returned to Louisville and continued working as a chef and gardening in his plot at the Billy Goat Hill Community Garden, of which he is an original member. Leary also gardens at Billy Goat Hill, situated just a stone’s throw away from UCHM. The relationship between the two and the idea for the new program began in the garden. “When we got to know him as a gardener, I took him over to the building and the kitchen, and as a chef, he just fell in love with it,” Leary said.
UCHM has had a commercial kitchen since its old kitchen was renovated for commercial use eight years ago. Until now, it has been used as a warm-up kitchen, a place where mostly processed foods are warmed and served to the community. While the kitchen has sometimes been used for teaching, it had never been its primary focus. UCHM is ready to develop a program for their kitchen that focuses on the role of the kitchen in the community, as the center of food production, where people can learn to cook and go home to their families, teaching their families how to cook. The kitchen will become a more active and prominent part of UCHM’s ministry. “We never had the vision that Chef Tucker is presenting us. That’s what I’m excited about,” Leary said.
With Tucker as kitchen manager, UCHM hopes to provide new services related to food for those in the 40206 zip code. The vision that has been developed so far has three primary components. The first is a culinary training program similar to the Salvation Army’s Hope Culinary Program.
Second, the kitchen will be available for young entrepreneurs to rent, providing a service to the community and growing the food economy. The rent from this operation will also bring in a small but steady flow of always-needed income for UCHM.
Finally, the kitchen will be the site for a nutrition program that centers around the paleo diet. The paleo diet (as in Paleolithic) is based on the presumption that humans have been cultivating and consuming grains for only a small part of our total history, and glutenous fruits and grains – potatoes, wheat, and corn – are not part of our genetic inheritance. As our bodies are less adapted to these agricultural products, our over consumption of them leads to auto-immune diseases, such as heart and thyroid disease. “The science behind the paleo-diet – because it is part of our genetic fit – is less inclined to cause these chronic diseases,” said Myron Hardesty, who is cultivating this component of the program with Tucker. Rather, the paleo diet prescribes seasonal fruits and vegetables, nuts, and meat, or, what could have been hunted and gathered. This kind of hunting and gathering that Hardesty promotes, however, takes place in a grocery store in the 21st century. He teaches his students to shop the perimeter of the store, avoiding the packaged and processed foods that are concentrated in center aisles.
Myron Hardesty, clinical herbalist, physician’s assistant, and owner of Weeds of Eden adheres to the paleo diet and worked with Tucker at the Salvation Army. Hardesty taught classes on herbal medicine as part of a series of rotating speakers in Tucker’s culinary program. He also helped patients navigate the healthcare system. He will likely do the same at UCHM.
“The whole point is self-empowerment, to make people self-sufficient, to believe they can actually take care of themselves,” Hardesty said. As both an herbalist and a physician’s assistant, Hardesty spans two very different approaches to healthcare. Diet, however, is what unites these two areas of study, and what he hopes to teach to those in the UCHM kitchen.
“At the end of the day, the nucleus of this program is helping the people who need it,” Tucker said. The need in Louisville is great and this new program will help meet some of that need. There remain a few hoops to jump through before the program is finalized. The kitchen received an A from the health department, but is in need of a sink grease trap to comply with new regulations for commercial kitchens.
“I was just an outlet for helping make social change in the community,” Tucker said, emphasizing the collective efforts of others in the community. This new venture of the UCHM will by necessity be a collaboration between those at UCHM as well as local farmers, chefs, and restaurant owners. Without the combined effort, Tucker assures, the program cannot be successful.
– Caroline Stephens
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