#EveryStoryCounts — Monica Lapenta

BACFAD (Be a Chef for a Day) is a healthy eating program that teaches all people of all ages to cook healthy meals and create a food budget; our students learn cooking skills while absorbing valuable information about diet and nutrition.

The sudden onset of the pandemic meant that on March 16th, we had to decide if we were up to the challenge of opening a community kitchen to deal with the immediate needs of families in our community. We know that for those families without jobs, helping to provide nutritious meals would help to decrease the stress that comes from financial need.

We met this challenge and have done a tremendous job by providing more than 750 dinners every day for needy families, as well as 200 “Grab and Go” meals to make sure nobody has to go hungry during the day. Hot meals are a big part of our program – my philosophy is that sandwiches are a stopgap measure rather than a real meal. People need nutritionally dense and varied meals with lots of healthy ingredients in order to fight COVID. The disease attacks the immune system, and it is my belief that we can protect it with better nutrition and an improved diet.

At BACFAD, we have adjusted to every obstacle and met every challenge. It has been difficult, but I am incredibly proud. Our team of volunteers is a dedicated group that works up to 16 hours each day. Our local politicians have also helped us as much as possible, for which I am grateful. However, I am most appreciative for my staff and for the organizations that were already on the ground doing this work when we started. Baltimore is a city where there are many more good things happening than people usually think.

We are expecting and preparing to run this operation for at least one year. We have big hopes and dreams for the future, such as the BACFAD Mobile Initiative, which is our plan for a mobile training kitchen. This would be a commercial kitchen on a converted bus that can travel around the city and run even when schools are closed to bring vegetables and fruit to the needy, and also to provide culinary training that we hope will also help with job preparedness.

Obviously, the mobile community kitchen is still in the works, but we plan to keep our current community kitchen open for as long as it is needed. Hopefully by next summer in 2021 the situation will improve, and we will not need to produce such a high number of daily meals. This is our hope, but I will stress again that we will continue to prepare food for as long as it is needed.

We are prepared to continue to respond to this emergency situation, and now we know that we have the capabilities to meet the task for as long as necessary.

Monica Lapenta is the Executive Director & CEO of the Italian Cultural Center of Maryland. Sign up to volunteer with BACFAD here.

Special thanks to Jessica Flynn for conducting this interview. Photo courtesy of Monica Lapenta.

Find out more about programs and resources you can work with to help empower youth and grow healthy food.


The #EveryStoryCounts Campaign

You don’t have to be a climate scientist or city planner to create sustainability + resilience. Everyone has a story to tell about making Baltimore a stronger, fairer and safer place for all of us.

Be a part of our #EveryStoryCounts Campaign by sharing yours on social media using the hashtag ‪#‎EveryStoryCounts‬, or by sharing your words and pictures with us at sustainability@baltimorecity.gov.