Quran Carlos-Ali has a delicious dream her own halal gourmet soul food business. An Internal Revenue Service employee, she learned to cook at the age of 12 from her grandmother and wanted to pursue her passion.
In a warehouse that could hold several Costcos, on Friday, October 9, 2015, wearing a chefs jacket and hat, she graduated from the Maryland Food Banks FoodWorks program, the culinary training designed to enable low-income students to strengthen their skills in the kitchen while producing healthy meals for those in need. Carlos-Ali earned the highest GPA in this batch and was granted the Valedictorian award for this course through a partnership with the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC). Two other students earned the Best in Kitchen and Best Life Attitude award. All three students were presented with knife sets from Chef Matt Delano, executive chef at Maggianos. Quran was ecstatic with her new set.
She had found the program online while searching for a culinary school and when she saw the students feed people, she was stirred.
The intensive program was developed to address some of the root causes at the intersection of hunger and poverty, lack of workforce training and job opportunities. More than 750,000 people in Maryland do not have enough to eat. The food cooked by the graduates of the program is vacuum-sealed daily and heads to soup kitchens, homeless shelters and food pantries.
For 12 weeks, the students study under Manny Robinson, the Executive Chef of the Maryland Food Bank (MFB). From Asian to Italian, they learn a wide range of culinary techniques, gain valuable knowledge of nutrition, food safety and menu planning.
All graduates were certified as food safety experts through ServSafe Food Sanitation Management. The Food Bank pays for the certification for the students. Chef Manny informed the Muslim Link, that seventy percent of the class has lined up jobs, and the rest have interviews coming up, from the Hyatt to the Holiday Inn to local restaurants. We normally place 95 percent of the class, he said.
Trussing up their culinary careers, the food bank sets them down a path toward self-sufficiency and independence. The graduates, in return, have left their own legacy over the course of their training session, having produced nearly 50,000 meals for hungry individuals across the state, state MFB officials.
During a tour of the facility, Najma Jones of the Foodworks program, shared the creative ways food is preserved. She is a full-time chef at the MFB state of the art kitchen and helps train students in the same program she graduated from a few years ago. Allah has provided enough food for us. People are hungry not because of a lack of food, said the mother of five, pointing to shelves of stacked with thousands of tons of chicken, The issue is access to the food, she said as she led me through miles of freezer space that held cooked and uncooked food. Local grocery stores donate their perishable and non-perishable items to the food bank and these make their way through the program into the plates of thousand of food insecure Marylanders.
I have never seen that many green beans and potatoes in one place, said John Shaw in his speech, class representative, to the families of the graduates, describing the amount of work that the chefs put in each day. The MFB sources all it produce from local farmers. One year we were getting a hundred thousand pounds of potatoes a week, said Jones. The community kitchen one of the very few in the state and the FoodWorks program at MFB is able to cook and preserve produce and meat so it is not thrown into the trash.
I would work here for free because of the nature of the work, said Jones, whose team feeds 4500 nutritious meals a day to hungry children every day through the summer food service program and 4500 meals a week through the school lunch program. Jones tells her students: You are cooking for people who are the most vulnerable. The least of their worries should be if the food that they are eating is safe. They may not have anything else so let's put out the best food we can.
Spike Gjerde, the winner of the prestigious 2015 James Beard Award Winner and the chef and owner of the Woodberry Kitchen was the chief guest at the graduation. Cook with love just imagine that what you are cooking is going to someone you love, advised Gjerde.
The skills you have learned here will greatly help you as you head down the road, he said. Our connection to food is real and it matters, he said, sharing his culinary theory.
Carlos-Ali hopes to work at a halal restaurant and bring the standards that she has learned to the halal restaurant industry, before she launches her soul food carry-out.
The Maryland Food Bank distributes food to a broad network of hunger-relief agencies, including schools, food pantries, homeless shelters, faith-based organizations, and community centers. referred to these agencies as network partners. - To find out if your Islamic Center or charity organization is eligible visit https://www.mdfoodbank.org/faqs/#sthash.0eJLJFff.dpuf
Food is our common ground, a universal experience. James Beard
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