For the fourth year in a row, chefs turned out to cook for disaster victims and first responders. This time, the kitchen volunteers served evacuees and firefighters from the Kincade fire.
Meals were prepared for thousands of people at the Kincade fire base camp in Sonoma County. The menu included rosemary smoked pork loin with potatoes and apples, and roasted pumpkin green Thai curry over rice.
The volunteers were from World Central Kitchen, a non-profit dedicated to providing meals in the wake of natural disasters, founded by celebrity chef Jose Andres in 2010.
According to the non-profit's website, the organization has served over 400,000 meals in California after multiple wildfires in recent years.
One volunteer chef, Matt Masera, was in Chico for the Camp Fire and in Redding for the Carr Fire.
“We were kind of ready for something to happen,” said Masera. “So people were ready to activate a lot faster than, you know, in Chico. Nobody saw that coming.”
But Bay Area celebrity chef Tyler Florence, who hosts shows on Food Network, said California needs to move away from disaster recovery and put energy into preventing these kinds of wildfires.
“This is not how we should be living,” said Florence. “This is fun and all, and the food’s great. We’re very proud of our volunteers at World Central Kitchen, but this is just a Band-Aid on the bigger problem, and the bigger solution is to figure out how to adjust to the new climate world we live in.”
Power poles are antiquated, and lines need to be underground, Florence said.
“They snap over like toothpicks, and they catch fields on fire, and they’re destroying our towns, and they’re destroying our tourism,” said Florence.