An Ex-Noma Chef Has a Plan to Serve Better Food for US Prisoners
Dan Giusti is bringing professional chefs into penitentiaries to help inmates cook for each other. So far, it’s working.
Chicken and chickpea stew, rice, pita, and tomato and cucumber salad, an example of a recent meal at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham.
Source: Impact Justice
At 29, Dan Giusti was in charge of the kitchen at Noma in Copenhagen, widely considered the best restaurant in the world. Two years later, in 2015, he announced he was leaving to start Brigaid, a for-profit company with the mission of transforming institutional kitchens, often neglected in places such as schools, hospitals and senior centers. Since its inception the following spring, Brigaid has placed 42 professional chefs in 20 school districts in five US states.
In February the company began a pilot program called Chefs in Prisons with Impact Justice, a California-based nonprofit in criminal justice reform. Through it, Giusti installed Brigaid chef Colin Freeman in the Maine Department of Corrections (MDOC). An alumnus of acclaimed Israeli restaurant Zahav in Philadelphia, Freeman serves as a culinary liaison to the state’s correctional facilities in Charleston, Warren and Windham.