FOOD FOR THOUGHT

A former US president, a chef and 15 women launch an unlikely revolution, writes CHRISTINA KO

THE EXCESSES of haute gastronomy will seem foreign to those who inhabit the depths of poverty in gloomy Sarcelles, a suburb of France best known as a backdrop for the infamous riots of 2005. Michelin stars, proprietary cooking pots and market-fresh ingredients are figments of fiction here, a reality far, far away from more prosaic concerns such as feeding the kids and making ends meet.

It’s been a long time since Alain Ducasse has had to deal with problems such as these, but now he’s involved himself with 15 women who do so on a daily basis.

These women have Bill Clinton to thank for the attention. When he formed the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005, he encouraged global thought leaders to think big and innovative in order to combat the world’s major issues. It’s easy to assume he was addressing powers larger than ourselves – MNCs with budgets and CSR divisions, as opposed to celebrated French chefs. But from that call to arms emerged 15 Femmes en Avenir (15 Women with a Future), a philanthropic programme that plucked immigrant women aged 26 to 40 from the streets of Sarcelles and plunged them into 15 of Ducasse’s restaurants in France.

The programme officially began in September 2010, but the idea was brewing for a year beforehand, when posters were put up to announce the concept. Eighty-five women applied, who were then screened for basic education (“To make sure they’re able to succeed in this world, so just the minimum,” explains Ducasse’s business partner Laurent Plantier) and then selected not by previous culinary training, but by motivation. If they complete the programme and also successfully earn a state CAP diploma, then they are guaranteed a fulltime job at one of Ducasse’s establishments. In the months since September, these women have split their time between cooking school and earning in-the-kitchen experience, as well as interacting with the media, who have lapped up this sensational story.

And why shouldn’t we? It has that heady mix of celebrity, sentimentality and vision that makes reporters drool, a fact that Ducasse et al were counting on. “There are only a limited number of people we could help; we’re not such a huge company that we can train and hire 100 people,” says Plantier. “The idea is to create an awareness that if someone like Alain Ducasse, who is very high-end, could train people who know nothing about food, and be able to train them enough to have a job in one of our restaurants, then anybody can do it. We wanted to do something that would not only help the women but also create an awareness for other companies to do the same.”

The obvious irony aside – that these women are cooking up a future by preparing the very food that they cannot afford – this has the makings of an idea that many restaurants can replicate easily, high-end or not. When one of Ducasse’s restaurants closed down for renovations in December, leaving one of the 15 trainees hanging, he called fellow chef Alain Dutournier. “He said, ‘Yes, I know about your idea, I read about it, I like it, please send the girl to me.’ It was one try and it was accepted, so we think that this is an idea that will be well received by other chefs.”

Ducasse himself has earned no small amount of publicity with this initiative, whether by design or coincidence – a French documentary crew has even followed him to Hong Kong to record his every move, including interviewing this journalist about her thoughts on 15 Femmes. Both the number and format of this scheme beg comparison with Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant and his Jamie’s Kitchen TV show, in which 15 disadvantaged youths were trained to run a restaurant, but Ducasse isn’t about to do the same, whether or not it will earn greater noise for his approach.

“I’m not in that trend of TV programmes. The chefs who are doing that on TV are very good at that, but I need to be in my restaurant, and if I’m spending all my time in the TV studio I can’t do that,” he says.

“Apart from when I’m talking to journalists, most of the time I’m in the kitchen. When I travel, I arrive here, I go to the kitchen, I try [the food], I discuss the dishes. I do tastings to develop the orientation of the recipes.”

Although these women are beneficiaries of his scheme and have been subject to the questions of some reporters, they haven’t been made into media puppets, paraded in front of cameras as examples of poor ladies done good. Nor will they be shipped off to one of Ducasse’s outposts around the world – “From Sarcelles to go to Paris is already a journey,” he points out.

They will, hopefully, discover an enthusiasm for cooking, as Ducasse once did. “My grandmother cooked perfectly, and one day, because I smelled good food, I decided to be a cook. It’s very simple.” And perhaps that simple passion will drive them, the way it did Ducasse, to forge a revolution – if not one that will change the world, at least one that will change their own lives.