Feed Louisville Executive Chef Callie Critchelow talks working to combat food injustice in Louisville
photos by Robbie Dobbs
Callie Critchelow, a queer chef in Louisville, had been working as a sous chef at a fine dining restaurant in town for eight years or so when she had the realization, “I just got tired of feeding rich white people,” she remembers. Now, she’s the executive chef of Feed Louisville, an organization dedicated to getting food to those who need it and, as she says, “I don’t believe I ever will go back.”
Prior to December 2022, Critchelow hadn’t heard of Feed Louisville, but in her research for new opportunities, she found a posting for a line cook position at the organization and was immediately drawn to the mission. “The moment we started talking about it, I was just like, ‘Okay, this seems like something a little more purposeful, a way to actually put a little good back in the world,’” she remembers.
It’s not hard to see why Critchelow was so taken by Feed Louisville. The nonprofit works to combat food injustice by collecting leftover or otherwise to-be-thrown-out ingredients from local restaurants and retailers, repurposing them into complete meals and dispersing them across the community via partner organizations. When the organization first started during the pandemic, it worked only with restaurants that found themselves with an excess of ingredients at the end of the day. Now, Feed Louisville partners with even more restaurants in addition to Dare to Care Food Bank, major grocery stores and more.
“About 30 percent of all viable food that the U.S. has to offer ends up in the landfill, which is a huge waste” Critchelow shares. “But we come scoop it up and we mix and match all the different pieces, turn it into nutritious meals and get it back out to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access.”
While the organization may be young, it has the steps down to a deliberate, intentional process. “First thing we do is send out our drivers – we go pick [the food] up,” Critchelow explains. “We bring it in, we weigh it all and then we go through and triage it. First priority is always our production kitchen, the meals that we produce each day. We split off everything the chefs can use to make meals, raw ingredients, all that type of stuff. … Then we go down our list of partner agencies and we have profiles on all of them about who they serve, what times of day they serve, what ages they serve – things like that. And we go down the list and see what we can send where.”
As far as where exactly these meals go, Feed Louisville focuses on the unhoused community and those facing any kind of food insecurity. “People always think it’s just the unhoused folks, but food insecurity is prevalent in the majority of households all around the world,” Critchelow says. “It’s the choice between paying the electric bill or having food in the fridge for a week. That’s food insecurity.”
Since its founding during the pandemic, the nonprofit has grown exponentially thanks to buy-in from food rescue partners and support from the community. As far as why it’s been able to grow so fast? Critchelow says it’s because of the need. “The moment you start doing work like this,” she relates, “it’s eye-opening. The moment you step in and you hand someone their first meal, five more people will appear the moment you make that safe space, that introduction, because food’s the only universal concept we really have. Everybody has to eat. So no matter what anyone’s going through, if the first question you start with is, ‘Are you hungry?’ and you’re doing something about that, then you create a level of trust there.”
The ability to so earnestly create a space like that and a deliberate place of inclusion and support, Critchelow considers, is in a large part due to the queerness in the organization’s leadership. “When you have marginalized folks and you move them into leadership, they have a tendency to lead with more empathy and more compassion,” she maintains. “We already know how it feels – why on earth, if you’ve felt like that, would you want to ever make anyone else feel that way? And that’s the goal here. We lead with compassion.”
In addition, a great deal of who Feed Louisville serves is folks on the street, many of whom are LGBTQ individuals who have been kicked out and are now fending for themselves. And when they have often been scorned by their family on principles of religion, it’s unlikely they’ll turn to the faith-based organizations that work to support those unhoused. But with the Feed Louisville team, Critchelow emphasizes, “we’re service industry refugees. There’s a kinship there in the outcast or the misunderstood or the marginalized. And having folks like that in our organization and working in it just builds that level of trust with the community that we’re serving because a lot of them have been in the same boat.”
Now, this deep into the work of Feed Louisville, Critchelow looks back at her fine dining past and admits it was hard, but knows that this work is a different kind of hard. Whereas at her previous job, the work ended when the stations were cleaned and floors were mopped, the work here never ends. But Critchelow is unequivocally committed to pushing forward and making as much of a difference as she and her team can make. “It’s easier to get up in the morning to come and do this work because it’s easier for me to sleep at night knowing that I did something worthwhile today,” she says. “We’re not going to solve world hunger, but we’re going to put a dent in it.”
