Chef Alli Sosna: Stretching the Dollar for Healthy Food

MicroGreens reaches out to a seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion that, per­haps more than any other, has a real need for access to healthy food. “More often than not, a lot of the folks that are on SNAP are suf­fer­ing from health-related issues,” Sosna told Organic Connections. “They’re suf­fer­ing from either child­hood obe­sity or mal­nour­ish­ment. You can work with middle-class and more afflu­ent peo­ple on how to eat healthy—and I do—but you can also work with this huge pop­u­la­tion that needs the tools to just know, ‘If I buy 10 things at the gro­cery store, what are the healthy cheap 10 things that I should be buy­ing?’ That’s what MicroGreens really is all about—it’s just pur­chas­ing power and how to use and stretch your dollar.”

Teaching the Kids

MicroGreens works through school­child­ren. “I really wanted to use kids to lever­age that help at home, because kids are there to help,” Chef Sosna said.

“We work with sixth and sev­enth grade,” she explained. “It’s an eight-week pro­gram that we’re pilot­ing for an hour a week. It’s con­ducted by me and five other vol­un­teers who come to the class and donate their time to help teach the kids. The chil­dren are bro­ken into teams of four, with six­teen per pilot pro­gram. We teach them recipe build­ing and cook­ing skills so that each meal comes out to $3.50 per per­son for a fam­ily of four.

“As an exam­ple, this past Monday we did roasted chicken. The roasted chicken turns into chicken soup, and also into chicken salad. We’re teach­ing them that they can get 12 meals out of one chicken. It’s pretty effec­tive when the kids see how far you can stretch a chicken.”

From Child to Parent to White House

This edu­ca­tion is then passed from the chil­dren to the parents—and fol­lowed up by MicroGreens. “We send them home that day with food for a fam­ily of four,” Sosna con­tin­ued. “Afterward, we go through the process of surveys—a begin­ning sur­vey, mid-term sur­vey, end-of-term sur­vey, and then a six-month sur­vey follow-up with these kids. Through that time we ana­lyze the data of how this is affect­ing the kids: Are they eat­ing more at home, cook­ing more at home, cook­ing more with their fam­i­lies, going to the gro­cery store more? Are their par­ents cook­ing more? Are they more aware?”

Sosna her­self also has direct inter­ac­tion with par­ents. “After every class, when the kids get picked up from school, I meet the moms, I meet the dads, and we talk,” she said. “We talk about what they strug­gle with at home. We offer tips, ways to eat bet­ter and healthy.”

Although the MicroGreens pro­gram has been in oper­a­tion only a short while, it has attracted con­sid­er­able notice—including that of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move pro­gram. “The fact that the folks from the White House called and said, ‘Hey, come tell us more about this pro­gram,’ tells me it is really hit­ting home to a lot of peo­ple,” said Sosna. “We’ll be meet­ing with them next week. We’re also hop­ing to launch in Philly and in Delaware next year, and just grow from there. It’s really exciting.”

A Growing Purpose

For Chef Sosna, the path that led her to pro­vide access to healthy food for the under­priv­i­leged was a mul­ti­step process. It actu­ally began when she was quite young.

“I had always been a mobile kid,” Sosna related. “I was always active. I was always on a sports team—athletics were def­i­nitely my first love. When I got to col­lege, I was on the row­ing team. As I was get­ting more and more into sports, I real­ized just how much food affected my body. Everything I was putting in had a dif­fer­ent effect on my body, whether it got me bet­ter sleep or more strength.

“Then I lived in Italy in my junior year and saw a whole dif­fer­ent side of food that I had never seen before in America. Food affects their culture—food is their cul­ture. And so when I was there I decided I wanted to do some­thing with food and people.

“That got me into the food world. I worked in every kind of food out­let, from cater­ing to retail to fine din­ing. As I was learn­ing the food side of it, I wanted to give back to my com­mu­nity more. I mean, feed­ing rich peo­ple is fun and all, but it can only take you so far.”

DC Central Kitchen

Through another chef for whom Sosna worked, she dis­cov­ered DC Central Kitchen—an estab­lished non­profit that works to edu­cate and empower pre­vi­ously incar­cer­ated and home­less indi­vid­u­als. It was through DC Central Kitchen that Sosna began work­ing in school food.

Click any image to enlarge.

“During that time, I unin­ten­tion­ally got into school food because I was the sous chef of Fresh Start, the cater­ing com­pany owned and oper­ated by DC Central Kitchen,” Sosna said. “They pro­moted me to be the direc­tor of cater­ing, and we had this one school that served 77 kids, all boys, in a not-so-great area of DC. It was a pri­vate school, and the food was okay—but we had a decent bud­get and I just said, ‘Why aren’t we cook­ing any­thing fresh? We have a good bud­get, so let’s do some­thing with the food.’

“We started with basics. We got fresh let­tuce in; we got fresh veg­eta­bles in. Next we began sourc­ing locally. We were sim­ply build­ing on it, and sure enough, a few blog­gers and the media took notice. Then we had Jeff Mills, the Food Service Director of DC pub­lic schools, come in. He said, ‘I want this food on every plate, and every kid in DC eat­ing this food.’

“By the time I left this past June, we were feed­ing over 4,000 or 5,000 kids every day in the DC pub­lic school sec­tor. They now have 10 schools that they’re feed­ing. When I left, I left know­ing that I had fed over a mil­lion healthy meals to kids in DC. It is by far the best thing I have ever done as a chef.”

It was while she was at DC Central Kitchen that Sosna started mak­ing the obser­va­tions that led to her found­ing MicroGreens. “While I was at DC Central Kitchen, I saw that chil­dren were eat­ing 90 per­cent of their meals at school. There was a lot of out­reach, with chef demos and get­ting kids to talk about veg­eta­bles. But the ques­tion became, how do you help fill the edu­ca­tion gap between the child and the par­ents, so that when the child comes home and asks for sweet pota­toes, mom and dad know where you get the sweet potato and know how cook the sweet potato?

“At the same time nation­ally we were see­ing the most-ever peo­ple in the United States apply­ing for SNAP—almost 20 per­cent of Americans to this day are now on food stamps. So the next thing I really wanted to focus on was see­ing the edu­ca­tion gap shift, and to work with folks who are liv­ing within a spe­cific bud­get, who have this spe­cific eco­nomic con­straint, and to use kids to lever­age that help. So that’s where MicroGreens started.”

Social Enterprise

Today Sosna con­tin­ues to expand MicroGreens, sup­port­ing it with her cater­ing com­pany, Allison Sosna Group Benefit, LLC. That com­pany per­forms pri­vate chef ser­vices such as din­ner par­ties and cock­tail parties—but a per­cent­age from every client billed goes to MicroGreens.

“We are cur­rently going through the non­profit IRS process, and we can’t apply for grants just yet because we haven’t fin­ished that process,” Sosna con­cluded. “It’s a way for us to con­tinue fund­ing for MicroGreens in the interim.

“But every­thing that I work on that is tech­ni­cally under my legal name or with a part­ner will always give a per­cent­age to MicroGreens. I’m a strong believer in social enter­prise. I’m a strong believer in busi­nesses hav­ing a respon­si­bil­ity to do good as they grow and as a part of their culture.”

To find out more about MicroGreens, please visit www.microgreensproject.org.

For more on Chef Alli Sosna, go to www.chefallisosna.com.