Plant-Based Culinary Trainings For City Of Toronto Shelter Chefs
Veg Food Bank executive director Matt Noble, Chef Amy Symington, Makayla Dewit from the Forward Food team, and City of Toronto shelter chefs and food & nutrition managers, during our training.
In September (2023), Toronto Vegetarian Food Bank partnered with Humane Society International Canada's Forward Food team to offer plant-based culinary training for a group of City of Toronto shelter chefs!
The full day in-person training was broken into morning and afternoon sessions, where the City cooks collaborated to prepare delicious plant-based meals that were served to the shelter residents for lunch and dinner!
Amy Symington, guiding City of Toronto shelter chefs through one of her plantlicious recipes
Lentil-Walnut Tacos with Mango Avocado Salsa from The Long Table Cookbook.
It was a fun team-building day, everyone loved the food, and chef Amy demonstrated plant-based versions of common meals like French toast with flax and soy milk as a cheap and healthy egg replacer, and tempeh mushroom lentil tacos.
Toronto Vegetarian Food Bank is deeply grateful for all the amazing work that chef Amy, the Forward Food team, and the City of Toronto shelter food & nutrition managers did to make this amazing day happen.
The City of Toronto is a Cool Food City, as well as a C40 Good Food City, and has committed to reducing food-related emissions by 25% by 2030.
We've been working with City staff and councillors on moving policy in a more plant-forward direction, and this culinary training was an exciting initiative to help insure the sustainability and success of the changes that the City is attempting to implement.
Our hope is that this inaugural training with be the first of many, and the start of an ongoing relationship with the City, to help make sure their plant-based offerings are well received by the populations they serve.
We are continuing our dialogue, to support the City and their chefs and food & nutrition managers in whatever way we can - in the shelter system and in long-term care, where meals are cooked in-house - and hope to have more exciting news about future partnerships soon!
In September (2023), Veg Food Bank board members Nital Jethalal and Matt Noble spoke at Toronto City Hall, at the Infrastructure & Environment Committee, about the City's environmental goals around food procurement and how the City can maximize these changes, while improving nutrition and animal welfare - and the committee passed a Motion to consider a plant-based food purchasing policy.
Updates on the outcome of that Motion will be coming soon!
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