Wasting food is far from being a negligible problem, both in Brazil and worldwide. According to United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, global food loss and waste amounts to about one-third of all food produced. Brazil is among the top ten food-wasting nations, the World Resources Institute reports, with about 40 thousand tons of food wasted every single year.
“I used to be horribly fussy about food,” admitted Ms Regina Tchelly, a 35-year-old cook and entrepreneur from Morro da Babilonia, Rio de Janeiro. “I wouldn’t go near anything that was wholegrain.”
For the past six years, though, she has been doing precisely that – and more. As head of the Favela Organica Project, Ms Tchelly has taught over 30,000 people how to grow their own vegetables in tiny spaces, to transform banana peels, broccoli stems, pumpkin shells and other improbable raw material into delicacies and to turn what they cannot use in the kitchen into compost for their home gardens.
The founder of Favela Organica came to Rio as a teenager and worked as a housemaid for many years before deciding to apply for seed funding from the Agencia de Redes Para Juventude (Youth Network Agency), a government programme for small-scale social entrepreneurship. That was in 2011, when Ms Tchelly set up her first workshop – in her own home.
“My main concern is to create a kind of gastronomy that is not elitist. My recipes try to create food that is beautiful and also has a lot of heartfelt memory – something that your grandmother could cook for you,” she said.
Ms Tchelly is about to bring her recipes and advice to a wider audience – her debut as the host of her own TV show at Futura, an educational channel that could be described as a kind of Brazilian Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), is scheduled for August.
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Source: Folha De S. Paulo, 24 June 2017