The Dream is Intact | University of Portland

The Dream is Intact

Portland Magazine

Alumni

June 9, 2020

Every day—even now, especially now—Fedele Bauccio ’64, ’66 is feeding people who need healthy food. In March he partnered with World Central Kitchen to feed passengers and crew quarantined on the Grand Princess cruise ship.

By Jessica Murphy Moo
Photos by Bart Nagel Photography

FEDELE BAUCCIO has spent most of the COVID-19 lockdown days on the phone in his home in San Francisco. There is nothing typical about this workday routine. Usually he is traveling around the country giving lectures on college campuses on sustainability, informing Congress about the effects of antibiotics on livestock, or checking on Bon Appétit Management Company’s more than 1,600 restaurant sites in museums, universities, and corporate campuses in 34 states. He was in New York opening 13 new sites at the Metropolitan Art Museum when the governor shut everything down.

He’s been taking long walks every morning to get some fresh air—following safety guidelines, wearing a mask, he’s quick to note. He goes to the Presidio in San Francisco, which has lots of open space. Some days he walks across the Golden Gate Bridge. If he needs to go to the grocery store, he gets on his Vespa.

In the evenings he gravitates toward the stove. He’s been cooking his mother’s tomato sauce, an act that somehow seems more prayer than preparation. He remembers watching her at work, remembers the smells of garlic, roasted peppers, onions, and oregano. In many ways, these fresh ingredients, and the family that would gather to eat together, are where his dreams for Bon Appétit really began.

He also says that cooking this dish is therapeutic, and therapy is good for him right now because social distancing protocols are, as he says, “driving me crazy.”

He doesn’t argue with the reasoning for the precautions. It’s just that he is not someone who sits still, and social distancing runs counter to his dream of building community, bringing people together, through food. Right now, with the stay-at-home mandates still in place, that dream can’t happen, and it’s been tough. The path forward for everyone—and particularly for the food industry—is unclear.

The vast majority of his restaurants and campus kitchens are shut down. Very few students remain on college campuses, and they get their food to go. Bauccio is worried about his employees—as of March there were 25,000 of them, working in spaces as wide ranging as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty, Google, Universal Studios, Twitter, Nordstrom, Adobe, and all manner of universities from coast to coast, including University of Portland. And then there are all the farmers, all the farmworkers, all the truck drivers, who are part of his supply chain too, and all of the people who live nearby who are hungry.

I admit I wondered if now might not be the right time to talk to Fedele Bauccio. He is carrying a big weight.

When I mentioned these feelings of caution to Kirk Mustain, general manager of University of Portland’s Bon Appétit services who has worked for Bauccio for 29 years, he said, “Seeing how someone works in times of adversity…these are the times that really matter. Fedele, he believes in what he’s doing.”

So I went ahead and made the call.

And he picked up because picking up the phone is something Fedele Bauccio is known to do.

Man serving food wearing maskAfter the news broke that the Grand Princess cruise ship was quarantined off the coast of California due to a COVID-19 outbreak onboard, he got a different kind of a call.

It was José Andrés, celebrity chef/humanitarian and founder of World Central Kitchen, the disaster food relief NGO.

“Can you get me a kitchen?” Andrés asked.

Bon Appétit Management Company runs the Marketplace Café at University of San Francisco, whose students happened to be on spring break when the Grand Princess crisis occurred. That meant there was space in the kitchen to work.

Bauccio confirmed that indeed he could get Andrés a kitchen, and the operation to feed the 3,500 passengers and crew began.

Within 12 hours of that phone call, the kitchen and food production were up and running in the Marketplace Café at USF, with World Central Kitchen staff and a range of 12 to 30 Bon Appétit associates on site each day, creating and packaging daily meals for the individuals quarantined on the ship. The assembly line included staff and volunteers from around the Bay Area. The chefs were responsible for cooking and handling the food, but Bon Appétit team members from all departments, drivers to executives, took part in the packaging and delivery. It was all hands on deck.

“Doing these kinds of things strengthens the culture of a company. We’re like a family at Bon Appétit,” Bauccio says. “That family comes together.”

With a core shared belief that food can change the world, Bauccio and Andrés have been partners before, and they will—no doubt—find ways to work together again.

Depending on the crisis and food relief needs, sometimes World Central Kitchen needs chefs. Sometimes they need contacts in a supply chain. Sometimes they need funding for operations or hardware such as water sanitation equipment.

Because Bon Appétit’s founding dream—the company has a “dream” rather than a mission statement—aims to give back to the community through healthy, sustainable food, Bauccio says volunteers from the company always rise to the occasion when a crisis hits.

“Our people step up,” Bauccio says. “It’s part of what we do. We bring people together, putting the right food into people’s bodies. I am really lucky.”

In recent years, Bon Appétit chefs have helped with hurricane relief in Puerto Rico, floods in Nebraska, and fires in California.

All told, the Bon Appétit-World Central Kitchen partnership made about 50,000 meals for passengers and crew of the Grand Princess cruise ship. They initially thought they’d need to bring the food over by helicopter, but the ship eventually docked in Oakland, and they were able to truck the food over and use a forklift to get the meals onboard.

The meals included the fresh ingredients Bon Appétit has built its reputation on. On the menu were salads, jambalaya, and soy-glazed salmon.

“You wouldn’t believe the notes I got from people saying, ‘This is the best food we got,’” Bauccio says.

Row of salads in boxes on tableThough he is eager to help, Bauccio remains very cautious about safety protocols, sanitation, and protecting his workers.

“I was scared to death,” he says of the potential proximity of his workers to those affected by COVID-19. “I worked to make sure our own people would be safe.” He was quick to make clear that none of his workers stepped foot on the ship.

As the effects of the virus on our society have unfolded, Bauccio has continued to explore options for using Bon Appétit-run kitchens to make food for people who need it. University kitchens have become what he calls community kitchens.

At the University of Chicago, the output is up to 225,000 meals per week going to homeless shelters and food-insecure communities. At Transylvania University in Lexington, KY, they are feeding homeless men who are taking residence in the dorms. And there are all manner of stories about his staff trying to bring good food and comfort to the few students remaining on college campuses.

When a company’s culture gives autonomy and creative license to chefs over their own menus, you get examples like the following: at Washington & Jefferson University, most of the remaining students are international students, so the chefs asked these students to tell them what their comfort foods were back home so they could try to recreate those meals for them. At University of Portland, the Bon Appétit chefs created 140 study snack-packs for students the weekend before finals. How beautiful, simple, and not-so-simple are gestures like these?

When I spoke to Bauccio, he was waiting on the city of San Francisco to give him the green light to feed houseless individuals taking shelter in local hotels. He gets frustrated with delays. He is ready to donate food—his generosity is a fact. He wants to get his people to work, and he wants to feed people who are hungry.

Many, many organizations have been calling him for help— the needs are great—but if he can’t guarantee the safety of his workers, he has to say no.

Safety continues to be a top priority. “The issue for me is protocol. I want to be sure our people are safe and come back with no harm.”

And these safety concerns extend to farm workers too. Bauccio has made it his life’s work to study and know Bon Appétit’s supply chain and improve it, whether that is through sustainable fisheries, advocating for farmworkers’ rights or animal welfare, or making connections between our food system and climate change. As he has gathered evidence, he has come to the conclusion that the model of agriculture that we use in this country is “broken,” and then he has set about looking for ways within his sphere of influence to make change.

An example: In 2009, Bauccio was at Washington University in St. Louis giving a lecture on sustainability. One of the students raised her hand and offered a challenge.

“Mr. Bauccio,” she asked, “do you know what’s going on in Immokalee, Florida, with the tomatoes?”

“I said, ‘No, I don’t know,’” Bauccio says, “‘but I’d like to know more. Come see me after this.’”

She told him there was slavery happening on farms there and that he shouldn’t be buying tomatoes from them.

We have all seen people in power receive challenging information. Let’s imagine, for one blessed moment, what the world might be like if all leaders responded in the following way.

He listened to this student.

Then he bought a plane ticket to Florida. He also brought with him a Washington Post reporter and a Bon Appétit chef who spoke the Central Mexican language that most of the workers spoke. (“I did my research,” Bauccio says.)

He wanted to see what was happening with his own eyes.

“They told me to get there at five in the morning,” he says. “It’s dark. I go to the center of this town, and all these Mexicans are getting on a bus. I follow them in a car, and they drive for about an hour and they go into the fields. I’m watching what’s going on, they’re not working, they’re just waiting for the sun to get up and the frost to get off the field. They’re not getting paid during this time. Finally, at 10 o’clock, it’s so damn hot, you need water. I’m looking around: there’s no bathrooms, there’s no water, there’s nothing. I snuck into the fields with the reporter. We actually got some pictures and stuff, and I saw young children.”

Then, with the help of his chef-interpreter, he met with some of the workers and started asking questions. He asked about conditions, and he asked about what workers needed. He also saw where some workers were being locked up.

“It was slavery,” he says.

In partnership with The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, an organization fighting for humane farm labor standards in Florida, he drew up a code of conduct and told the landowners of the four tomato farms in question that he wouldn’t buy their tomatoes until there were changes. At the time Bon Appétit wasn’t as big as it is today. “They laughed at me,” he says. For six to eight months they didn’t serve any tomatoes, an act that was applauded by students. Eventually, he got Chipotle and Whole Foods to join him, and changes came. The change wasn’t perfect, but it was a start, and he now has third-party auditors monitoring how farms are performing and treating their workers.

Fedele Bauccio and workers from Bon Appetit Management Company

Bon Appétit is now big enough to influence change on its own. Because his restaurants span the US, Bauccio knows the big picture of agriculture in this country. Talking to him is not only an education on the movement of produce—did you know that all tomatoes east of the Mississippi are grown in Florida, picked green, and treated in Texas before distribution?—but also about the ways in which certain practices are wreaking havoc on the environment and oceans.

Bauccio believes that part of the answer is in local, sustainable practices. Bon Appétit requires all his chefs to source 20 percent of food from a radius less than 150 miles. Bauccio also believes that another part of the answer is systemic.

From 2006 to 2008, he served on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. He fully absorbed the impact of animal waste on waterways and the environment; he saw chickens in battery cages and sows in places where they couldn’t move, practices he says are “disgusting” and that he no longer supports. He won a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award for his efforts to encourage socially responsible food practices, and the company has also been recognized by The Humane Society of the United States, Seafood Choices Alliance, and Food Alliance, among others.

Another partial answer to making change, in Bauccio’s view, is the role of young people. He listens to them.

Remember that young college student who raised her hand and called him out about the Florida tomato workers? Well, she went to work for him in the Bon Appétit fellowship program, where fellows tour and audit farms to make sure the farmers are making good on their promises.

“Students really get it,” he says. “They understand the whole world of sustainability and the environment and where we are today and how we need to make sure we do the right things for future generations. They get it a hell of a lot more than we do. I really believe the next generation is going to help us change the world in the right ways. At least that’s my dream.”

Given these views, it makes sense that he is so involved with universities and that a university is where he got his start.

His origin story has been written in these pages before, but it’s worth retelling. Fedele Bauccio got his start in the dining hall here at University of Portland. “I didn’t have any money to get through college, so I started washing dishes,” he says. Then he became a manager. Eventually, Fr. Waldschmidt, who was president of UP during Fedele’s junior year, handed young Fedele the keys to the kitchen.

“I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’” Fedele said.

“You’ll figure it out. It’ll be fine,” said Fr. Waldschmidt.

Turns out Fr. Waldschmidt was right. Fedele ran the food program while he was still a student. There were 800 students total at that time. He figured out how to get them breakfast and lunch, and then the whole student body had a sit-down dinner together.

Then he worked in the industry for about 20 years before starting a company of his own based on his dream of nutrition, quality ingredients, and sustainable practices. “People thought I was crazy,” he says. “They’d say, ‘This is not what this industry is about. You’re never going to make any money.’ It wasn’t about money for me. It was about how do we do something uniquely different to change an industry to help change the world?”

Helping to change the world is a big dream. And given the present circumstances, a lot of that dream is hanging in an uncomfortable balance.

With the need for social distancing, the pandemic has hit the food services industry hard. (If you haven’t read the New York Times piece about Prune restaurant in New York City, you should have a look at how the individual restaurant-owner is being impacted at this time.) Bauccio believes he can weather this storm, but the way forward is still unclear.

And in the meantime he has had to make some difficult decisions, including furloughs and salary cuts to the top tier.

It has been painful to furlough so many of his employees— more than 16,000 people—though he has maintained their health benefits and intentionally used the furlough option so that workers would be able to get unemployment immediately. The intention is to hire them back once we can begin to return to normal.

Though, as he says, “What will be the new normal?”

Right now he is waiting for the phone call from the San Francisco mayor, and he’s waiting for social distancing restrictions to slowly lift. He’s not sure how it will work. How long before people can eat together again? And what steps will come first? When will people even feel comfortable heading back to museums? When will universities and corporate campuses reopen, and even then, what is the safest way to feed people?

This is not a profile with a tidy closing. As we go to press, Fedele Bauccio is still worried. He is still on the phone. He is still going for walks to get some fresh air and calm his nerves. He is still heading to the kitchen in need of that holy therapy. He is still trying to get his people back to work, and he is still trying to find ways to feed the hungry. The truth is he doesn’t know the future any better than any of us knows it. What he does know is that he will emerge with his company’s dream intact.

JESSICA MURPHY MOO is the editor of Portland magazine.