«My travels taste like salt». He says it smiling Giovanni Soldini while presenting his solidarity recipe proposed in collaboration with AmrefAfrica’s largest healthcare organization, and My Cooking Boxan Italian company producing Premium Meal Kits for the preparation of gourmet Italian dishes, in support of the campaign Hunger is not a game. The occasion is World Food Day. The common objective is to promote social justice by committing to the right to health and adequate nutrition on the African continent where 1 in 5 people suffer from hunger and the lives of millions of people are therefore at risk.
Amref and My Cooking Box have developed a special box dedicated to the project thanks to which, for each purchase, 2.50 euros will be donated to Amref in favor of the activities it promotes in Burkina Faso. Explains Chiara Rotafounder of the company that produces Meal Kits: «For me and for us at My Cooking Box, food is not only a necessity, but also a symbol of hope, care and life. In a context of crisis like the one Burkina Faso is going through, we feel a profound duty to do our part…Every box sold becomes a concrete gesture of solidarity, but also a message of hope to make a difference. We are geographically distant from Africa, but we are united by humanity and the desire to share a precious commodity with those who are less fortunate: food. It makes me happy to think that our participation can be a drop towards a better tomorrow, because no one should face hunger and the deprivation of dignity and future.”
«In Burkina Faso, where our intervention will be concentrated with this collaboration, it is estimated that there are around 587 thousand children who do not have sufficient quantities of food available», says Guglielmo Micucci, Director of Amref Italia, «our work is in the communities and especially in the canteens of a district that includes eleven schools, to reach over 3000 children”. Ocean navigator Giovanni Soldini contributes a personal recipe for the special box and on each packaging there is a QR Code, see the video recipe made by Soldini. «Pasta and chickpeas is a simple but nutritious recipe, which I often make on a boat. Ideal for this initiative, which focuses on the dramatic food difficulties of many African communities, often caused by drought and global warming. Legumes are perfect, because they require little water.”
What has your life as a “navigator” taught you about food and food waste?
«When you go on long voyages, the boat is a small world that replicates the problems of the world on a scale and teaches you to carefully manage every form of waste and dispersion. We travel with the essentials, we look for solutions that respond to problems such as storage without a refrigerator and disposal, bulk and weight. I never give up cooking, I don’t use freeze-dried foods and this requires organisation.”
How do you manage food on the boat?
«Generally we make a weekly menu, so we prepare the foods dividing them by days and weeks. In this way we manage the packaging and also the waste bin better and we do not have problems with shortages or excess stocks. We are careful not to buy food in plastic packaging and we cook everything using the pressure cooker, also saving energy and fresh water.”
Can you tell us the recipe you chose?
«I chose to prepare pasta and chickpeas because it is a dish that I love very much and which is always on my boat menus. It is nutritious, rich in fiber and proteins, easy to prepare, it is tasty and even in the middle of the ocean it is a great comfort. It is a traditional dish of Italian cuisine but it seemed perfect for this Amref project because chickpeas are a sustainable food, easy to grow, adapt to different soils and require little water.”
What memory or image connects to Africa?
«I was in Namibia this year, the deserts are beautiful, these incredible landscapes come to mind. Another memory, from the sea, is more shocking because there at night I happened to come across huge foreign fishing ships plundering the resources off those coasts.”
Your observation point of the world is different from the land: how do you see it from the sea?
«It’s definitely a different point of view because nature and the sea put you back in a more human dimension. They remind you that man doesn’t control much and that nature is at the center of everything.”
Source: Vanity Fair
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