This is a collaboration between Feed Evansville, the City of Evansville and the Commission on Food Insecurity.
Lisa Vaughan, chair of Feed Evansville, said this is finally happening after years of work through multiple agencies.
They’ll be revamping existing kitchen space along with two sizable rooms currently occupied by the Evansville Police Foundation, which will move to different rooms.
Vaughan said this state of the art community kitchen “will be used for food insecurity programs for gleaning purposes, rescuing food, reallocating food, and also then for social situations in the community center, and also educational situations and programming.”
She said 20-percent of Evansville residents report experiencing food insecurity, and fighting food insecurity includes reclaiming food that might have been wasted.
“There's a lot of food that gets wasted throughout not only in the surrounding areas, but within our city alone that we could take and repurpose and do different things within that kitchen,” she said. “And it's also a kitchen that is going to be ServSafe. It's going to be commercial grade. So nonprofits can go to the kitchen and do their food programming.”
She said an example of repurposing could be accepting thousands of pounds of potatoes from farmers, with which they could deconstruct with their equipment and freeze. They could be turned into hash brownsand served later.
“Sometimes we have to turn those donations away from the gleaning, the farmers, because we don't have a place, a cooler or freezer to put them in,” she said.
She says reclamation activities, where donations are received and preserved for later, could happen weekly because of the equipment and the freezer space they’ll have.
Vaughan says 40-percent of Evansville neighborhoods are food deserts — areas that lack a grocery store.
“So we're really hoping that this helps eliminate some food insecurity, provides economic development then also socialization and harmony within our community members,” Vaughan said.
While a fee schedule is not set, commercial businesses will be able to rent the space as well, but it will be free of charge for non-profit organizations.
She said she hopes it can be complete by fall of 2024.
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