The road that has delivered Becca Self to her current career – as an educator and innovator specializing in sustainable food systems – is one that she calls a “crooked path.”
The founder and executive director of the Lexington nonprofit FoodChain, Self grew up in Lexington as the daughter of two educators – her mother a high school French teacher, and her father a philosophy professor at the University of Kentucky. Self studied math and science at MSTC – a competitive math, science, engineering and technology program at Dunbar High School – before pursuing a degree in architecture at MIT and then pursuing a career teaching chemistry and physics at the high school level. Eventually, Self transitioned to teaching in a Montessori school setting and, in 2004, moved back to Lexington, where she took a job as the science and sustainability instructor at Montessori Middle School of Kentucky.
Her experience at that school ultimately signaled a profound shift in not only Self’s career path but her own psyche, particularly as she was tasked with helping transition the school’s relatively traditional science program into something called a “land-based curriculum.”
“I agreed to it, having absolutely no idea what that meant,” she said with a laugh. The aim of the program, as Self discovered, is to impart middle schoolers with an appreciation and understanding of major scientific principles by using the natural world and agriculture as a teaching ground.
“A very obvious answer to that, particularly for adolescents, is food,” Self said.
Food – where it comes from, how we get it, and how we prepare and share it – has been a central part of Self’s career ever since. In 2008, she left the classroom, due to what she described as a growing personal conflict about teaching what she believes should be widespread skills to a small population within the private school sector.
“My kids go to Montessori, I am a huge fan of Montessori, but I personally was conflicted [by] the challenge of, basically, who has access to this kind of education and who doesn’t,” Self said. She began looking for ways to bring these messages and food-based education to a broader audience, as well as to historically underserved populations in the community.
“I embarked on my own inventory of what was going on in Lexington,” Self said. She soon met Ryan Koch, who at the time was the executive director of SeedLeaf, a Lexington non-profit that focuses on educational efforts largely centering on community gardening.
“I basically kept showing up and volunteering [at SeedLeaf] until he just gave me a title,” she said. She was eventually named education director of SeedLeaf, a job she held for several years before, motivated to focus on additional intentional and creative approaches to food education, she broke off in 2011 to focus on developing FoodChain.
FoodChain staff: Rebecca Self, Kristin Hughes, Morgan Miller, Leandra Forman, LaTiphia Brewer, Kaitlyn Dykstra (l-r). Photo furnished
FoodChain began in 2011 as Kentucky’s first indoor aquaponic farm, utilizing a method that combines tilapia fish farming in an urban, indoor setting, with soilless plant production. The process works in a loop, with the plants serving as a filtration system for the fish’s water and the fish waste serving as fertilizer for the plants, which are edible (lettuces and herbs).
Among the many catalysts that led to the formation of FoodChain is its location. The organization is housed inside the Bread Box building, the renovated former Rainbow Bread factory at the intersection of Sixth and West Jefferson streets that also houses a number of other innovative local businesses and organizations, including West Sixth Brewing, which is co-owned by Self’s husband, Ben Self. (The Selfs played a large role in overseeing the entire Bread Box project, from renovations to tenant placement.) Not only are the architectural bones of the building itself created to house a food facility, Self explained, but the location – in the middle of a demographically diverse residential neighborhood with no grocery store within a square mile – lends itself to a facility centering on food education. Studies have shown that lack of access to nutrition can lead to a cascade of problems, such as lower test scores for school-age children, lower immune system function and chronic health issues such as heart disease and diabetes.
Since its inception, FoodChain has evolved into a multifaceted facility that includes a teaching and processing kitchen, a gathering space for communal meals and a community space dedicated to increasing fresh food access and providing living wage jobs. And, in the weeks since COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the world, Self and her team have embarked on yet another crooked path, quickly switching gears to find ways to apply their organization’s mission toward the rapidly changing needs surrounding food security within the Lexington community.
FoodChain’s teaching and processing kitchen offers cooking and nutrition workshops and demonstrations for all ages, including after-school and summer classes for youth. Photo furnished
“Our mission is to forge links between the community and fresh food, using education and demonstration of sustainable and innovative food systems,” Self explained, when asked to describe FoodChain’s work during “normal” times. “That’s a big old mouthful – [but] at the heart of that is just finding as many different ways as possible to connect people to their food.”
On March 17 of this year – the first week that Fayette County Schools were officially out and that restaurants had been ordered to shut down to in-person dining – FoodChain’s mission of “connecting people to their food” saw its nine-person team coordinating, creating and distributing over 50 hot meals a day for the growing community of people in need. It was a quickly cooked-up system that called upon a recipe that, while new to everyone involved, was not wholly unfamiliar to the FoodChain team: The utilization of unused ingredients from local restaurants; coordinating with existing contacts at organizations such as Community Action Council and family resource centers to get the food into the hands of those who needed it; and reliance on the skilled execution of FoodChain’s staff, which was already accustomed to thinking on its toes and at turning whatever ingredients are available and them into viable meals.
“We [talked] internally to figure out, as it was clear this crisis was coming, ‘what can we do?’” Self said. “If there is a common theme at Food Chain, it is often, ‘let’s find a gap, and try to fill that gap.’”
By the end of that first week, the number of meals put together and distributed by the FoodChain staff had grown to more than 150 per day; a month later, the organization has had its hand in the distribution of somewhere in the ballpark 20,000 meals. Over 5,300 of those meals were in the form of lunches distributed to families of school children during spring break week, and a large bulk of the effort has now been focused on a new program called Nourish Lexington (see sidebar on following page), which helps get hot meals in the hands of those in need. The program, a partnership between FoodChain, VisitLex, the EE Murry Foundation, Keeneland and others, also utilizes out-of-work restaurant workers, paying them for shifts.
Coordinating with so many different entities to meet consistently growing and shifting needs during such a stressful time – while also maintaining social distancing and dealing with the day-to-day hardships of life during a pandemic – has not been a small order. Self is quick to emphasize that her staff at FoodChain and their community partners have all worked tirelessly to make these programs a success.
“There is a colossal collaboration behind it,” she said. “It is a practically impossible mathematical equation to solve, and the variables keep changing every day.”
Thankfully, she added, it’s been a case of “many hands making lighter work.”
“It is definitely a daunting task, but it has brought out the best in a lot of people, and fostered a collaborative spirit,” she said. “That’s been the real silver lining of this crisis.”
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FoodChain will produce and distribute more than 20,000 hot meals during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Photo furnished
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FoodChain will produce and distribute more than 20,000 hot meals during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Photo furnished
About Nourish Lexington
In early April, several community partners joined forces to start Nourish Lexington, an initiative designed to address the growing food insecurities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Piloted at FoodChain’s kitchen facility on West Jefferson and Sixth streets, the program utilizes the skills and talents of unemployed or furloughed restaurant workers, who are paid for four-hour shifts as they create hundreds of meals each night.
Meals are distributed to hospitality industry families, families in need, seniors in affordable housing apartment complexes and children and their families through family resource coordinators. Food distribution is held at 5:30 p.m. each weekday, utilizing a handful of distribution points. To see which locations are being utilized for the week, visit nourishlexington.org.
In addition to FoodChain, founding partners include the EE Murry Foundation, Keeneland and VisitLex. In its first week of distribution, the program helped deliver over 6,300 meals to those who are food insecure, including over 2,300 school lunches.
Becca Self demonstrates FoodChain’s aquaponic fish farm, which utliizes a method that combines indoor tilapia fish farming with soilless plant production. Photo furnished
Becca Self and her husband, Ben Self – high school sweethearts who will be celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary this summer – live with their twin 5-year-old children. She recently took a few moments out of a very busy week to answer a few questions about the inception and evolution of FoodChain, and what she has learned during this unprecedented time.
The creation of the Bread Box was a huge undertaking for your family. What’s a standout memory from the renovation of the building, which has now become a community hub and home to so many great organizations? For FoodChain’s part, the first time we put fish in the farm was pretty historic. It was Good Friday 2013, and the momentousness of the day seems particularly apropos! The first opening to the outdoors, when sunlight came into the former locker room/bathroom (now Smithtown Seafood), was pretty special too.
Can you share a story of the early planning of Food Chain and how it took shape from dream project to reality? Has your initial vision for the organization changed or shifted over the past 10 years, and if so, how? FoodChain has its roots in lots of initial conversations, but the one I recall most vividly was sitting on the porch of [Midway restaurant] Holly Hill Inn dreaming with [that restaurant’s chef/owner] Ouita Michel about the need and opportunity to tie the local food movement more directly with food insecurity, and how education could be a part of that. Later on, visiting the Plant in Chicago was also a real eye-opener in terms of seeing how underutilized food spaces could become opportunities for a mash-up of different, interrelated functions. Finally, I fondly recall working late at night with a dear friend to come up with the name FoodChain, and how perfect it felt when she suggested it.
Tell us any thoughts you might have about ways that navigating life in the time of a pandemic may change life moving forward – both on a personal level, and as a society. I worry about if we’ll be able to gather together in the same way we did before the pandemic. So much of what I love and what I think is critical about the work we do at FoodChain involves being together – learning together, growing together, cooking together, eating together. It’s hard to imagine links in a chain that don’t interlock. But I know technology will be able to provide some alternatives and substitutions. And hopefully, over time, we’ll be able to get back to more human connections and in-person interactions.
When the COVID-19 threat is past, what are you most looking forward to? Being with other people and sharing a meal.
How are you and the FoodChain staff managing to recharge during this challenging time? Recharging might be a bit of an overstatement – processing might be more accurate. The crisis, I think, requires everyone to return to a lot of their most basic coping strategies and find comfort in whatever is most primitive to their personality. No doubt food is part of that, and eating good food is pretty critical – even if it’s caloric and comforting! And cooking is a major part of that, particularly if you have the opportunity to cook for others. Finally, communication has been paramount. Time is sometimes the most limiting factor, but finding a way to talk with others, even if it’s venting off steam using whatever platform you have available, is absolutely critical to me, personally.