You have a fascinating personal journey. How did your passion for cooking begin and what have been your major influences?

I was born in Milan. My father and my mother were restaurateurs. I grew up with my grandmother, Rosa, in a countryside village in Southern Italy. She was a farmer and used to make her own wine, her own cheese, her own pasta; she fed her rabbits, made pizza and cooked her own bread. And she shared all that with her village.

From that time, I remember two episode that made me the man I am now.

My grandmother used to wake up every Sunday morning to make this huge amount of fresh pasta for the whole family, called cavatelli, which has a very particular shape I love. We, the kids, didn't really want to go to church; all we wanted was to get back home and finally eat the pasta Rosa made that very morning for us.

And there is another episode. I was cleaning sweet peas with my grandfather, Augusto, on a very long flight of stairs when I was about 8 years old. When we were done cleaning this huge amount of peas, I stood up and tossed all the peas down the stairs by accident. It was an avalanche of peas. My grandfather went completely mad. Now that I am 43 years old, I totally understand his rage: he had put so much effort and care into planting, growing, caring, picking and cleaning the peas, that to see all that effort wasted in the stairs was horrible. I learned then how important it is to grow your own food and the care you put into it. It's not a commodity you toss just like that.

Your love for cooking and for traveling has taken you to different countries. How has this influenced your vision, which combines world class cuisine with social inclusion and kindness?  

When I started to travel, I went from Norway to Mexico to Singapore and Moscow and Spain, and everything in between. It was a cultural shock for me. As I said, in Italy we grow up with very good food. It is our heritage. So, I thought everything outside my country would not be very good. But I got a fire of reality and removed all my prejudice about food that was not Italian.

In these travels, the spark that lit the fire that is now burning in Geneva about social inclusion happened in the United States where I lived for seven years; specifically in Los Angeles which has an immense population of homelessness. This is not news for anyone, but for me, being a cook, was particularly shocking.

On a weekend, I approached a sweet lady that was serving soup to the homeless in Venice Beach. I told her I run the restaurant Piccolo Paradiso in the alley next to them and would love to give them my hand-made soup, exactly like we prepare it at the restaurant. Me and my team, I said, would love to participate in your effort to serve the community. It would be even greater because we could recycle our unsold menu and avoid wasting food. But the lady told me there was a law forbidding to give away free food from a business. That totally raged me: there was a law that preferred to put a legal constraint on feeding people than facilitating it.

I started to reflect on how it is possible that a person like me, who cooks for 12 hours a day, consumes so many ingredients, cannot have an impact on his own community? I thought why the restaurant business, or the food and beverage industry could not be inclusive instead of exclusive. As an industry, we are the biggest consumer of food. So why not have a socially inclusive restaurant? That's how it started.

Since then, I have this very activist position, both on the production and the waste side, and on the receiver side: those vulnerable persons in need. They deserve kindness, the dignity that is their right as human beings.

Then I came to Geneva, while it is not Rome and there aren’t a lot of agencies dedicated to food, it still represents a humanitarian endeavor. I thought if there is a place where I can have an impact, and can propagate the idea of equity, is here.

Since I am a cook. I went down to my basic unit, a restaurant.

In 2018 I designed a restaurant called The Fifth Day, where every fifth day of the week, we took all the unsold food, and we invited the homeless from the community to enjoy a special experience, much richer, than just receiving food. In Geneva there is no starvation, not severe malnutrition. But still, when a person loses a job, is experiencing hardship, is homeless, a political refugee, still deserves dignity.

So, I offered the restaurant itself. At a restaurant someone smiles at you, serves you, welcomes you; there is good music, good china (porcelain), good drinks and good food. It was fantastic! Everyone went crazy because the restaurant was so beautiful.

After a while, I closed the private company to open a non-profit organization, the Mater Fondazione, to be more coherent in my daily operations and created the Reffettorio Geneva.

How did you start your activism to enshrine the right to food in the Geneva Constitution, and now aim to do the same for the European Union?

While I am still cooking, running a restaurant and have many projects, I work to have an impact in the entire food system.

I defend the right to food by my own means. I am not an academic, I am not a writer, I am not a politician. I am a worker and demand the right to say what is important. And for my profession, it is the right to food.

I thought if the right to food was enshrined in the constitution there would be no need to have an inclusive restaurant like mine. So, we decided to propose a referendum. But then things went in a bit different way because a representative from the Parliament proposed a law, which had to be voted for by the people anyway.

Instead of preparing the referendum, I thought we should put together the civil society: people like me, but also academics, scientists, business people, all at the same table. There we decided to write a Manifesto on the right to food and translated it into 15 languages.

We took the Manifesto to the Food Summit and were invited to the Policy Against Hunger Conference in Berlin. I was in the same working group with the current chair of the CFS, Nosipho Jezile. She dismissed my concerns for being only a chef. “Who would know more than you in a matter you do every day? she said. Later, at the CFS 51 meeting, we gave our Manifesto to each state delegation.

This contributed to enshrining the right to food in the Canton of Geneva, which is the first in Europe. Now we are in a commission that is making a recommendation on how to implement the law.

Afterwards, we came up with the idea to do the same for Europe. It turns out there is a mechanism called the European Citizen Initiative, where seven citizens can get together and, with the support of a million citizens throughout the member states, can propose a legislative piece. If the commission accepts, this forces the Parliament to discuss this law.

You created the Rapid Relief Kitchen, an emergency system for places suffering natural disaster. How does it work and where do you see it going?    

This is our latest project. A dream that came true because we already have a prototype. It came out of a visit I made to the Ocean Viking, a rescue ship that operates in the Mediterranean Sea.  

The first thing I noticed is that there was no kitchen. So, I asked, what are they feeding these migrants? They crossed the desert, endured the high sea, and then their ship sank. I discovered they fed them a sort of a K-ratio, freeze-dried food, which goes back to the original state after being heated. A very expensive system.  

It's a fantastic solution for a catastrophe where people really need to eat immediately or would die. But the boat was not like that. The migrants stay in the boat for a long period and have to be fed three times a day. There is a lot of cultural and physical tension. How can you convince a person that has been rescued from the sea that, in fact, the pulp they receive is very rich in protein and vitamins?  
 
I imagined a solution: a container which is self-contained and independent. A regeneration kitchen, with a supply chain that already exists around the world: ready-to-eat food.    

They are not raw ingredients. It is not an onion, but a bag with an onion soup already seasoned that can be regenerated at any latitude in the world. The only thing you need is to pick into the supply chain and have a piece of equipment that can withstand, in this case, in the high sea. 
 
Then you are serving food that is nutritious, properly made, but it is also recognizable as food. We are not just feeding people; we are giving them a bit of dignity and entertainment.  

I had a chance to speak to the High Commissary for Refugees here in Geneva, and I proposed this idea. He told me this is a fantastic project and encouraged me to go ahead. There are containers for sleeping quarters, offices, depot, chemical bathroom, you name it. But not the kitchen.  
 
People in distress have the right to be fed properly. We need to give them hope, dignity, comfort. They need a slice of normal life. And that is our solution.