Among the 24 states impacted by Hurricane Sandy in October, New York and New Jersey were hit especially hard, with families displaced due to destruction, flooding, and power outages. Weeks following the disaster, many in the region are still in need.
Jason Ziobrowski, CEC, Indian Harvest’s corporate chef for the Eastern Region based in Charlotte, N.C., heeded a recent call from the American Culinary Federation’s Atlanta chapter for donations of food, clothing, and funds to assist chefs of the ACF Jersey Shore Chefs Association and their families.
“Not only did many of these chefs lose their homes, they lost their jobs because the buildings they worked in have been destroyed and, in some cases, totally washed away,” says Michael Deihl, CEC, CCA, AAC, president of the ACF Greater Atlanta Chefs Association Inc., and executive chef of East Lake Golf Club, who spearheaded the collaborative effort. “I’m told things are a lot worse than we see on television.”
Ziobrowski, a member of the ACF North Carolina Chapter, worked with Indian Harvest’s director of culinary development, Michael Holleman, to secure more than a ton of Kansas Medley, a mélange of wheat berries, wild rice, and parboiled long-grain rice, and Brown and Wild, a whole-grain blend of long-grain brown rice and wild rice. The 2,100 pounds of grain products were loaded onto palettes with packets of Indian Harvest’s proprietary Country Chicken and Garden Vegetable Seasonings and shipped to Atlanta, where a trailer capable of hauling 44,000 pounds of goods awaited.
Indian Harvest is a longtime supporter of the American Culinary Federation—the largest organization of professional cooks in the Western Hemisphere—which operates a Disaster Relief Fund through its Education Foundation to assist ACF members in need.
