Title: A Feast for Detroit


Narrator: This is Ederique Goudia’s respite. The holy pause punctuating a week of endless service–of fingernails in soil and sweaty brows in a hot kitchen. On Mondays she may be volunteering with some of Detroit’s urban gardens. On Tuesdays she may be teaching Detroit’s youth how to cook and manage a business. On Wednesdays she makes meals for the food insecure of Detroit, and so on, but on Sunday, she’s at Mass at St. Monica and St. Augustine. And she needs this time, this Eucharistic meal, to prepare for all the other meals she will be serving that week, all the hungry she will be feeding in food and spirit. This is Ederique. 


Ederique: So St. Monica St. Augustine, it is an amazing parish. It's a really great church. I love the people. It's one — it's a beautiful church, but the people are really great. 


Narrator: Since she moved to Detroit in 2002, St. Monica and Austine has been her taste of home. The community she had been seeking to replicate since leaving her old community behind. 


Ederique: I was introduced to them, actually, by my business partner. And at the time I was living across town, I would come — I would drive a half an hour to church every Sunday because they are such a strong community. The church, the parishioners, everyone there has been super supportive. I love that. You know, they even — you have prayer partners, so someone will call on you and ask you how your week has been, how you're doing and ask if you need to, you know, if you need them to pray for you. So I just absolutely love that parish so much, and they've been super, super supportive of everything that we've done.


Narrator: When she says her goodbyes and exits and steps out into Detroit’s Indian Village, she will be back in the world with her grueling schedule. But the Eucharistic feast she had with the loved members of her community is what propels her through the next week. This divine message of sacrificial love poured out on the altar for her. Ederique wants to give a selfless meal too, to communicate love to all those sitting at tables without food, passing empty urban lots without gardens, sitting in food deserts where the closest produce is a bus ride away, for the youth without a culinary future and the lonely without community. Ever since Ederique Gaudia has stepped foot in Detroit she’s been working to bring Detroit the feast she thinks they deserve. 
Welcome to Detroit Stories, a podcast on a mission to boldly share the stories of the people and communities in Southeast Michigan. These are the stories that fascinate and inspire us. This episode is sponsored by Alliance Catholic Credit Union. Learn how “you belong here” at www.AllianceCatholic.com.


If you’re a foodie or a news junkie, you may have already heard of Ederique Gaudia. She was nominated this year as one of the Detroit Free Press Chevy Dealers Food Fighters. This award goes to chefs and restaurateurs who used food to make a positive impact on their communities. She’s also been featured in NPR, Eater, Food and Wine Magazine, Bon Appetit, and countless other places for her work in starting the wildly successful Taste of the Diaspora event this February for Black History Month. 


News anchor: Every week will feature two different local chefs cooking up dishes that range from soul food to east African cuisine, and every meal comes with a story about the culture it’s from.


Narrator: The 4-week event sold weekly shoebox lunches highlighting the foods of the African diaspora while supporting local chefs, farmers, food workers and food insecure people in Detroit. This event was just the cherry on top of an expansive list of food undertakings by Ederique. 


[Creole music]


Narrator: She is the co-owner of an upcoming Creole and Cajun restaurant and music venue that currently does pop-ups and caterings. She is the founder of In the Business of Food, a foodservice-based consulting agency that creates curriculum, facilitates workshops and consults for food businesses and nonprofits. She serves as a business coach for FoodLab Detroit, a non-profit providing under-represented food entrepreneurs with tools and resources to start a food business. She works as a chef in the Upcycling Kitchen, an initiative to transform food that otherwise would have ended up in a landfill, into healthy meals for Detroit’s hungry. She teaches at the Detroit Food Academy, a non-profit teaching Detroit youth about cooking, entrepreneurship and leadership. And she volunteers as a gardener for numerous urban gardens that are seeking to alleviate the food gap in Detroit. It’s a lot of accomplishments, and Ederique knows there is one person who would take a lot of joy in the person she is today. 


Ederique: I think he'd be really proud and he'd be really happy. 


Narrator: This is Ederique talking about her grandpa who passed away when she was 16. 


Ederique: I was his little girl. I was so spoiled behind him. His name was Ernest and, yeah, he would, he'd be so happy. He loved my pancakes. He would have me, after I get off from school, he would call me and say, can you come up and fix me some pancakes. He loved the pancakes with the crispy edges. 
Narrator: Ederique grew up across the street from her grandpa in Wallace, Louisiana, a little town right along the Mississippi River that is home to the Whitney Plantation. This is the only plantation in the U.S. today with a museum exclusively focusing on the lives of enslaved people, a point that she and the Wallace community takes great pride in. Here’s Ederique.
Ederique: My mom and my dad are from the same small town, so I'm related to everybody. And so, with my grandparents being so close, of course, right across the street, you know, I grew up with them.
Narrator: To say her grandpa had a green thumb is putting it lightly. Her grandpa was entirely self-sufficient, living off of whatever he could grow and care for on his own land.
Ederique: I loved being in a garden with my grandfather. My grandfather had three gardens and I was always, always, always in the garden with him or, you know, shucking peas, corn, or picking strawberries or, you know — so that was just, that was a way of life. He even grew his own like, cayenne peppers and dried them and grinded them. So we had like fresh ground, you know, red pepper. During harvest time in November, we would harvest the hogs. So we had fresh ham and pork chops and he of course would go fishing and shrimping and hunting. So we really did kind of live off of what we — what was grown or, you know, hunteed, fished. So it was great. I mean, that was my normal. I didn't know what it was like to go to a grocery store and purchase produce until after he passed away. I was like 16.
Narrator: This normal required an earthy hardiness that is found less outside of her Wallace bubble. When it rained, which happened a lot in south Louisiana, her grandpa would drive an old F150 through streets that were surrounded by swamps where the turtles would cross, hit them with his truck, and take them home to make turtle stew. Trading and bartering with neighbors for whatever you couldn’t grow yourself was the norm. Community dinners and potlucks in her tiny 500-person town were weekly. Everyone sitting before a feast together, reveling in their communal harvest. 
Ederique: Being from south Louisiana, everybody cooks. So it was not like — it wasn't a thing, you know, it was just like, this is what people do. I didn't really see it as a career. Everybody in my family cooked, my grandfather was a cook in World War II. My grandmother was a live-in maid, housekeeper for a wealthy family in New Orleans. So everyone knew, you know, everyone in my family knew how to do this. My dad even knew how to cook. So it was just something I had definitely picked up from all of my family members. And then as I got older and really, really fell in love with it and realized how much I was falling in love with it, I was like, Oh, this is something that I can really do. And I would love to really continue this legacy that my ancestors have left. 
Narrator: So much of her life growing up was having a visceral awareness and connection with the food going into her body, and the process it takes to grow it, one that left her with a profound sense of gratitude and appreciation for the gift of food. 
Ederique: But it really started when I was about — well, my mom will tell you, tell anybody that I've been cooking since I was three. So me and my sister would get up on Saturday mornings and surprise my parents, our parents, with breakfast in bed. So of course at three, I can't work a stove. I learned how to scramble eggs and a microwave. Okay. So at three years old, I was scrambling eggs in a microwave, making grits in the microwave and then, like, making toast. And that would be like the surprise, you know, breakfast that we made our parents on Saturdays. And so I think if I fell in love with the hospitality of it all before I actually fell in love with the food, because you know, it was that, like, instant gratification of, Oh my God, this is so great. This tastes so good. Oh, thank you. This is so wonderful. This makes me happy. And so that's how we continued to do it over and over and over. And in essence, it's like chasing that — you know what I'm saying? Like, like those words of affirmation, chasing that instant gratification.
Narrator: Wallace taught Ederique that food could be more than nourishment and sustenance, it could be a way to communicate love. And what Ederique saw in her neighbors and friends offering their hard-earned crops and animals, in sharing the wealth and the losses, was a communal, neighborly love that she thought everybody needed in their lives. 
Ederique: And particularly south Louisiana, we treat friends like family. We're very community oriented. Even in harvesting, you know — when we harvested hogs, it was a community thing, right? We would — one weekend this family would harvest and we'd all go over there and help harvest it the next weekend, another family, and we’d help them harvest. And the same thing with the food that we grew, if we had too much, we would share with the neighbors or say a crop had come in, they would barter or they would, you know, give or they would trade. So that sense of community just really runs deep.
Narrator: So even as Ederique planned her steps after highschool graduation, she knew she might not be able to stay in Wallace forever, but maybe, wherever she ended up, she could bring Wallace to them. And whoever those people were would feel the love she had felt her whole life in the sharing of a good meal they had worked for together. 
Ederique: I kind of had this dream to open up my own restaurant. So I was about 17. So I figured I would go and get my bachelor's in business, then go back to culinary school later. So that's what I did. So after I graduated, got my degree in business management, I moved up to Michigan to work in the restaurant industry and get a feel for what it was like to manage and lead a food service operation. Did that for several years.
Narrator: Ederique had planned to come to Detroit temporarily, maybe go to U of M, apprentice in the restaurant industry and return home. But Detroit resonated with her more than she anticipated. 
Ederique: There are so many gardens here. Urban gardens and farms here in the city of Detroit. And most people don't think about Detroit as having fertile land or Detroit as somewhere that, that things are being grown. But Detroit has over 1800 farms and gardens here in the city, inside the city limits, which is amazing. And so with that really being a part of this really large, I guess, urban agriculture movement, it just really takes me back home. And I just feel like I'm back with my grandfather and his gardens. I remember I was volunteering at Keep Growing Detroit a couple years ago and I had a straw hat on, like he used to wear and we were harvesting garlic scapes, and my grandfather loves garlic. I mean, he loves, he like — and I do too — so much that it would kind of seep from his pores, like, you could just always smell garlic, right? And I remember picking these garlic scapes and I felt like he was next to me. Like the smell of garlic, me wearing a straw hat, in the garden, right, in the dirt. And I was like, oh my God. Like, I just felt like he was literally sitting next to me in his garden. So it's just been really beautiful. And I'm so appreciative of being a part of this community. It feels like home.
Narrator: When Ederique moved to Detroit in 2002, it was considered a food desert because of the considerable lack of reliable access for residents to fresh, healthy food. 39% of residents were food insecure and about 30,000 people did not have access to a full-line grocery store. Ederique wanted to change all this. In addition to all the other nonprofits she got involved with or formed, she started working with a new group called Make Food Not Waste. 
Ederique: Make Food Not Waste is a non-profit that is dedicated to reducing the amount of food waste that ends up in landfills. And so Make Food Not Waste has what's called an upcycling kitchen where we rescue food, because 30% — most people don't know that 30% of all food that is grown in the United States ends up in a landfill. And that's a lot of food. Especially when we look at how many people are food insecure. And over 39% of Detroit residents are food insecure. So we figured why don't we take the food — why don't we rescue food that would've ended up in a landfill and create these beautiful meals that can feed people that don't have them? And so that's what we do at the upcycling kitchen. So every week I rescue food and I make meals for our community members.
Narrator: Make Food Not Waste works out of what they call their Upcycling Kitchen at Jefferson Presbyterian Church in Detroit, where chefs create meals for the hungry in their community using farm surpluses, food distributor closeouts, even unexpected nutrients like brewer grain and juice pulp to turn into delicious, warm dishes to hand out to the community. 
News anchor: Well this holiday it’s not just the sick, but the able bodied laid low by a virus that has crippled household incomes, leaving more families food insecure and exposing an issue that predates the current health crisis.
Narrator: During 2020, the pandemic exacerbated food insecurity across the country. In Detroit, where it had already been lacking, Ederique saw her neighbors, friends, students, people who were previously secure, now food insecure. So Ederique had an idea for a way she could get all her friends and chefs to pivot during this time, and pour their energy into something else. 
Tapped by Make Food Not Waste to operate as lead chef, Ederique partnered with numerous Detroit award-winning chefs and restaurants to make Thanksgiving and Christmas meals for thousands of hungry Detroiters. One of the first people she called was her friend Raphael Wright. Raphael is in the process of opening an equity, crowd-funded, worker-owned grocery store in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood. He had a sprawling 5,000 square foot space, in a perfect location and a heart as wild about the community as Ederique. Here’s Raphael, 
Raphael:  First, we were in a very, very, very insecure space in regards to food as a city. Food insecurity skyrocketed due to the pandemic, the food system was all but disrupted. So — as well as the social consequences of people socially distancing and holidays not being what they have been traditionally. So being able to put a smile on people's faces, in any type of way, just the gesture alone, really resonated well in the community, at least from my standpoint. And it was needed, you know? There are families that literally went into poverty because of this pandemic. She reached out to me and asked me, did I want to utilize the space that I have for the neighborhood grocery as a delivery center for a hundred of the boxes in an effort to feed 5,000 families.
Narrator: He was in. Ederique enlisted the help of the countless out of work chefs and food workers in Detroit and they took over the tiny kitchen in the back of Jefferson Presbyterian. Here, a group anxious about the uncertainty of their own situation, poured their energy into lovingly creating some of their finest meals for the beleaguered citizens of Detroit. 
Ederique: But to be able to not only partner with different chefs and restaurants throughout the city of Detroit, provide them with, you know, additional income to pay their staff. Of course, in the middle of a pandemic when restaurants were extremely affected by that. And, you know, and then to be able to provide meals of Detroiters that have also very much been affected by this pandemic, because that's why they didn't have a Thanksgiving meal, you know? And we were able to provide that and they could still be in community with their family for the holidays. That to me is like the combination of all the work that I do. 
Narrator: Ederique and her team made and gave away 5,000 meals for Thanksgiving and 6,000 meals on Christmas. They continue their work every week with food that otherwise would be in a landfill, feeding 90 families a week. She wanted to give families meals they could be proud to put on their tables, something to imbue their celebrations with dignity. Here’s Raphael. 
Raphael: I know for sure that many of the people that participated in that meal box drop-off definitely needed that meal box to feed their families and just have some type of celebration of a holiday that we celebrate every year. The feedback was all positive from my standpoint, like I have not heard any complaints from anybody as far as the food, the presentation, as far as the packaging. People really appreciated the hands that prepared those meals and the people that dropped them off or made them available for pickup.
Narrator: Here’s Ederique.
Ederique: This is what we do. I mean, I do have a love for what else — I have a love for people. So if I wasn't going to become a chef, I was going to become a psychologist. I love food. I love people. And so the work that I'm doing is a combination of both. I get to help people through food and that's it. That's a really — that's all, that's the reason why I do this. And I love it every day. ‘Cause I'm able to help people.
Narrator: For Raphael, and the others that know her, there’s no question about her impact. 
Raphael: There's not many people in the food system that works harder than Ederique. Passion wise, you know, she is extremely passionate about, you know, feeding families, culture, good food. You know, she really lives, breathes, drinks, bleeds food. Good food. And nourishes our communities. So she dove head first into this initiative to feed 5,000 families in genius ways that protects and helps the environment, put nourishments into people's bodies, they put smiles on faces, and it doesn't get any better than that. One of a kind. Ederique’s one of a kind.
Narrator: Ederique’s potluck dinners in Wallace might have looked a little different than the feast she prepared for Detroit’s hungry. She couldn’t give people the physical presence of a community of neighbors, not during a pandemic where contact was near impossible. But for the newly hungry, unemployed, widowed, immunocompromised, lonely, for the sick, the ones who couldn't have family visit them — when they opened up their steaming hot meals of mango chicken curry, rice pilaf, sauteed collard greens, butter dill carrots, monkey bread, and sweet potato bake, Ederique hopes the message was loud and clear — a message of companionship, solidarity. A feast of love. 
Detroit Stories is a production of Detroit Catholic and the communications department of the Archdiocese of Detroit. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is sponsored by Alliance Catholic Credit Union. Learn how “you belong here” at www.AllianceCatholic.com.