Massimo Bottura’s Refettorio Remakes the Future through Stories of Food, People, and Places

There is an immediate reaction to food waste, degraded suburban areas, and vulnerable people exemplified in derogatory expressions (“white trash,” “piece of trash,” and “trailer trash”) that equate disposed materials with communities and places (Vaughn 2018: 44). Chef Massimo Bottura has parlayed his celebrity status into a movement to reverse the bias against food waste, neglected places, and vulnerable communities. He turned his crown jewel, Osteria Francescana, a three-Michelin star restaurant located in Modena, Italy, into an incubator of ideas for his Refettorio, an upscale, no-waste soup kitchen that has opened over thirteen branches across the world. Bottura believes that the principle of never wasting anything in commercial kitchens is not only applicable to food, but to people and places (Bottura 2017: 7–8). Caring for the lives of the vulnerable people served at the Refettorio begins with breadcrumbs turned into gourmet desserts and neglected buildings revamped and filled with artwork. This article makes its start by asking why Bottura’s elevated soup kitchen gained global traction. It brings to the forefront three key concepts built into the Refettorio: “the quality of ideas,” “the power of beauty,” and “the value of hospitality,” and makes the argument that the Refettorio’s success lies in the ways it lets us imagine a future of reduced waste not by way of dire statistics, but through stories of food recovery and communities’ rescue told around these three core tenets.