As one of the world’s greatest chefs feeds the poor with Rio 2016 food leftovers, why aren’t athletes showing support?

Neither the IOC nor Rio’s Olympic organising committee have answered requests for help from Massimo Bottura 

Ian Herbert
Rio de Janeiro
Wednesday 17 August 2016 15:07 BST
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Refettorio Gastromotiva serves food to those in need three times a day, 70 people per sitting
Refettorio Gastromotiva serves food to those in need three times a day, 70 people per sitting

So, Michael Phelps, Mo Farah, Simone Biles, Usain Bolt and countless others, we have celebrated you and loved you and marvelled at your Olympian feats these past two weeks and sport will keep you comfortable for all of your years.

But which of you will step outside of the insulated comfort of the Olympic bubble and give an hour or so needed by the small group who have extended more hope to the scene of your collective triumphs than any other?

That group is to be found in Rua Lapa, the unprepossessing cobbled street in downtown Rio de Janeiro where hawkers trade what they can to make what they can, and where something quite exceptional has taken shape. It is Refettorio Gastromotiva, a bright, light, airy dining space where, for the past two weeks, the food waste of the Olympic Village has been served to those who are in the most desperate need of it: three times a day, 70 people per sitting.

Rio free restaurant

Its inspiration is Massimo Bottura, an Italian kaleidoscope of ideas and imagination, who was wise enough to see the screaming disconnect between the lorries of wasted fruit, vegetables, pasta and bread, surplus to Olympic requirement, which would be carted away to be dumped,while the poorest starved a few miles away. Bottura happens to be as fine a chef as it comes. His restaurant, Osteria Francescana in Modena, was this summer named the best in the world.

The response to Refettorio, with its plywood tables and high ceilings and walls adorned with artworks commissioned with thoughtfulness – who decided that soup kitchens should be soulless places, asks Bottura? – has reaffirmed our faith in the human spirit.

The Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi dispensed with protocol to leave his Olympic delegation and visit. The Brazilian soap opera star Regina Casé arrived. More than 60 internationally celebrated chefs answered Bottura’s call to arms and will be flying in to help prepare food from the Olympic food mountain, between now and the end of the Paralympic Games.

Volunteers have shown up en masse to help serve the food, prepared under Bottura’s supervision by Cairocas, as the Rio call their own. Others have provided food to fill the gaps in the Olympic waste supply. A call went out for meat supplies because the Olympic Village tends consume all it is sent. Hyatt Hotels have been providing 80kg a day. Yes, the world has responded, as it tends to do when formidable, trailblazing Bottura is at the core.

Sport has not, it almost goes without saying. Neither the International Olympic Committee nor Rio’s Olympic organising committee have answered requests for help from Refettorio, which Bottura’s Brazilian collaborator David Hertz made months ago.

It is lamentable that the governors of sport are once again so myopic. The IOC’s dismal one-track Twitter commentary on its big event centred, on Wednesday morning, on the self-important president Thomas Bach condemning the booing of a pole vaulter. But no amount of indignation will pay the bills when the Olympic caravan has packed up and gone.

The vision is that Refettorio will stand on its own two feet then, funded by donations and by opening the doors to a lunchtime paying clientele who will make a donation for those hungry souls who will arrive in the evening. This is a version, Bottura says, of the “suspended coffee” idea well established in Italy: buy a coffee, leave money for the one without the means to buy it.

Many across the world will make a contribution through the Refettorio website, where $30 (£23) will buy a meal. But imagine the beautiful circularity of an establishment which creates from the bloated excess of these Games actually receiving someone of iconic Olympian status through the door. The hour or so of time committed would shout out the brilliant, uncomplicated concept of Refettorio Gastromotiva to the world. It would telegraph the project’s virtues to the world. And it just might bring the money that will be needed soon enough to keep the wolf from the door.

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