CHEF JOSÉ ANDRÉS AND PARTNERS AT THE LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL FESTIVAL
Las Vegas. The home to crooners, card counters, and…clean cookstoves? Yes, that’s right.
Alliance culinary Ambassador Chef José Andrés unveiled his pop-up restaurant Sunny Day at the second annual Life is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas for some cooking education. Chefs from ThinkFoodGroup, Chef Andrés’organization, prepared vegetarian tacos on Alliance partner-provided cookstoves, including those from One Earth Designs, BioLite, and Project Gaia. Applied Sunshine, an Alliance Pilot Innovation Fund (PIF) grantee, cooked taco fillings on their newly designed institutional GoSun stoves. These technologically unique solar stoves were modeled on a large household stove from the firm's Guatemala pilot project. The Sunny Day solar kitchen concept reflected World Central Kitchen’s work with sustainable food projects in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Zambia, with the goal of educating festival attendees on the benefits of clean cooking.
The Life is Beautiful Festival, held October 24-26, featured speakers, well-known musical performers, gourmet food, and local art. Some 50,000 people attended the weekend event enabling hundreds of festival goers to sample food from Sunny Day. It was also a unique way to demonstrate the capabilities of various solar and biomass cookstoves.
The Alliance would like to thank Chef Andrés and ThinkFoodGroup for inviting a team member to participate in the Festival and help support the Sunny Day solar kitchen. We would also like to congratulate Chef Andrés, ThinkFoodGroup, and our partners—Applied Sunshine, BioLite, One Earth Designs, Project Gaia, and World Central Kitchen—on the exciting and successful clean cooking event!