really GOOD FOOD

For Chef Shanita McAfee-Bryant, finding a way to give back to her Kansas City, MO, neighborhood was a calling. The Cutthroat Kitchen alum had always been passionate about food access, but also she knew that giving away free food F to folks didn't always help the recipients as intended-often people didn't know what to cook with the items they'd been given. Her lightbulb moment came in 2018, after her father passed away. "I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted the next chapter of my career to be like," she says. "I decided to move into social entrepreneurship."
That meant opening a business whose focus was making an impact on hunger and poverty locally. Chef Shanita founded The Prospect KC (theprospectkc.org) in 2019, and specifically set out to combat "food apartheid." What does that mean? Well, the east side of Kansas City, where The Prospect is located, has historically been pocketed with food deserts-areas where fresh, nutritious food is hard to find-but Chef Shanita prefers to refer to the problem as "food apartheid." "We call it 'apartheid' because a desert is not a man-made thing," she says. "When you use the term 'desert,' it's like, 'We don't know how this happened, and there's not much we can do about it.' But 'apartheid' speaks to systemic divestment and opens the door to talking about creative solutions."
The Prospect aims to be one of those solutions. It's home to a café, The Spot, staffed in part by alumni of an on-site culinary workforce-development program. The program helps low-income individuals in zip codes with poorer health outcomes by giving them a culinary education and teaching them job skills, with a guarantee of a one-year externship-and the resulting jobs pay a living wage. "As Prospects [the trai...