ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY SOW PROJECT
Ben Vaughn
Chef Ben Vaughn wants everyone to learn how to cook. As a professional chef with 30 years’ experience, he figured teaching people that skill was something he could do. “If I knew how to do HVAC, I think I would do the same project, but teach HVAC,” Vaughn says. “It’s just me doing one thing that I do well, and being open to do that for our community.”
Vaughn is perhaps best-known to Memphians for having helmed the kitchens of restaurants Grace, Au Fond Farmtable, and River Oaks; he also authored the best-selling book, Southern Routes: Secret Recipes from the Best Down-Home Restaurants in the South, and was the host and co-producer of the digital series, The Breakfast Show.
Now, he has a new title: founder of the Sow Project, which he considers “the center of culinary cultivation.”
Why “Sow”? “We’re sowing a seed,” he explains. “We’re changing a community by sowing a seed.”
Vaughn and a team of chefs are teaching six-month culinary programs to students ranging from seniors at a charter high school to a “second-career mother of nine.” The classes are held in the Girls Inc. of Memphis building at 1179 Dellwood Avenue.
“This is all free,” he says. “Every drop of it. There’s not a dollar that you have to pay.”
Vaughn remembers when the idea hit. “My wife and I — with these large, oversized Post-It notes — came up with this idea and decided to be a ‘catalyst for change,’” Vaughn says. “And with my experience, start giving.”
Vaughn thought, “I can teach. I can help. I can mentor, I can be a conduit for employment. I can do all of these things. And I really believe in my heart that it’s incredibly timely, because if you watch culinary schools all over the country, they’re closing, left and right.”
He recognized a massive need for education and an equally massive need for employment for people in the restaurant industry. “Our restaurants in Memphis suffer through lack of quality employees,” he says, so Sow is “an incubator, so to speak, for the local restaurants. We employ and educate.”
When he was training to be a chef, “they kind of cut out the piece of culinary school that’s terribly fun. All of it was new to me at the time, but it was French terminology that I’ve never used. The traditions of a French kitchen that aren’t typically used in the practical kitchens in Memphis, Tennessee.”
Instead, he says, the Sow curriculum “strips away all the pretense and just gets to the heart of day-to-day activities.”
The project began about two years ago. Vaughn’s first student was the daughter of someone who worked with his wife. Vaughn wanted to see what “this nonprofit, no-expenses culinary program where you’re guaranteed employment” looks like. “I literally started teaching ‘class’ in my home kitchen. Meeting with her three days a week and going through the very basics.”
He wanted to make sure he was “on track with a traditional curriculum for a culinary program, because I don’t savvy myself a teacher by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t feel like I’m a culinary instructor. I think I’m a good cook, but I’m a better mentor. And I have gone through enough garbage that I’ve kind of paid the price of admission for everyone else. I’m a good big brother. I’m a good friend.”
Vaughn began using The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, by J. Kenji López-Alt, which he describes as “a wonderful culinary book.” he says. “I went back through my memory bank of like, ‘Where did I start in culinary school?’ And I remembered knife skills, temperatures, food safety, and sanitation.”
When he added a second student, he moved from his home-kitchen “school” to a local church. “They gave me the kitchen for free. And a key.”
That’s when he really got to work. “We started baking,” he says. “We were doing pastry and learning how to make omelets. I could see the lights lighting up, but more importantly, there was a connection happening. And that connection was real.”
Vaughn, a recovering alcoholic, says he and the students were talking about more than food. “We were talking about life. I was sharing about my addiction. And I saw similarities in their lives. It created this bond. And then me, through prayer, and my wife, through prayer, we saw this was something terribly special.”
His tiny culinary school took off. “We went from one student to seven, then 11, and then 20. I didn’t totally understand what was happening with the program, because people were coming because they needed employment so badly.”
His students were finding restaurant jobs, Vaughn says. “We were getting people jobs over and over and over, but then they stopped coming to class. It wasn’t that they didn’t enjoy class, but we attract a certain type of individual — someone who really needs help will go to a free culinary program that is flexible and loving and works around your schedule more than a traditional culinary school out of town.
The class sizes kept getting larger,” he recalls, “and we were using a couple of kitchens here and there in other places, such as a few churches.”
He then began teaching out of the kitchen at Church Health in Crosstown Concourse. “We started doing classes there and I started to see more people show up,” he says. “Alcoholics, addicts, people experiencing homelessness, people that didn’t finish high school, who were being in some way or another saved after horrible experiences through foster care. And I felt like, wow — we’re really on to something special here.”
Vaughn still fretted he had “a bit of imposter syndrome. I was really like, ‘I’m not a teacher, I know how to sear a steak and how to make a beautiful ‘you fill in the blank.’ But by no means am I a teacher.”
That’s when Brad Campbell came on board. He told me, “I would love to come over and volunteer. And I’m a culinary instructor.”
They begin with the very basics, Vaughn says. “First is safety and sanitation. Don’t spread germs. Wash your hands and use bleach.”
They continue with knife skills. Each student gets his own knife kit. They go on to learn everything from how to grow their own vegetables to how to write a menu and “food math,” which includes weights and measurements.
Sow also holds fundraising dinners, where students collaborate with the chefs and get paid for their hourly work. In more than a year, Sow has provided employment for 144 people, including Vaughn’s first student. And where is she now? She relocated to Atlanta to work in a recommended Michelin star kitchen as a baker.
In addition to restaurants, Sow students have found jobs at grocery stores, catering companies, bakeries, and casinos, Vaughn says. “Honestly, on a daily basis, I’m almost moved to tears by the lives that we’re changing. And it’s not necessarily food. It is truly about giving someone an opportunity to be more than they thought they could ever be.”
They don’t have an opening date, but the school will be an additional location. The current school at Dellwood will remain open.
Vaughn’s own life has changed since he began Sow. “I am a chef, an Uber driver,” he says. “I am on call in the middle of the night. I will help you buy a cell phone. I am a mentor when you’re out of hope. And I’m a hug-giver when you feel the joy and you want to share it.”
He sums up his project in this way: “You know, that’s really what this is about. It’s about just loving our neighbors.”
For information on how to join or support a Sow program, go to sowproject.org
