Taking Hunger Off the Menu

Tonii Hicks doesn’t doubt that one in 10 area residents face food insecurity, a statistic often cited by the nonprofit Philabundance. But she doesn’t accept it, either.

“People deserve access to good, healthy food,” says Hicks, whose professional efforts have focused on fulfilling that basic human need.

She has her own business offering private chef services, meal prep, menu and recipe development, and cooking instruction classes. She is also a culinary instructor at the Community College of Philadelphia. And she has collaborated with community activists who fight hunger.

Hicks got her start through the Philadelphia branch of Careers through Culinary Arts Program (C-CAP), a nationwide program that provides culinary, job and life skills to over 22,000 middle- and high-school students. Through a C-CAP competition, she won a scholarship to Drexel, where she graduated in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in culinary arts and science.

“The Drexel program combines culinary arts and food science, and also has the Food Lab program,” she says, referring to Drexel’s food-product design and culinary innovation kitchen. “[It] was everything that I wanted to do in one place, under one roof,” she says.

Hicks has scored successive wins since graduation. In 2021, she landed a regenerative-farming fellowship through the Stone Barns Center and Blue Hill. The next year, she won a coveted James Beard Foundation fellowship, and in 2023 Chef Jose Garces took her into the Chefs in Residency program at his Philadelphia restaurant, Volvér.

All along the way, she’s been thinking not just about food and eating, but about something much bigger.

“It’s all about community,” says Hicks, who grew up in a food-insecure neighborhood. “My mom had to make the best of what was around us. Luckily, she worked in King of Prussia, so she was able to go food shopping in that neighborhood and bring things home.”

Others aren’t as fortunate. In too many cases, she says, “people are given scraps, and they usually have to work with their scraps.”

By elevating culinary skills, Hicks is trying to help people to make the most of what is available. “Not everybody knows how to cook that food,” she says. “People can learn what real food is and its value. When people learn these fundamental skills, it eliminates food waste and it improves their health. Once you learn how to cook, a lot of different things can fall into place for you.”

With this in mind, she’d eventually like to own and operate a commissary building in West Philadelphia. “I want commercial kitchen space, a demonstration-kitchen space and an incubator space for other creators,” she says.

Such a building would serve “as a stepping stone for people’s careers in culinary arts, as well as others in the arts who go beyond the kitchen — photographers, artists, designers,” she says. “Space is limited in Philadelphia, and it’s very expensive. I’d like to provide a place for up-and-coming chefs, a place where we’re teaching small-business skills.”

Hicks acquired many skills through the Beard fellowship. “It offered financial literacy, business development, brand development — understanding who you are and how you want to present yourself to the world,” she says. That experience in turn amplified the key insights she’d picked up in her time at Drexel.

Through the co-op program, “Drexel gets you out into the field to get that actual experience,” she adds. “I already felt like a professional while still in college, and by the time I left college, I knew this was something I could do. I knew that I was meant to be in this industry.”