Chef's Special: Michael Ehlenfeldt
From A La Carte, Share Our Strength Boston's Newsletter

Despite many grueling hours standing, moving, stirring, flipping, and plating at Hammersley's Bistro, Chef de Cuisine Michael Ehlenfeldt makes time for his other two passions: biking and volunteering with Share Our Strength's Operation Frontline (OFL) program. In fact, he often combines the two, having traveled on two wheels to to teach healthy cooking and nutrition to kids, adults, and seniors in 20 OFL classes.

Before Ehlenfeldt became a chef and volunteer, he was raised in a small town where the nearest movie theater was 20 miles away. The first McDonald's opened when he was in high school. "To eat, we made everything," Ehlenfeldt says. His family hunted and fished, butchered their own meat, and grew vegetables and fruit on two acres of land. There were two freezers in his basement: one for meat and one for vegetables.

His appreciation and love for food was clearly instilled at a young age.

Ehlenfeldt, who has been at Hammersley's Bistro for 12 years, decided to start volunteering with OFL in 1994. He taught his first class with longtime volunteer Peter Franklin. Since then, he has led 18 other classes, enough to tie for the record of "Most Classes Taught by a Volunteer." This is an impressive feat given that each class requires a significant time commitment - 12 hours, broken down into two hours a week for six weeks.

So with such a busy schedule, what has pushed Ehlenfeldt to come back to teach, again and again? "It's nice to be able to connect with people and see lightbulbs go on," he says.

Ehlenfeldt remembers a woman in his class at the Brookline Housing Authority who was overweight and had lupus and diabetes. She used a motorized cart because she couldn't walk a block down the road. And she insisted that she didn't like rice and beans. Ehlenfeldt taught her that recipes are just templates and that ingredients can be adapted. "Don't put green peppers in if you don't like them," he says. To demonstrate, he made rice and beans with lentils. Then the woman understood. She made some healthy changes and her health improved. Today, she can travel without her cart some days.

But like anything that is ultimately rewarding, there are challenges along the way. For Ehlenfeldt, the biggest challenge is "just plain obstinance." It's hard to get people to cut back on junk food and increase their physical activity. "There's a reason why we have huge amounts of disease and obesity that other parts of the world don't have," Ehlenfeldt explains. "Getting participants to be active is hard. They're working jobs and raising kids; they're too tired and they don't have the time."

As a volunteer, Ehlenfeldt says his role is to break through these barriers so that participants recognize the importance of healthy eating. This didn't always happen in his first class. He made the mistake of telling participants to buy the cheaper bruised vegetables at the grocery store. "They thought we were telling them to buy the junk," he says. "So it's really important to [communicate at] a human level."

What other advice does Ehlenfeldt have for potential Operation Frontline volunteers? He says to teach as much as you can, as often as you can. Dedication to this program leads to big rewards, like the sense of accomplishment Ehlenfeldt had after teaching a class at the Women's Club. The participants were "Southern grandmothers," women who knew how to cook. "[They were thinking] what is this skinny white boy from Boston going to teach us?" he says. "In the end, I taught them how to cook collard greens without having heart attacks."