“To be able to do together what we can do alone”. This is how Franco-Polynesian chef Gabriel Levionnois, founder of the Pacific Food Lab cluster ten years ago, explains his commitment to school canteen chefs in New Caledonia. His aim is to motivate and inspire children to cook and eat for themselves. A self-defined social entrepreneur and creator of the Au P’tit café restaurant in Nouméa, the chef is fully in line with the movement born of the conclusions of the 2019 Eat Lancet report and the FAO 2021 Asia Pacific conference.
His ambition? To leave a culinary legacy that takes care of ourselves, others and our planet. To share his vision more widely, he created Uma Kitchen, a food lab for recipe creation and media content. His cooking shows are collected on the Pacificfoodtv platform – viewable on YouTube and Calameo – and in an intuitive shared library. His goal is to engage more restaurants, cooks, professionals and amateurs to cook better with local resources.
An activist for the food transition in New Caledonia and the Pacific, his holistic approach to community life, inspired by his Polynesian seafaring ancestors, aims to reconcile man with his environment. For Gabriel Levionnois, food is not just a biological necessity, it’s a cultural, social and environmental act, which he sums up as follows: “I eat therefore we are”.
