Cozy to Colossal: Kitchen Renovations
By Morgan Kelly
This year, Project Chimps is getting both a new garden installation and a cozy kitchen makeover! We’ll be relocating (and upgrading) our walk-in cooler and freezer in order to add more space for meal prep.
What do chimps eat?
If you’ve ever cooked your own meal or baked a cake, you know it can take a lot of time. Now, multiply that by three meals a day and then multiply that by 101! Our kitchen staff and volunteers spend hours every day preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the 101 former research lab chimpanzees living in sanctuary. But our current kitchen is pretty tiny for making 303 chimp-sized meals — and snacks! — per day. We prefer the term “cozy,” though.
We make sure the residents here at Project Chimps get quality meals three times a day. Thankfully, our staff and volunteers are experts at vegan meal prep!
Chimps get most of their nutrients from fresh fruits and veggies. India Sloan, a caregiver for Team Onyx, explains that treats like banana smoothies are tasty and a great form of food-based enrichment. In case you were wondering, the rumors are true: monkeys go bananas for bananas! But wait, chimps are not monkeys…their favorite food is actually onions!
Cooked, dehydrated, and blended fruits and veggies are also on the menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the sanctuary. Our staff and volunteers use the kitchen to bake, slice, and peel fruits and veggies every day.
Colossal Meal Prep
Kitchen staff count meals per chimp group. Since there are six groups, we make 18 meals a day. We try to make sure our chimps get a lot of food-based enrichment with their meals. India likes to scrounge up whatever ingredients she can find to bake enriching cakes as well. She says that the oven is the most popular appliance in the kitchen!
Staff members start their meal prep one day ahead of time. If they have time to spare, they might get started on meals for the following day as well. But all these meals take up a lot of space in our cooler and freezer.
A “Cozy” Kitchen
We prepare a lot of meals for such a cozy kitchen. Our walk-in freezer and cooler are currently the kitchen’s most helpful features. This is where we store meals for the next day and up to a week in advance. Our space if limited even outside the freezer, though.
Two metal tables sit at the center of the kitchen. Here, staff have enough room to weigh, chop, and blend fruits and veggies. We need to make more than one meal at once to stay on schedule, though. The counter space in the kitchen is currently too small to prepare breakfast and lunch at the same time, so staff and volunteers typically prepare one meal inside while the others prepare outside. This is challenging during the cold winter and hot summer months. Thankfully, improvements to the cozy kitchen will help make meal prep a more comfortable process for volunteers.
Colossal Changes
We hope to provide food and shelter for even more retired chimps in the future so we’re making some changes.
First, we’re removing the walk-in cooler and freezer in the kitchen to open the area for meal prep. We’re also getting a new dish sanitizer and larger sink to make clean up easier. Our new walk-in cooler and freezer will be just a few steps away from the main building which allows us to make multiple meals at a time, taking some of the stress off our volunteers during lunch rush!
Our volunteers work so hard for us, so we want to make sure they’re as comfortable as possible when preparing meals for almost 100 chimps at one time. The new space will also feature better lighting and an awning outside the kitchen. We’ve also budgeted funds for heaters so the volunteers who need to work outside during the winter months can do so in comfort, thereby allowing the sanctuary to meal prep even more.
We expect that the new kitchen will be finished by the end of August. We’re so excited for our volunteers to see our new kitchen! You can check it out yourself by volunteering with our kitchen staff.
