Justice League of Food

Nick Kuhn has created and continues to run the Justice League of Food located in West Des Moines since 2017, with the mission of teaching at-risk students how to cook in order to fulfill the idealogy of “teaching a man how to fish”.

The Justice League of Food has a two-part mission. The primary goal is to offer a job training program and job placement services program within the restaurant industry for at-risk youth. The secondary is to help feed people who don’t have access to food otherwise. This is where the mutual support with a government program called A Partnership for a Hunger-Free Polk County began. The main home of the Justice League of food is called The Foundry. In 2017, Nick Kuhn opened The Foundry. The building consists of 3 parts: The Hall, the restaurant portion; The Kitchen, which is the nonprofit portion of the business; and the Distillery, which has a tasting room as well as event spaces. The Foundry is the main home of the Justice League of Food because this is where the product is made and created within The Kitchen. The product is not just the source of profit, which is food, but also the students who are making the food. The Justice League of Food profits off of all food sold at The Hall as well as at Kuhn’s other establishments, The Beerhouse located in Urbandale and The Clubhouse on Sun Valley Lake. 

Nick Kuhn began the mission to help feed the hungry long before the Justice League of Food was established. Once he realized his purpose and goals, he opened a food truck. He went to different shelters and outreach events to serve the community. However, he realized he was seeing the same people over and over again and wasn’t doing much to stop this cycle. Kuhn commented, “That is where teach a man to fish came in.” Instead of giving these people the fish, Kuhn wanted to teach them how to get it. 

The process to create the institution Kuhn had visualized was not as easy as expected, however. Kuhn remarked, “We teach culinary skills but that’s the easy part.” He soon realized that the hard part was teaching the youth how to transition into adulthood. They missed out on a lot of life skills and education growing up. Kuhn has cultivated this program but explains he has gotten a lot of help along the way. He stated, “My job is to make sure that this organization remains stable [and] also to help grow the program by being the face of the program and telling our story.” A yearly event held by the Justice League of Food to ensure its stability is called the Culinary Superhero Dinner. Kuhn described, “We invite some of the greatest chefs from the metro and beyond and we have them spend a day with the students and make under a dollar-a-plate meal.” This not only provides a great experience for students but also for awareness of the program among the community and the chefs. Oftentimes, chefs will wait for a student they met during the event to graduate from the program and hire them at their own establishment.

The biggest and easiest ways to support JLF and Kuhn’s efforts are to eat at his restaurants, tell the story and volunteer. They can always use a helping hand. In terms of big steps he stated, “If everybody just took that one thing they are really good at and said alright, I am going to figure out a way to apply this to helping. The world would be a much better place.”

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