On the 1st, TABLOCAL, a restaurant operator in Wakayama City, held a soup kitchen at Shirokita Kitchen Park in Hachibancho, Wakayama City, offering free curry. With natural disasters occurring frequently across the country, the project also served as a demonstration experiment to find out how much time and materials it would take to provide meals in the event of a disaster.

It all started in January last year, when many restaurants in the city center were closed due to heavy snowfall, so they hurriedly set up a rice ball and pork soup soup kitchen. Residents who received the soup kitchens expressed their gratitude and said, “It was a huge help.” The company’s president, Kimiyasu Okuhata (47), reflects, “I realized that in times of disaster, by providing cooked food, which is our strength, we can contribute to society.”

On this day, TABLOCAL employees prepared approximately 300 curry meals using ingredients such as vegetables and curry powder provided by six companies supporting the initiative. When the curry began to be served around 11 a.m., visitors received the curry one after another. Approximately 30 third-year students from the nearby Municipal Fushitora Compulsory Education School also visited, listened to Mr. Okuhata explain the reason for running the soup kitchen, and munched on curry.

This time, the cooking was conducted under the assumption that electricity, gas, and water could be used, but the company is considering conducting the cooking under other conditions, taking into account the possibility that some of the infrastructure may not be available in the future. Okuhata said, “I hope that by preserving the data as an experiment, it will be used as a reference for preparing soup kitchens in the event of a disaster.”