Top chef Tom Colicchio sets out to end American hunger

By Mick Krever, CNN

Tom Colicchio – renowned chef, restaurateur, and head judge on TV reality series “Top Chef” – wants to “rebrand” hunger.

“You know, the idea that people are hungry because they're lazy and they don't want to work just is not true,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview that aired Wednesday.

In the richest country in the world, 50 million people are hungry, and don’t know where their next meal will come from. Colicchio is setting out to change that.

“The average person is on food stamps for only nine months. The average person who is on food stamps was working the year before and the year after.”

“This is not a handout,” he said. “It's an investment in people. It's an investment in our country.”

He has produced a new documentary on American hunger called “A Place at the Table,” and is lobbying Washington politicians to focus on hunger, scoring them on their attention to food issues.

“Our goal,” he said, “is to take the food movement and change it from a social movement into a political movement.”

“When you talk to the average person [and] you start talking about hungry people, they'll automatically go to the homeless – oh, homeless people are hungry. They have no idea that these are working people.”

“This is a problem of equality,” he said. “What's so amazing about this problem – it's solvable.”

Click above to watch Amanpour’s full interview with Colicchio.