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Politics & Government

Chef, Former Alderwoman Does Her Cooking in Disaster Areas

After an already fruitful career in both cooking and politics, Lynn Krause now works in disaster relief.

Astronauts, soldiers and athletes are three careers somewhat known for being a good lead into another career in politics. But Town and Country resident Lynn Krause was likely charting new ground when she made the transition from gourmet chef to politician.

Krause, now a Chef instructor at L’Ecole Culinaire in Clayton, got into Town and Country politics in the early nineties with one issue in mind.

“At that particular time we had the that was moving into the area,” Krause said. “I’m not anti-business by any stretch of the imagination, but the immediate plan that the WalMart people wanted would have dumped all that traffic right onto Mason Road. And I live on Mason Road so I was very interested in getting involved.”

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When she tried to contact her alderman to express concerns about the WalMart, she found him completely unresponsive and unavailable to constituents. So Krause ran against the eight year incumbent and won handily. She won reelection four years later.

While serving as Town and Country’s Ward 3 alderwoman, Krause was also self employed as a pastry and desert chef. She did primarily private party and catering work and her clientele grew through word of mouth. 

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After an impressive but ultimately unsuccessful bid for the Town and Country mayorship, Krause left politics to focus all her attention on the much friendlier world of culinary arts. But when her two sons became middle school aged, Krause took the advice of school councillors who said that a great asset to her sons’ success would be having a parent who was home when they got home from school. With that in mind, Krause gave up her business. But she stayed in the culinary arts world, teaching classes at Forest Park Community College, where her work hours would match those of her children.

Since then, Krause has held a number of teaching positions, including a professorship at South East Missouri State University, before joining the faculty at L’Ecole. 

Not only is Krause active in teaching culinary arts, she is also highly involved with the American Culinary Federation, the largest organization of professional chefs in America. Krause herself was integral in the creation of the ACF’s Disaster Relief Task Force.

“When Katrina and Rita hit [in 2005], I contacted our national [ACF] office and asked them if we were doing anything or if anything was being organized,” Krause said. “And nothing really was being put together but a few days later the culinary federation national president called me and asked if I’d be part of a national task force and I said ‘absolutely, I’ll jump right on it.’”

And with that, the the ACF’s Disaster Relief Team came into being and since then Krause, as the group’s chairwoman, has been on the ground responding to disasters such as Hurricane Ike in Houston, the 2008 Iowa floods and the 2010 Nashville floods. Most recently Krause and the ACF Disaster Relief Team were providing food to residents devastated by tornados in Joplin, MO. 

“You don’t forgot the pain and the anxiety you see in people’s faces,” Krause said about the disaster areas she’s been to. “There is a different level of sadness people have when their cities are destroyed, when they lose everything. It’s like being in a war zone, I suppose. There’s a sadness that people have inside of them, but then there is a brightness that comes back out when they see that there are people out there who really care.”

Krause and the Disaster Relief Team demonstrate that caring simply by providing food, something that a group of culinary experts know how to do well. Krause stresses that a chef is a chef, even when he or she is an aid worker. 

“We as chefs have a little ego and even though the food that is provided to us is canned or jarred, we always try to make it taste a little better, whether it’s just a few little extras or some more tomato sauce or more onions,” Krause said. “We always try to make it a little better.” 

Krause says that when she was working in Texas in the wake of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, the mobile kitchen had to stop serving people because they wouldn’t leave, saying the food was too good. Down in Joplin, Krause’s team prepared a Chorizo pork burrito, which was widely appreciated. A handful of citizen’s even came up to Krause to thank her specifically for the chorizo telling her, “we never get Chorizo down here.”

“I think that’s what I always wanted to do was to volunteer my time,” Krause said. “I think when you work in this industry there is so much passion that you have and there’s so much knowledge that you have and it’d be a shame not to turn around to share it.

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