How Bengaluru's Sneha Vachhaney created a portal where home chefs deliver healthy food free to frontline workers, COVID patients 

In our series, #DailyPositivity, today we speak to Sneha Vachhaney who not only serves home-cooked food to COVID patients and frontline workers but also created a website connecting home chefs
Picture: Edexlive
Picture: Edexlive

In a city like Bengaluru, it is difficult for people to find home-cooked food - especially for COVID patients, doctors and crematorium workers, who are supposed to eat healthy food and keep their immunity levels up. To help out, people like Sneha Vachhaney have come forward to help many such frontline workers in the IT city by providing them home-cooked food. 

Sneha explains how it all started, "In the last week of April, I had put out a post on Instagram about preparing meals for COVID patients, doctors and frontline workers in and around the Bellandur area. A lot of people reached out to me and I provided them with a food package that had healthy and immunity-boosting food items. Soon, the number of people that I had to supply increased beyond my expectations. Though my friends were helping with finances and groceries, I had to stop cooking food for the past one week."

The locality that Sneha has been living in is now a containment zone. Hence, delivery boys or outsiders have not been allowed to walk into her apartment. "The person who lived opposite my apartment runs a restaurant called Idlis Unlimited. The owner, his wife and the cook at their restaurant joined handswith us  to provide meals for frontline workers. Therefore, last week, the cook took over my share of work and cooks over 150 meals every day."

If you think that Sneha is free now and has less work to do, then you'd be very wrong. In April, she and her friend Nitin Pandey created a website called covidmeals.in so that they can provide home-cooked meals to different locations across Bengaluru. "I posted again that we require home chefs who are interested to volunteer, cook food and deliver it. A lot of people came forward through the website we had created. Anybody can be part of our initiative to deliver meals. All they need to do is fill out the form on my website and we will go through the details, call them and guide them about hygiene and the food they need to prepare," says Sneha who earlier worked with travel start-up Make My Trip. 

With Sneha's initiative, currently people living in Bengaluru, Chennai, Mysuru and Delhi can avail these home-cooked food. So what is the process of ordering nutritious home-cooked food? Go to covidmeals.in, select the district or city, select the area or locality you are living in and a list of contact numbers of five to six people appear here. While some of these options include breakfast, lunch and dinner, some of them provide only lunch and dinner. Sneha tells us, "A lot of people have ordered food for their parents from abroad. Recently, a lady from Singapore whose parents are living alone in Bengaluru thanked me on Instagram for starting this initiative. In the past few weeks, I have received messages from people living in 15 different countries. I think these messages of gratitude keep us going," she concludes.  

During these dark times, a spark of hope and a shot of positivity can make all the difference in the world. That's what our new series Daily Positivity+ is all about. If you know someone who is doing their best to spread hope during this COVID pandemic, do tell us about them at edexlive@gmail.com or WhatsApp us at +91 73580 29990

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