You’ve got to hand it to Massimo Bottura. Not content with running the world’s best restaurant – Osteria Francescana in Modena, in case you’re wondering – the man who made Italian food cool again wants to change the world itself.

delicious. readers will know this already.

“We need more places that unite people at the table,” he told David Matthews in an exclusive interview for the July issue of the magazine. “We need more places that revive neighborhoods. We need more places that restore the body and soul.”

Bottura was in Sydney for MAD SYD, the first overseas iteration of the Copenhagen-based food symposium MAD, using the occasion to launch Food for Soul, a program that develops contemporary soup kitchens internationally.

“A recipe can be a social gesture,” he told the audience at that event. “Cooking is a call to act.”

Bottura is now planning to use the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, which start in a little over a week, to make his biggest “social gesture” yet.

Feeding the Games’ 18,000 athletes is a military operation. Sixty thousand meals – roughly 208 tonnes of food – will be cooked each day in a kitchen the size of a football field. With leftovers and wastage almost certain to result, Bottura has teamed up with Brazil-based social gastronomy organisation Gastromotiva to rescue as much of the surplus as possible in order to feed the city’s poor.

Bottura and Gastromotiva founder David Hertz believe they’ll wind up with about 11 tonnes of unused food over the course of two weeks. They’re going to use that food to prepare 100 free meals every night of the event.

To help the pair achieve this goal, Rio’s city council has taken over an empty store in the Lapa neighbourhood and turned it into a community soup kitchen. The newly named ‎RefettoRio Gastromotiva will feed the poor and hungry during the Olympic and Paralympic Games and then remain in place as a community centre helping locals with food-related programs and classes. (Gastromotiva has made its name running vocational kitchen training.)

Bottura and Hertz said they would call upon local social workers and charities to spread the word to residents and hoped that the centre’s ongoing programming would cause people to question wasteful behaviour. “We need to empower people on the ground,” Hertz said in a statement. “They can make the change happen.”

Food wastage is becoming an increasingly hot topic worldwide. About 1.3 billion tonnes of food goes to waste globally every year, which is more than the total food production of Sub-Saharan Africa and enough to feed 900 million hungry people. In Australia alone, food wastage costs $10 billion each year.

On Monday, OzHarvest ran Think.Eat.Save lunches across the country to raise the issues of food wastage and security. The South Australian State Government is currently considering a program that would cut the size of pub meals in order to reduce waste.

In Brazil, 30 per cent of produce is discarded before it ever reaches the table. In São Paulo, the country’s largest city, the council is reviewing a bill that would require companies to donate any unused food still fit for consumption.

In other words, Bottura’s efforts are merely the tip of an increasingly sharp spear.