Commendable initiative by Neapolitan chef Ciro Di Maio, of Brescia’s SanCiro pizzeria restaurant: he donates leftover water from tables to the dog pound.
On average, customers don’t drink about 30 liters of water a week, Neapolitan chef Ciro Di Maio, who runs the SanCiro pizzeria restaurant in Brescia, donates them to the Sos Randagi Shelter Kennel in Brescia. “A symbolic gesture against water waste in this time of drought.”
We may not pay attention to it. But very often, when we go to restaurants, we don’t finish the water in the bottles. Restaurateurs, when they collect them, are forced to throw them away to comply with hygiene regulations.
The San Ciro pizza restaurant in Brescia
Ciro di Maio, a Neapolitan-born chef who opened his restaurant “San Ciro” in Brescia, could not accept this waste. Armed with pen and paper, he set about marking down each day how much water he wasted. And he found that with his clientele flow on average 35 liters per week ended up in the sink, or nearly 150 per month.
Coincidentally, just a few hundred meters from his restaurant stands the Brescia Kennel Shelter, run by the Sos Randagi association, which has been involved in taking in foundlings for more than 20 years. The goal is to have them live peacefully and find them loyal and responsible families. Cyrus knew the facility: he lives with Ciruzzo Junior, a French bulldog who is almost a son to him. The chef thus knocked on the kennel’s doors and proposed a simple gesture. Once or twice a week he will come by, bringing water left on the tables by his customers, meanwhile collected in five-liter jerry cans.
The word from Ciro Di Maio
“For me it’s really a relief to stop wasting our blue gold, the water that will increasingly be a precious commodity for humanity,” says Cyrus. “I am also educating my customers about its consumption, and I hope that this symbolic gesture will be imitated by other restaurant colleagues of mine. I would like to see a network of chefs who save water, it would be nice if some guides, I’m thinking for example of the Michelin guide, would also start to evaluate those who engage in green initiatives of this kind that go to close the food chain by really valuing every ingredient we bring to the table. Water is one of them, perhaps the most important since it makes up all foods.”
The initiative therefore kicked off in this time of summer heat, in which kennel residents particularly suffer from high temperatures and in which the issue of drought foragriculture will be increasingly in the spotlight. Not to mention the dramatic spike in animal abandonment at this time every year.
SOS Strays Brescia
Supporting the initiative is Ann Christine Terenghi, president of Sos Randagi Brescia and author of the book “Just a Dog,” which tells the stories of many dogs living life in kennels. It was she who accompanied Ciro to the bowls, where the chef made the first water flow with the supervision of Idro, a large and beautiful white dog, unfortunately deaf, who has been living in the kennel for months and is looking, like the others, for a family to adopt him. “A name that could not have been more apt as a testimonial for this initiative,” says Di Maio.
“Our guests need food and lots of water first, especially now that the heat is increasing thirst,” Terenghi explains. “We hope that this nice gesture of Cyrus will serve to make those who waste a lot of it and also those who decide to leave their faithful four-legged friend in the kennel, with the most trivial reasons, vacations in the first place, think. Let us remember that abandoning a dog in the street is a criminally punishable offense, but giving up by taking it directly to the pound for futile reasons is equally uncivilized.”
The Brescia Kennel
“The care of the animals is important to us; many arrive here in really worrisome states,” says Guido Pellarini, veterinarian and health director of the Brescia Kennel Shelter. “That’s why we need everyone’s solidarity.”
This is not the first solidarity initiative of Chef Ciro, who last year pledged to teach the white art of pizza to inmates of the Brescia prison.
