June’s, a unique pop-up restaurant in Toronto, Canada is the world’s first eatery where all of the kitchen staff are HIV positive.

The idea of the restaurant was born out of a recent poll that suggested only half of Canadians would knowingly share or eat food prepared by someone who is HIV positive.

According to Joanne Simons of Casey House, Canada’s first and only standalone hospital for people living with HIV/Aids, the idea was to “challenge the stigma that still exists around HIV” and also an invaluable opportunity to publicly address some of the myths that persist today around the disease.

“I think that there’s still this lingering notion that if I have regular human contact with somebody with HIV, I may contract it – and it is still a death sentence,” Simons said.

After the after the pop-up restaurant was launched there were a lot of questions about what happens if somebody cuts themselves in the kitchen and they’re HIV positive and the risk of transmission, but Simons explains:

“We manage that like anybody would in a kitchen: you make sure you provide first aid, you clean up the area, you throw away whatever has been touched by the blood and you clean the surfaces. We would do that regardless of whether you have HIV or not – that’s just common sense.

“There’s absolutely no risk that somebody can contract HIV from sharing a meal. HIV doesn’t live well out of the body for any length of time and through the cooking the virus dies.”



After its launch, the restaurant which already has more than 100 patrons, recruited a 14-person team for the kitchen who spent hours with the Toronto chef Matt Basile to design a menu. As they geared up to prepare dishes that ranged from a northern Thai potato leek soup and Arctic char pappardelle, Basile trained them in food preparation.

Muluba Habanyama, a cook who lost both her parents to the disease, wondered what her parents would have thought of the restaurant.

“I know that if they were alive and seeing this it would have been unreal to them. Growing up, I knew I was positive, but I also knew it was a secret you kept within the family,” the 24-year-old said. As a child she fretted during sleepovers that the other kids would spot her taking medications – and experienced first-hand how perceptions shifted when she revealed her secret, the Guardian reports.

see more here:
http://www.tipsissuesonline.com/2017/11/see-restaurant-where-everyone-is-hiv.html
&
http://www.tipsissuesonline.com/2017/11/see-first-man-in-india-to-tattoo-his.html