IN COPENHAGEN in the summer of 2013, Daniel Patterson, a two-Michelin-star chef with four restaurants in California’s Bay Area, watched as the Los Angeles–based chef Roy Choi gave a speech about the millions of Californians who are hungry or live in fear of going hungry. As Patterson sat in the audience at the MAD Symposium in the Danish capital, an annual event that gathers thought leaders in the field of food, he was reminded of his own social-justice initiative, called the Cooking Project, which works with kids and adults in San Francisco’s toughest neighborhood, the Tenderloin. “The idea,” he says, “is that by teaching...