Civil Eats

Chefs are artists. Good ones draw people in with their inspired plates and atmosphere–performance art meets flavor. While deliciousness at a restaurant is first and foremost, more patrons are now also making decisions about where to eat based on the values behind the food–like social justice for the workers, healthy growing practices, and support for local economies.

Last week in an interview with The New York Times, chefs Thomas Keller–who has received many awards for his creative approach to food at restaurants French Laundry and the Bouchon empire–and Andoni Luis Aduriz, of the restaurant Mugaritz in Spain, took the Damien Hirst approach to feeding people: It’s about the experience and whatever it takes to create radical and inspiring food is more important than the potential impact on the environment. “With the relatively small number of people I feed, is it really my responsibility to worry about carbon footprint?” remarked Keller.

Both chefs admitted that they buy local when they can, but didn’t want to focus on that as a practice. According to Aduriz, “to align yourself entirely with the idea of sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited.”

The good food movement would beg to differ. The proliferation of farm-to-table restaurants, farmers’ markets and small food businesses, and the increased visibility of food policy issues in the media all speak to a sea change under way. Read More

When the last farm bill passed, small farmers and sustainable food advocates had a few things to celebrate, but not as many as they’d hoped for. The bulk of the funding for agriculture went to subsidize industrial-sized commodity farmers (producing corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice) in a big way. Congress voted to continue a pattern that, according to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), has allowed ten percent of the nation’s farms to collect 74 percent of all farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009, a total amounting to over $150 billion. Those subsidies are delivered in the form of direct payments, crop insurance, and something called counter-cyclical payments (for a primer on some of the wonky terminology in this article, try EWG’s Farm Subsidy Primer).

The 2008 bill did, however, include some bright spots. There was a rural microenterprise program, support for beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers, grants for value-added agriculture, and several strong conservation programs (incentives for farmers to be good stewards of the land, water and air). As it turns out, however, the implementation of these programs is dependent on funding that Congress (more specifically, the House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee) then chooses to award—or not to award—on an individual basis every year. (You can see where this is going, can’t you?) Read More

The Cooking For Solutions event in Monterey always offers a dizzying array of well planned activities, all promoting that the public take a second to think about the issues that surround our current food system, particularly our seafood. But deeper into the layers of after-hours food galas, wine tasting tours, and celebrity chef demos is the Sustainable Foods Institute, two full days aimed at members of the media, brimming with information from the heavy hitters at the forefront of our food industry. At times mind numbing with content, this year’s packed agenda presented countless topics to report. After taking some time to absorb the speeches, presentations, panel discussions, and statistics, some re-occurring themes emerge, but mostly an overlying presence I just can’t shake is how much food waste occurs within all tenants of our food system, both in the ocean and on the land. Read More

Thomas Keller is one the world’s most celebrated chefs with his fleet of restaurants in Yountville, Las Vegas, and New York. At the same time, he is a vocal “thorn in the side” of local food advocates, with his direct dismissals of the locavore movement.

His message was much the same this year when he spoke at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sustainable Foods Institute a few weeks ago.  Speaking on a panel called “The Future of Food: Scaling Down,” Chef Keller made the distinction between geographically local and temporally local food.

That is, he personally considers local food to be anything that he can get at his doorstep within one day of harvest – even if that means flying that product overnight from across the country.

Here are some excerpts from Keller’s comments on the panel: Read More