Other approaches to kitchen sustainability

Restaurants often follow the U.S. Green Building Council’s standards to give new or renovated facilities a greener tinge. But the points-based system doesn’t extend to such energy and water-saving measures as installing the right kitchen equipment, notes kitchen designer Josh Smith.

He’ll be part of a panel at the International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium that looks at sustainability practices that may not earn points in the USGBC’s LEED certification process.

Part of the presentation will deal with choosing equipment, says Smith, director of business development for Next Step Design in Annapolis, Md.

But also covered will be “philosophical things that are not tangible,” like systems and policies.

For instance, he says, the convention has long been to put refrigeration equipment inside a restaurant kitchen for the sake of convenience. But moving a walk-in outside the building shifts a heat-generator out of the production area, easing the burden on the exhaust system. It’s also easier to maintain that way, he adds.

Similarly, “not distributing water bottles in your restaurant” won’t get you any LEED points, but it’s a major step toward greater sustainability, says Smith.

He’ll be joined on the Sustainable Building & Kitchen Design panel by a Next Step colleague, designer Russell Stillwell, and an architect, Peter Hapstack, a principle of hapstak demetriou + pllc.

The session is scheduled for Wednesday, May 25, at 1:30 p.m.

Shedding light on new light options

Recounting the cost benefits of LED lighting is dog-bites-man stuff. What restaurateurs might not realize, says sustainable-lighting expert Derry Berrigan, is the potential impact on sales.

“If you’re trying to drive sales, lighting most definitely impacts that,” says Berrigan, who’ll be talking about lighting at the International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium next month.

Not surprisingly, the effects on evening and nighttime traffic can be particularly pronounced, she adds.

Indeed, Berrigan stresses, lighting affects everything, and has to be viewed from a macro viewpoint.

In the case of LEDs, the low-consumption lights “improve your bottom line on both ends—costs and sales,” she says.

The savings are dramatic, she says. LEDs can cut energy bills by as much as 81%, making them an economical choice no matter how you slice it.

That’s why it’s important to assess a lighting product by its whole lifespan, not its upfront price, she stresses.

At the conference, Berrigan will recount case histories of two LED installations: A one-year-old McDonald’s unit, and a two-year-old KFC-Taco Bell combo store.

“We’ll be explaining how LED is now affordable for any restaurant franchise,” she says.

Berrigan is co-hosting the Cutting Edge of Sustainable Technology session with Richard Young of the Food Service Technology Center, a California facility that tests and verifies the energy efficiency of commercial restaurant equipment. The breakout is slated for 4:45 on Tuesday, May 24.

Sustainability talk in a sustainable setting

It’s fitting that the first foodservice sustainability conference will be held at one of the trade’s greenest educational facilities.

Kendall College, host of next month’s International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium, decided in 2005 to instill a green sensibility into every aspect of its School of Culinary Arts. The effort extended to the replacement of plastic tasting spoons with wooden ones, and a switch from disposable paper toques to cloth rewashable ones.

Today the downtown Chicago school recycles, composts and maintains an on-campus sustainable garden that supplies its student-staffed fine-dining restaurant. The garden affords an opportunity to teach students the sustainability principles that will be discussed at the IFSS.

The fine-dining facility was expanded last year into a 22,000-sq.-ft. space with a hotel-sized display kitchen situated behind a floor-to-ceiling glass fronting the 90-seat dining room. Patrons see their locally and sustainably grown vegetables being produced on energy-saving equipment by students who’ve been schooled in maintaining a green approach from field to fork.

Kendall is not only the host of the IFSS, but a founding co-sponsor, in collaboration with the National Restaurant Association.

Chefs as super heroes

Julian Cribb, author of the acclaimed “The Coming Famine” and a keynote speaker at next month’s International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium, has spied an unexpected hero in the world’s mounting food crisis. More Clark Kent that Superman, given more to culinary whites and toques than capes or masks, Cribb’s potential rescuer is the foodservice chef. 

He explains why in this interview with Christopher Koetke, executive director of the Kendall College School of Culinary Arts, the host of the IFSS.

Koetke: It’s exciting to think that chefs may hold one of the keys to this dilemma because they set “food fashion.” Where do they start? What can we say to chefs about what they really need to do to help people understand the issues at hand?

Cribb: As I mentioned in the book, I’m a very humble domestic chef, but I was impressed when I visited the The World Vegetable Centre regional research facility in Arusha, Tanzania. Scientists there have collected seeds from the whole of Africa, including about 400 vegetables that have never appeared in any restaurant or supermarket; these vegetables were being eaten by local indigenous tribes and, indeed, sometimes even the next tribe didn’t know about them. And that’s just Africa. Think about how Christopher Columbus brought over the American potatoes, tomatoes and peppers to Europe and how that revolutionized the world diet. Now multiply that by Africa, Asia, and Australia. We have about 6,000 edible plants in Australia and only five of them are regularly consumed – macadamias, cumquats, bush tomatoes, bush pepper and lemon myrtle. We have not even begun to discover the richness of this world’s edible plant foods. We talk about eating more plant foods and it can be a marvelous and healthy culinary adventure.

Koetke: You say you’re not a professional chef but your comments are very much those of a professional chef because we are increasingly learning about the diversity within the plant world and it is great inspiration. I frequently travel to other countries like Brazil and I’ve tried a whole host of fruits and vegetables that I never knew existed. It’s fascinating and elicits the kind of creative inspiration that really gets the ideas flowing, whereas meat is essentially limiting.

Cribb: Well, meat isn’t all that limiting. I was recently invited to address a beef feedlot association’s annual conference and I gave them my usual message, which really worried them, and one guy asked, “What can we do?” The fact is that if the primary input, grain, is going to triple in price, then beef feed lotting isn’t going to work out. And I said to them, “Have you ever thought about diversifying into guinea pigs?” I mean there are livestock other than just cattle. Smaller livestock, like guinea pigs and rabbits can run in much smaller areas, can eat a more diversified diet – you can grow algae and feed it to them or you can use vegetable waste from supermarkets. The current formula is very limiting, but my point is that it doesn’t need to be. I believe that diversification is going to happen; we already see it with the Chinese who essentially eat anything that runs, swims or jumps. I think people will even begin farming certain types of insects as a good source of protein, just like we’re farming prawns, which are essentially insects of the sea.

Koetke: In Chapter 12 of your book you open up with a scenario set in 2085 in which students visit a museum to see how their ravaged world came to be; they see an object at the end of a long hallway that is the cause of the end of the world, the symbol of indulgence – a cookbook. I thought that was really interesting and would like you to comment on that really means.

Cribb: People think their own indulgences don’t matter, but when you multiply those personal indulgences by seven billion human beings, they have a very big impact. A cookbook looks innocent, but the wrong kinds of advice in a cookbook about what you eat can kill you and make agriculture unsustainable. We need to have cookbooks that help farmers and send market signals to grow fruits and vegetables in sustainable ways. Current cookbooks aren’t produced like that.

Koetke: You’ve pointed out a potential cookbook market segment that could be very interesting.

Cribb: Without being too preachy, I’d like the cookbook to gently educate the reader. Perhaps recipes could be labeled with a number of droplets signaling that the recipe is water-heavy or water-light, oil-heavy or oil-light so they understand their choices.

Koetke: That’s interesting because that kind of weighting is very much what the nutrition industry has done. It could be done much like nutritional content is done now. I think there’s an awful lot there to think about.

Cribb: Ordinary people in cities that don’t have contact with agriculture don’t understand these things. They don’t know how their food is produced and that most of our meat is produced by cruel, inhumane and toxic methods. They just see it as pink stuff in the supermarket that’s part of their diet. Chefs, cooks, and food designers can look further upstream in an attempt to understand it and help educate people, because as I said before, they set the food fashion.

How can you help avert famine?

“This book,” celebrated author Julian Cribb explains in the preface to his latest work, “is a wake-up call.”

No doubt about that. “The Coming Famine” details how the dynamics shaping food demand and production are combining to push the world toward an unprecedented level of hunger and starvation. Throw wars in there as a likely outcome, too, Cribb writes.

But there’s a big “if.” If the world doesn’t address the mounting shortages of water, land and agricultural know-how. If the agricultural mindset doesn’t change. If new, more responsible methods aren’t adopted.

What he doesn’t say in the book, but will likely stress at his key address at the International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium next month, is the “if” of big agriculture not responding to the pressures directed at them by foodservice chefs and their customers.

It’s not a matter of pleasing some well-heeled foodie who likes his asparagus harvested just that day. It’s a matter of sustaining the world’s food production capabilities.

Hear more about how restaurants can remedy the situation at the IFSS, a daylong brainstorming session on sustainability. 

Warts, famine and all

Sugarcoating, it seems, is not sustainable.

Or at least it shouldn’t have a place at next month’s International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium, insist the renowned authorities who’ve agreed to serve as keynote speakers. As one put it during a recent conference call, “We should not shy away from painting the real picture. If we do that, we’re just denying what we have to face up to.”

The unpleasant realities include a possible worldwide famine, or what another speaker termed “the biggest scientific challenge the human race has got right now.”

There are also thorny issues like increasing what farmers are paid for their output—a difficult idea for restaurateurs to embrace when they’re already wincing from a climb in commodity prices.

Yet the keynoters were quick to note there’s reason for restaurateurs and consumers to be optimistic. Yes, there are serious sustainability-related problems facing the world. But there are already steps being taken to address the issues, including a number of actions in restaurant kitchens.

The speakers participated in a conference call last week to hammer out the content for the IFSS, a first-of-its-kind brainstorming session.  FoodserviceSustainability was able to be a fly on the wall via a recording.

Because the confab was a working meeting, it wouldn’t be fair to air precisely who said what. It was a workshop, not a rehearsal or preview.

But suffice it to say that the participants are comfortable with an unabashed look at the facets of sustainability that should be of interest to chefs and restaurateurs. They agreed that differences of opinions on some of those matters would be welcomed, since more perspectives will bring a clearer picture and underscore the complexities.

Those issues include such things as improving food taste through sustainable agricultural methods, even if the end result is lowered farm output. For instance, mechanization boosts yield, but it also puts small farmers out of business because they can’t compete.

The speakers also raised some issues that are sometimes overlooked in discussions of food sustainability. How, for example, is the nation as a whole, and foodservice in particular, going to help a growing body of young people who’d like to reverse the historical trend and opt for a farm career?

The give-and-take during the hour-plus call suggested that the IFSS is going to be an event not to be missed. You can look at the specifics of the program on the event’s, website, IFSSymposium.org.

At the event, you’ll be able to hear the on-the-record comments of the conference call participants. They included Julian Cribb, the agricultural journalist and author of “The Coming Famine”; Dr. Fred Kirschenmann, an organic farmer and distinguished fellow of the sustainable agriculture program at Iowa State University; and Dr. Richard Beachy, director of the National Institute for Food and Agriculture at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

A conversation with Dr. Fred Kirschenmann

Our keynote speaker at the International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium will be Dr. Fred Kirschenmann, a farmer by birth who went on to become one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable agricultural methods. He serves as a distinguished fellow of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, and manages an organic-certified farm.

Christopher Koetke, executive director of the School of Culinary Arts at IFSS host Kendall College, recently spoke with Kirschenbaum about some of the issues he’ll be addressing.

Koetke: Chefs spend most of their time concerned about customers, operations, menus and those kinds of day-to-day things.  Unfortunately, there is little time to really get deeply inside the issues around sustainable food.  What I’m hearing from my fellow chefs is that there’s a lot of confusion out there. I’m hoping you can help us navigate the waters so when we’re talking about terms like organic, biodynamic, sustainable, and local, you can give us your thoughts and some context.

Kirschenmann: I will address that in a second, but I want to tell you a story.  I have the good fortune of being here with chef Dan Barber at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, NY, and he tells me there two schools of chefs now: One, those who buy products without paying much attention to taste or quality and then use all kinds of molecular techniques to transform that food into the kind of great tasting food they want to serve their customers; and two, chefs who establish unique relationships with the farmers who are producing the kind of quality food that has wonderful taste without artificial enhancements; Dan now likes to say that it’s really the farmers who are the chefs.

Chris:  When we talk about foodservice, it’s such an enormous market space. Although it’s often the high-end restaurants that garner all the press and if you look at the big players, it’s fast food, it’s fast casual. There’s a whole slice in the middle that doesn’t belong to either end and they’re saying, “I’ve got to make a profit at the end of the month.” If we can give them tools to understand the food they’re purchasing, that’s where I come in and I want to make sure we’re able do that.

Kirschenmann: I wanted to tell that story because it does play into the question of organic versus biodynamic versus local versus sustainable. There’s not a lot of peer-reviewed research around this yet but there is growing anecdotal evidence that when food is grown on biologically healthy soil, that is soil that has been managed to feed the soil’s biological community, it has a much better taste. The only way you can feed that community is by putting the waste, preferably in composted form, back into the soil. We’ve been experimenting with that here at Stone Barns. We’re working with farmers here looking at different types of soil management and compost – and now biochar – and how they affect the taste quality of the food. 

Chris:  Biochar?

Kirschenmann: The term biochar began appearing about 10 to15 years ago in soil science literature.  It was discovered in South America. Within a relatively depleted area, this incredibly rich piece of soil was found that went 10 to 15 feet deep and they couldn’t figure out how that could be possible in an area that was basically depleted of soil health.  As they checked back into the history, they found out that a community of indigenous people who lived in that area had burned wood for cooking but only to the point where it was a particular kind of charcoal, which they called terra prima, and they would put that back into the soil.  So we’re experimenting with it here and we’ve discovered that if you mix a small amount of biochar in with the compost, it improves the quality of the compost tremendously and that, in turn, improves the taste quality as well.

Chris: Can you talk a little bit about organics?

Kirschenmann: One way to look at organic food is that it meets the national standard.  I served on the National Organics Standards Board when we developed the rules for implementing the law.  Several of my colleagues and I wanted to make sure that organic production systems could only be certified if they also paid attention to soil health.  We drafted some language and the staff was interested in incorporating it into the standards.  However, when we ran it by the lawyers, they said we couldn’t do it because regulation relies on yes/no answers and there was no way to answer the complex soil quality issue in that manner.  So we ended up with a rule that says you can use any natural products that aren’t listed on the prohibited list, like arsenic, and all synthetics are prohibited except those on the allowed list. That means you can have a certified organic operation that simply uses natural inputs instead of synthetic inputs, yet doesn’t pay any more attention to the biological health of the soil than a conventional system.

Chris: So, as a chef, when I’m purchasing something that is organic, are you saying that I’m purchasing something that is certified by a standard, but it doesn’t mean that the farmer who produced it is necessarily being the best steward of the land?

Kirschenmann: That’s right and it also doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s sustainable. If you get your seaweed from Japan and your Chilean nitrate from South America, its associated energy costs go up and that’s probably not sustainable.