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.
Showing posts with label foodservice sustainability. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foodservice sustainability. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Monday, April 18, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, April 11, 2011
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.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Clarity from a godfather of sustainability
Long before the sustainability movement snagged mainstream attention, Dr. Fred Kirschenmann was practicing and recommending the principles of farmland stewardship. His work as educator and working farmer attracted the attention of famed field-to-fork chef Dan Barber, who made Kirschenmann president of his Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a working sustainable farm that supplies Barber’s four-star on-site restaurant site.
Today Kirschenmann is a sought-after expert on the matter of boosting food flavor by doing the right things on the farm where it's raised. We’re pleased to have him as a keynoter for our International Foodservice Sustability Symposium.
Kirschenmann, who’s many farmer hats include serving as Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, will help attendees make sense of the baffling lingo that’s sprung up around the sustainability movement. How is “sustainable” different from “organic”? And what are the nuances that differentiate biodynamic agriculture, or permaculture?
The longtime sustainability champion has the expertise to provide the answers. He was part of the team mustered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to draft federal organic standards.
He also brings to the task a practical knowledge from presiding over a 3,600-acre certified organic farm in Windsor, N.D.
Check back here in the next few days for a Q&A with Dr. Kirschenmann.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
An interview with Julian Cribb
The keynote speaker at next month’s International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium will be Julian Cribb, author of “The Coming Famine.” Christopher Koetke, executive director of the School of Culinary Arts at IFSS host Kendall College, recently sat down with Cribb to discuss how chefs can help to avert a catastrophe in the food supply.
Cribb: For the last 20 years, I feel that the world has been rather complacent about its food supply and scarcity will sneak up on us if we’re not careful. It’s good to know that the chefs and restaurateurs of the world, who have a tremendous effect on how we eat, have a strong interest in this topic.
Koetke: In reading your book, I would characterize it as both powerful and horrifying. As a brief introduction for those who haven’t read it yet, could you please share its premise and how you came to write it?
Cribb: As an agricultural journalist for about 40 years and now a general science journalist, I’ve always had a strong interest in the food supply, and how it can be produced efficiently and sustainably. In the first decade of this century, I could see the food supply was not keeping up with demand. Grain stocks were going down and down at a time when the population was growing and nearly developed nations like China and India with a rising middle class, began demanding more food, especially protein. At the same time, almost everything we need to produce food sustainability is running out: fresh water, good farmland, oil and fertilizer, which are all finite resources. Further, agricultural science has been neglected in all of the major developed countries of the world for the last couple decades and the climate is changing profoundly. Our civilization, which was founded on agriculture, is changing profoundly and we don’t know what the ultimate consequence of that change will be on our food supply.
Koetke: You talk about 2050 as critical for humanity. Why is 2050 such a milestone?
Cribb: The human population is still growing by about 100 million per year and people are living longer in developing countries. That means that sometime between 2030 and the end of the century, assuming there’s no awful war or devastating pandemic, we’ll have to be feeding 9 to 11 billion people until the population slowly begins to decline after the 2060s or 2070s; that’s roughly double the current population. Feeding this number of people is a very large challenge and we need to think about how we’re going to do it now, before the issue becomes critical. We’re already seeing some of the consequences in rising food prices because supply is not keeping up with demand worldwide.
Koetke: As chefs, we don’t typically think about water; we use it with abandon and the reality is there’s a price for that water and we don’t pay that fair price. Books like yours bring home the reality that you may not see them, but they’re still very real and they will be impacting our future so we need to do something about it
Cribb: Many countries, like Australia, are beginning to acknowledge that they’re not paying the right price for food. Farmers need to get paid better or the economic signal for them to produce won’t be there… It may seem expensive to the consumer, but today we’re paying for the food but not the landscape destruction that results from the growing process. It’s a short-sighted policy and our grandchildren will pay for it.
New sustainability conference takes root
Welcome to the blog for the International Foodservice Sustainability Symposium, the restaurant industry’s first global conference on the dynamics behind the green movement.
The conference, slated for May 24-25 at Kendall College in Chicago, will look at such issues as alternate power sources, the trends in green buildings, and how advances in technology are cutting expenses while preserving precious resources.
Special emphasis will be put on food, the aspect of restaurant sustainability that has perhaps generated the most confusion—and controversy. Does sustainable equal organic when it comes to food? Or is that description reserved for “biodynamic,” or the new phrase coming into use in the green community, permaculture?
What do those terms even mean?
And how can foodservice establishments embrace sustainable practices and still meet their sales and profit imperatives?
Our conference will put together the experts for a dialogue on those and other matters. In the meantime, we’ll be framing many of the issues here.
You can also get quick updates on the conference via our Twitter reports, @IFSS2011, and from the IFSS 2011 Facebook page.
The discussion begins now!
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