Chefs Collaborative

Chefs Collaborative is pleased to release the latest edition of “Seafood Solutions: A Chef’s Guide to Sourcing Sustainable Seafood.” The guide combines the latest information about the health of our oceans with practical tips for chefs on how to choose and cook with ocean-friendly seafood.

Download a complimentary copy by clicking here or email Chefscollaborative@chefscollaborative.org to request your free copy.

I attended the James Beard Foundation Awards on Sunday for the first time - and with this year’s theme, “Artisanal America: The Craft of Cuisine,” I was especially excited to be there. Co-chairs Dan Barber and Odessa Piper - both Chefs Collaborative members - set a great tone for the evening! And Kim Cattrall of Sex and the City added glamour as co-host!

Congratulations to Chefs Collaborative members Robert Stehling of Hominy Grill in Charleston, SC for winning Best Chef: Southeast; Craig Stoll of Delfina in San Francisco, CA for Best Chef: Pacific; Holly Smith of Cafe Juanita in Kirkland, WA for Best Chef: Northwest - and to all the Chefs Collaborative members nominated this year.

It’s an honor to be asked to cook for the Beard awards. Kudos to the many Chefs Collaborative member chefs who cooked (with local ingredients) for the event, including: MJ Adams of The Corn Exchange in Rapid City, SD; Sam Hayward of Fore Street, Portland ME; Greg Higgins of Higgins Restaurant in Portland, OR; Peter Hoffman of Savoy and Back Forty restaurants in New York, NY; Stephanie Kimmel of Marche in Eugene, OR; Tory Miller of L’Etoile in Madison, WI; Michel Nischan of Dressing Room in Westport, CT; Nora Pouillon of Restaurant Nora in Washington, DC; and Bruce Sherman of North Pond Restaurant in Chicago, IL.

Two books emphasizing sustainability also won top awards. Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, her memoir about a year of eating locally, won for “writing on food.” And The River Cottage Meat Book, by Hugh Fernley-Whittinggstall, which makes the case for supporting the environment, vibrant local economies, and respectful treatment of animals, won for “single subject.”

And finally, my hat is off to the James Beard Foundation for putting the spotlight on cooking with local, sustainable ingredients and artisanal products! Chefs have such an influential role in shaping the public opinion about the importance of buying food from trusted and sustainable sources and this year’s Beard awards went a long way toward promoting this important message throughout the culinary community and beyond.

Melissa Kogut, Executive Director

The salmonella outbreak in tomatoes is just the latest in a series of food security scares and has some of the nation’s largest restaurants and supermarkets taking tomatoes of their menus and shelves. With the FDA still clamoring to find a source for the outbreak, they have given consumers the following piece of advice on their website:

“Consumers who are unsure of where the tomatoes are from that they have in their home are encouraged to contact the store or place of purchase for that information. If consumers are unable to determine the source of the tomatoes, they should not be eaten.”

This may seem like common sense, but over the past fifty years, many Americans have lost touch with the source of their food. Most people don’t know where there tomatoes come from, let alone the name of the farm that produced them. This recent food security crisis is just another reason for knowing the source of your food and supporting local farmers, small-scale producers, and your local Chefs Collaborative member restaurants.

Over the past year, the locavore movement has grown significantly - with many Americans making a conscious effort to reduce the number of miles between the source of their food and the table. Last month, the journal of Environmental Science and Technology published a study that found food transportation accounts for only 11% of the greenhouse gas emissions related to overall food consumption. Almost half of greenhouse gas emissions from food are attributed to the production of red meat and dairy products.

This doesn’t come as a surprise as the consumption of meat and dairy products has risen significantly over the past few decades. According to the USDA, American consumption of meat has increased by 57 pounds, and the consumption of cheese has increased by 287% since the 1950’s. It also probably doesn’t come to a surprise to anyone who lives near a Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAF0) who can see and smell the pollution these high yielding operations produce.

National Public Radio recently asked the question, “Is it better to eat locally or eat differently?”. We believe it needs to be a combination of both. The locavore movement is not just about “food miles”. It’s also about knowing the source of your food, and community building.  And chefs can plan an important role in this movement by creating a market for good food that supports sustainable agricultural practices.

“Why bother?” asks Michael Pollan in the Green Issue of The New York Times Magazine . This “big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change” is a good one.

Let’s say, for example, that Chefs Collaborative is totally successful and sustainability becomes second nature for chefs and the greater culinary community – from white tablecloth restaurants to the town diner. Will it matter in the larger world of climate change and the health of our planet?

I have to believe that the answer is “yes!” While I’m quite sure that our efforts alone will not be the key to our climate change problems (scientists don’t even agree about what steps we need to take), being conscious of our carbon footprint matters. This includes being mindful of where our food comes from and the energy it takes to grow and deliver it. And as we take action around our carbon footprints, we’ll be doing something else too: Contributing to the quality of our lives, the diversity of our food supply, and the health of our communities.

The greater culinary community can be a catalyst for positive change by creating a market for good, sustainably produced food and by helping preserve local farming and fishing communities. I encourage each of you – whether for your restaurant or your family meal – to take a step (any step) that feels doable: Support your local farmer’s market, purchase seafood that has been sourced responsibly, or try cooking with lesser-known cuts of meat. Your actions will not only contribute directly to a more robust food supply and healthy environment, but as a chef you’ll influence your customers’ food choices as well. And who knows what kind of ripple effects these behavior changes will set in motion.

–Melissa Kogut, Executive Director, Chefs Collaborative

Rising food costs are big news these days, and news stories like this one are looking at the losses big restaurant chains are suffering as a result. If you’re a small restaurant buying from local producers in your community, this might be a chance to get even more attention for what you do.

You already pay more for your ingredients, and you have relationships with your suppliers and customers that big chains can’t compete with. So when you find yourself faced with raising the price on a menu item, you can come out of the kitchen and explain why to your guests.

It might seem like a simplified look at a complex issue, but while chains are struggling as a result of their participation in a busted industrial food system, small-scale, community-oriented food businesses have an opportunity to shine a light on their work–the work that might endure our current economy and inform our future.

You could feel that spring had come to the Berkshires after a long and gray winter. Wherever we went around Great Barrington, farmers and gardeners were hoeing the ground, planting seeds, adjusting water lines, patching up chicken coops, or moving livestock between pastures.

By noon on Saturday, many of us congregated at the Route 7 Grill near Great Barrington, to sample and discuss the foods and brews unique to the Berkshires, and ponder what they meant to our society as Earth Day of 2008 loomed before us. We sipped hard cider made from heirloom Baldwin Apples, nibbled at freshly-picked spring greens, passed around Berkshire Blue cheese, and savored barbecue sandwiches from brisket smoked not fifty yards from where we were sitting.

As the warm sun poured down upon us and the first daffodils broke broke out into flower in the pasture beyond us, I drifted off into a reverie about folks were eating when the first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970.

I remember that day because I had taken a “leave of absence” from my freshman year in college to work as a cartoonist and cub reporter at Earth Day headquarters in Washington, D.C. Like many times before and since, I was essentially playing hookie from my normal responsibilities to engage with others in promoting a somewhat novel way of looking at the world around us: we wished to have all human inhabitants on this little planet understand how their actions and consumption patterns affected the entire biosphere in which we lived. But while we worked fourteen hour days writing newsletters and press releases in a little office on DuPont Circle, we were oblivious to the fact that our own eating patterns might be contributing to the planet’s problem.

The staff of hard-core activists would hardly look up from their desks went someone came around to “order out” for some fast food. Most likely, it came from the Roy Rogers grill across the street or the twenty-four hour cafe a floor below us, one that was filled with policemen, hooker and pimps drinking bad coffee and eyeing one another all hours of the day or night. I remember that one day, I finally tired of the constant smell of grease, and went for a walk in attempt to find a health food store. Given the little pocket change I had at the time, all I could purchase was a bag of Basmati rice from India, a jar of orange honey from Florida, and some almonds from California. I lived off that combination for another week, leaving my desk only to nap on the mail bags in the postal room at the end of the hall.

Among the news events we covered at that time, food, farming or fishing were not much a part of our concern for a healthy environment. We wrote about the lead in paint, the pesticides on lawns, the sulfurous fumes rising from smoke stacks. We behaved as though our food came from another planet. The only connection we saw between food and planetary health was through Francis Moore Lappe’s little book, Diet for a Small Planet, which made it difficult for us to imagine how anyone in the future could eat meat, given how much grain and beans our burgeoning population would need to feed itself.

We knew that species were already disappearing from the face of the earth, but imagined eagles and rhinos and pandas, not the diverse species which still blessed our tables at that time: swordfish and sea turtles and white abalones and Jerusalem artichokes. No one used the term biodiversity at the time of the first Earth Day, and certainly no seventeen-year old like me could have then fathomed that the loss of food biodiversity would emerge as a concern among those worried about food security.

But in the months approaching that first Earth Day in 1970, scientists were suddenly realizing the risks of monoculture and of having too few crop varieties in the field, as the Southern Corn Blight raged through the rural communities of the South and Midwest.

Today, we are facing unprecedented rises in commodity food prices, largely because of the fossil fuel embedded in nearly every bite we take. The price of corn in the U.S. has doubled since 2005. The same amount of food relief the U.S. government annually offers the poor of the world currently costs $500 million more than it did a year ago, independent of how many additional people are currently going hungry. And at the same time, we are realizing that one of the most resilent buffers against food insecurity and outright famine —-food biodiversity—-is also in peril.

For this Earth Day, the Renewing America’s Food Traditions alliance released a list of some 1104 food species, varieties, and stocks that are threatened, endangered or already extinct, that are no longer on any North American table. This food biodiversity—of heirloom fruits and seeds as well as fish, game and heritage livestock breeds—-has nourished our ancestors and predecessors on this continent for centuries. And yet, these foods have been put at risk by over thirty environmental and economic threats to our food system. No one cause accounts for all of the losses our food system has suffered, from the extinction of the Passenger pigeon to the epidemic which depleted American chestnuts, or the collecting which decimated the white abalone.

But if historic consumption and habitat degradation has threatened so many foods over such a short period of time, is it not possible for our society to reverse those trends as well, by shifting our eating and purchasing habits to favor those food species that can again become sustainably-harvested, and those producers who are investing in diversity and restore habitats on-farm and off? Chefs Collaborative’s work—from its sustainable seafood campaigns to the American Heritage Picnics it has sponsored—clearly demonstrates that chefs and consumers can enable what we call “eater-based conservation.”

Much of the Earth Day that I will have this year is not only more flavorful but more sustainable than what I sampled some thirty-eight years ago around DuPont Circle. Importantly, food, farming and fishing issues are more integrated into Earth Day celebrations than ever before. Are current heroes and inspirations are not just Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, Ralph Nader and Frankie Lappe, but Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Deborah Madison, Peter Hoffman, Rick Bayless and Joan Gussow as well.

The selection of what we eat is perhaps the most direct impact we have on the earth and its waters. Earth Day, in a sense, is the communion celebration by which we acknowledge that we can either heal or damage the earth, depending how we eat. Let us all answer the call to eater-based conservation by any means we can muster.

Rising food prices are a global problem without an immediate solution. Recently, hungry people have staged food protests in Egypt, Mexico, Cameroon, and Haiti. In this country, a Chicago newspaper reported that the average area resident should expect to pay $260 more for his or her groceries in 2008. The price of cheese, wheat, corn, and meat, is at an all-time high. The AP reports that food prices went up 23% between 2006 and 2007, according to the FAO. Grain went up 42%, oils 50% and dairy 80% during this time.

Bloomberg News reports that Morgan Stanley analysts attribute the price spike to diminished grain reserves worldwide and rising demand from China. Corn being diverted to ethanol production, drought in Australia and floods in Argentina all may play a role. According to The Economist, some Asian countries like the Philippines can’t grow enough to feed themselves, while others, like Myanmar, maintain regimes that contribute to hunger and poverty. High fuel prices only add to the overall price increase.

In the Washington Post recently, chefs and restaurateurs shared tips for shoring up narrowing margins–smaller portions, small price increases, and a creative hand with trimmings and waste–is helping restaurants stay competitive. For some Chefs Collaborative members, finding the right menu balance is becoming a trickier proposition.

Amy Scherber, of Amy’s Bread in New York City, said in the past, she used organic flour even in her conventional breads, but “when it went up from 30 cents to 68 cents,” they had to switch. “We’ve used a stone ground conventional flour for two months, and last week it went from 44 cents to 78 cents a pound, and that’s not even organic.” For a commercial bakery, “that’s staggering,” she allows, noting that their supplier’s prices have more than doubled in a year, keeping pace with wheat prices nationwide.

Scherber had to raise her prices back in November, and can’t imagine doing that again in the months ahead. “I think we’re going to have to just suck it up,” she said, expressing her hope that New York restauranteurs stand by their artisanal bakers in these tough times.

In Cranford, New Jersey, at A Toute Heure Bistro, Andrea Carbine feels protected by her diverse menu and by buying local and seasonal foods. “If something is too expensive, we just don’t put it on the menu,” she said. Her local baker has seen a price increase lately, but produce and pasture-raised lamb, beef and bison have remained fairly stable. This year looks like a good growing season, and Andrea is optimistic, even though pickups and deliveries are costlier due to higher gas prices.

Julie and John Stehling of the Early Girl Eatery in Asheville, N.C. and the North Star Diner were equally optimistic about this year’s produce. “If we can get through the next two weeks, no frost, we’ll be fine. Last year was rough, with a frost after Easter that wiped out apples, blueberries, and raspberries. This year is looking better,” John said recently.

The Stehlings have seen a significant decrease in their profit margin, and buying local “is a real balancing act, it’s tricky.” Their business is currently about 50 – 50 local, and his free-range local eggs’ prices have more than doubled in recent years. “We are comfort food. I don’t feel like we can raise our prices any time soon. I see me absorbing it,” said John.

“I’m trying my heart out to stay with the people” he’s been working with long-term, because “we do what we can to be part of the community, year after year.” For the Stehlings, it’s a question of integrity. “That’s who we are as people,” he said. As they both tell me, they got into the restaurant business for reasons other than making a profit. As John said, “I could cut corners, but then I’d probably not go home and sleep as well at night.”

The other night Chefs Collaborative hosted a pig fabrication breakdown at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts. Chef Jamie Bissonette of KO Prime demonstrated deep porcine affection and understanding. If he hadn’t been talking the standing-room-only group through the process of breaking down a 140-pound pig, he probably could have butchered the thing in under thirty minutes. Pretty impressive. We tasted samples of his charcuterie, watched and asked questions while he talked us through the various parts and uses for every part, literally, from tail to stomach lining to feet to, yes, ears. A pig-ear terrine was pretty to look at with the taste and texture of something vaguely mushroom-y. It was a great gathering and, we hope, educational and informative for our members and guests.

Fast food isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It would be nice to say the same of small-scale family farmers. Who know that there are viable ways for these two groups to work together? Once again, pork paves the way. This Washington Post story looks at how fast food and small farmers are forming mutually beneficial partnerships. Bigger markets for farmers, better food for consumers. It’s progress. But can it compete with this?