Katy Millard of Coquine, Portland is passionate about creating a carbon neutral restaurant.Coquine
While the talk about plastic straws may have taken off in 2018, there’s a lot more waste in the food industry that needs to be addressed.
“It’s not pretty, and it’s not something that most restaurants are trying to fix,” says Portland-based restaurant owner and chef, Katy Millard, who has joined a group of eco-minded chefs to promote sustainability in commercial kitchens. Signing on with ZeroFoodprint, a non-profit started in San Francisco by restauranteur Anthony Myint of Mission Chinese and the Perennial, Peter Freed, a renewable energy expert, and Chris Ying, former editor-in-chief of Lucky Peach, Millard wants more restaurant owners and celebrated chefs to think about their carbon footprint, perhaps as much as they do about their cuisine.
Millard who trained across the US and in France, before choosing to open her own restaurant, Coquine in Portland’s Mt. Tabor neighborhood, says that the industry has a laundry list of wasteful practices in addition to sourcing ingredients from far-flung places: i.e. kitchen equipment left on all day, food sourced in plastic packaging, plastic containers in the kitchen, and generous use of paper towels. While not all these practices can be transformed overnight — even she struggles to find better alternatives to plastic wrap, for example, small steps can decrease the overall “foodprint” of a restaurant, she argues.
Coquine's food celebrates the ingredients of the Pacific Northwest.Coquine
When signing on with ZeroFoodprint, restaurants are asked to do a detailed self-audit: how much dairy is used at the restaurant, where are the vegetables sourced from, is the menu meat heavy and what kind of meat is it, single-use materials thrown own daily, and so on.
Millard, who completed the certification in early 2019, says she had not realized their heavy dependence on butter, a dairy product that has a heavier footprint than oils.
“Even for someone like me who is sourcing everything locally from the Northwest, and meticulous about recycling and repurposing, it was surprising — and something that made me think about places we can perhaps reduce our butter consumption.”
Millard is a self-described eco-warrior: she shops at the farmer’s markets, carts food boxes back and forth (instead of tossing them), focuses on having plenty of vegetarian options on the menu, and has eliminated as much single-use plastic from the kitchen as possible. Plus, she runs a small operation.
Coquine is a small restaurant, situated in the Mt. Tabor neighborhood of Portland.Coquine
“Yet, I had never thought that it would be possible for me to have a carbon neutral restaurant,” she says. “But being able to offset some of our carbon with programs that actually help farmers use less energy or farm smarter is incredible. It’s more so than just planting trees, it’s actually changing the food industry.”
Anthony Myint of Mission Chinese set up this certification to make it simpler and more realistic for chefs such as Millard, he says. “As a chef and restaurateur, I am totally absorbed in the moment: is my dishwasher showing up drunk? Remember to order the pumpkin seed oil. Where's the trout? Don't burn the onions. How am I going to make payroll and rent this month? It is crazy talk to be thinking about the next generation.”
Yet, he goes on to explain how the restaurant industry is massive in the US: he puts it at $800 billion, which is why it’s all the more imperative to engage individuals like himself in this conversation on sustainability. “What's exciting is that there are practical and super impactful solutions,” he says.
Currently, the carbon offsets through Zero Foodprint go to an array of projects from renewable energy to cleaner cookstoves in the developing world. But, Myint wants to make the connection between restaurants and climate change even more direct, he says.
“We are super excited to be trailblazing the funding mechanisms for carbon farming projects. There is a lot of emerging soil science and bio-geo-chemistry in the past few years which basically confirms that sustainable farming and ranching is as or more beneficial than typical environmental projects like solar panels or planting trees. So starting later this year, the contributions from Zero Foodprint restaurants will be going towards the implementation of these kinds of carbon farming practices to help create a renewable food system rooted in healthy soil.”
As the owner of the Perennial, which shut earlier this year, Myint spent a lot of time thinking about what creates the biggest footprint in a restaurant: it’s actually the ingredients, he argues. More specifically, how the ingredients have been farmed. For instance, he explains that beef from a feedlot versus beef from a carbon ranch are not equal: thus, not all meat is bad.
“Beef from a feedlot can have a carbon footprint as high as ~18 kilograms of CO2e per pound of feedlot tenderloin versus negative ~20 kilograms CO2e per pound of carbon ranched beef,” he explains. “To clarify, the cow in a carbon ranch is managed in such a way that it is having a radically positive benefit in terms of soil restoration by nibbling and promoting growth, as well as adding 50 to 70 pounds of manure each day, which is organic matter, and half carbon. It's worth noting that this is based on results that have been coming in the last 3 years, based on research from the last 10 years.”
Thus, the Zero Foodprint accreditation does not mean that restaurants have to convert to becoming vegetarian. Rather, they need to think more deeply about how they source their ingredients, supporting producers who are trying to offset the heavy footprint of industrialized farming. Most of the restaurants that have signed on so far are from the Bay Area, Brooklyn and New York City, and Copenhagen. Millard is the first in Portland to do so.
“It maybe seems unthinkable that food production could be environmentally beneficial, much less that burgers could be good for the environment, but it really all comes down to soil carbon,” Myint adds. “Bad farming, whether it's vegetables or feed for animals is responsible for massive amounts of GHG [greenhouse gas emissions], whereas good farms are turning atmospheric GHG into soil carbon while creating nutrient dense and delicious food.”
As chefs, individuals like Millard have the influence, he says, to pivot food into a new direction. If more chefs sign onto the program, the economics of it can support regenerative farming, Myint suggests.
“It only took capitalism 70 years to inadvertently ruin the food system, so the hope is that if we're trying, we could maybe fix it in 10 or 15 years. It's not about chard stems and stem cell burgers though. It's about millions of acres, billions of dollars and trillions of tons of compost restoring the soil health and bringing soil carbon back up to pre-industrial farming levels,” he argues.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eshachhabra/2019/02/27/why-these-chefs-want-more-restaurants-to-become-carbon-neutral/ 2019-02-27 21:15:00Z
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