There has never been a time in our nation’s history when more people have been so interested in and passionate about food.  Simultaneously, the challenges that the current, prevailing food system has created—environmental degradation, water shortages, compromised food safety, poor nutrition, and frightening public health outcomes—have reached critical proportions at every intersection of the system. The Sustainable Food Laboratory, along with the James Beard Foundation, is facilitating a national dialogue on sustainable food and public health through the lens of restaurants to engage chefs, restaurateurs, and other stakeholders in the food system to identify practical ways to make the restaurant industry more sustainable.

Collaborating with the James Beard Foundation brings the perspective of America’s culinary world into the discussion of sustainability. National Restaurant Association data tracks the increasing rate at which Americans eat meals in the more than 1,000,000 restaurants nationwide.  The restaurant industry accounts for a $566 billion piece of the annual US economy. The restaurant in America is a nexus of the myriad channels that are important to understand when addressing sustainability: materials and energy use, food production and distribution, labor, consumption and waste.

The restaurant serves as a microcosm of the food system as a whole.  Through the restaurant’s front door enter diners with eating habits formed and taste preferences ingrained. They come with health concerns, familial responsibilities, and other personal and cultural predispositions. Through the back door enter ingredients from many sources—products from global supply chains purchased from multinational corporations, as well as hand-crafted products from local purveyors—and other materials required to make a restaurant work, such as cleaning supplies, paper, equipment and cooking supplies, electricity, water, and gas. The back door also serves as the departure point for waste—both garbage and other products that municipalities struggle to dispose of in a responsible way. Staff arrives with their previous experience and education, as well as their own personal and cultural predispositions. Inside, increasingly difficult decisions about energy, food, cooking methods, water, waste, and human resources face chefs and managers on a daily basis, whether we are considering an independent, fine-dining restaurant or an outlet of a multinational chain.

By looking at what goes into planning and building restaurants, and then flows through the front and back doors, by viewing the restaurant as a system, we have a powerful vehicle to view, untangle, illuminate, address, re-imagine, and find ways to make the restaurant industry more sustainable.

The Scope of the Project

In the Spring and Summer 2010, The Sustainable Food Laboratory and the James Beard Foundation facilitated a series of regional conversations focusing on the full range of sustainability concepts with restaurant industry stakeholders. These conversations illuminated common issues across the restaurant sector, as well as exploring a variety of ways to bring sustainability to restaurants. Information and ideas gathered from the regional meetings shaped a national gathering in Washington, DC in the Fall 2010. The national meeting convened leading stakeholders in the US restaurant industry.

The Small, Regional Conversations (June thru September 2010)

The regional discussions focused on introducing sustainability concepts and elicited from the participants the key food-system issues and sustainability challenges facing them in their day-to-day work in restaurants, as well as the larger issues they see as important to sustain and improve our food system as a whole.  They examined how the most critical issues impacted a hypothetical restaurant and projected 20 year scenarios for that restaurant with data in hand about pressures on water supply and soil, climate change, energy trends, etc.  The regional conversations discussed industry-wide approaches with the most leverage, actions to launch and bring to scale, and introduced critical policy topics required to achieve the sort of restaurant –and restaurant system—we envision developing in the future.

Several locations in different regions across the country hosted small, intimate conversations with local and regional stakeholders: Portland, OR, central California, the South Fork of Long Island, NY, Central Maine, Kansas City, MO, and New Orleans, LA.  Each of these locations is in or near an epicenter of one or more large food system issue, and each has thriving restaurant industries and cultures. Conversations in each region raised some common yet also regionally specific themes.  Each conversation included: local chefs, restaurateurs both independent and chain, procurement professionals, food writers, academics, farmers, policy-makers, and other food-industry actors.

The National Meeting (October 2010)

Hosted at the Pew Charitable Trusts DC Conference Center on Thursday, October 21, 2010, the national conversation included guests from various backgrounds, including chefs, restaurant owners and executives, farmers, philanthropists, writers, journalists, retailers, purveyors, academics, policymakers, and other specialists as well as participants from regional conversations.  The meeting featured a dinner and daylong conference.

While high-end restaurants have incorporated sustainability into their menus and operations for years, and many new property developments have incorporated sustainable building and energy efficiency into their designs, this project aims to identify practical ways to bring these methods to scale, to lift the bar (and the benefits) for the whole industry.

The national meeting’s objective was to bring the local and regional issues discussed in regional meetings to the forefront and put them in the national context.

Carrying momentum forth from the regional meetings, this gathering of thought leaders from diverse and disparate backgrounds ignited actors all along the chain to work towards new solutions to the problems facing our food system.

We believe that convening a diverse set of stakeholders at the regional meetings and subsequent national meetings accelerates identification of obstacles, recommendations of solutions, and conversation regarding policy to bring about sustainability in restaurants. We expect the momentum will continue through 2011 and an anticipated two-day food policy summit.

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