Last year, if you were on the Upper West Side and popped into Harvest Kitchen for a bite, you’d find a casual atmosphere and a sizable four-page menu of burgers, sandwiches, tacos, bowls, salads, and mains. This spring, the restaurant is debuting a new look. A recent interior renovation gives the restaurant a sophisticated and elegant feel, but the most exciting changes are on the plate. Harvest’s new, curated menu is over 30 percent plant-based, featuring dishes like sweet-and-spicy brussels sprouts, a kimchi fried rice bowl, and a charred cauliflower-sumac hummus with a spicy honey-lime drizzle that melts in your mouth and lingers with a sweet heat.
Jeremy Wladis, restaurateur and owner of The Restaurant Group (a group that includes Harvest, Good Enough to Eat, Big Gay Ice Cream, Fred’s Restaurant, and other well-loved NYC eateries), says that this shift towards a more plant-based menu is reflective of diner demand for cleaner and healthier options. But this move doesn’t just cater to the evolving interests of consumers—it also has a positive impact on the restaurant’s carbon footprint.
During Earth Month, Harvest became the latest signatory to New York City’s Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge. A new food and climate initiative from the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy, the Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge activates the city’s private sector to draw down carbon emissions from food by decreasing procurement of the most resource-intensive ingredients (such as ruminant meat and dairy) and increasing the proportion of climate-friendly, low-carbon plant-sourced foods. Challenge signatories—12 and counting—commit to reducing the food emissions from their purchasing by 25 percent by 2030 through plant-powered food. From just this inaugural group of signatories, almost 40,000 fewer metric tons of carbon dioxide will be emitted into the atmosphere, the equivalent of nearly 100 million car miles off the road, 43 million pounds of coal burned, or over 45,000 acres of forest planted.
The Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge grew out of New York City’s shift towards plant-forward food policy, bolstered by Mayor Eric Adams’ switch to a plant-based diet after being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Adams often credits the reversal of his diabetes symptoms, including loss of vision, not to his DNA, but his dinner. Plant-rich diets are an important tool in fighting chronic diseases, like diabetes, which disproportionately affects communities of color. (Black adults are 60 percent more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes in the United States).
The steps that signatories are taking to implement the Challenge are backed by the best behavioral science on how to shift diners towards plant-forward choices. Signatories work with nonprofit Greener by Default to engineer their menus to expand people’s choices, rather than restrict them. For example, switching from cow’s milk to oat milk by default in coffee drinks (a swap that coffee brands have successfully implemented for years) both reduces carbon emissions from dairy and opens the menu to those with a lactose intolerance. Centering plates around plant-based proteins allows us to tap into a plethora of ancient grains, whole beans, and plants (the FAO estimates that humans currently consume only 4 percent of the near 300,000 edible plant species on Earth) for creatively ambitious and culturally diverse new dishes.
Nowhere was that clearer than at last month’s anniversary celebration of the Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge, where Challenge signatory Thomas Preti Events to Savor crafted a dynamic menu featuring carrot tartare with sun gold tomato “yolk,” mushroom galbi bao buns, empanadas, sliders, crostini, and three kinds of dessert—all plant-based, and all delicious. The mayor even went back for seconds.
These changes may seem small, but when they happen at scale—at global foodservice companies like Sodexo (80 million consumers a year), Aramark (2 billion meals a year), and Compass (5.5 billion meals a year), which are each participating in the Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge through their clients and subsidiaries—their impact is enormous.
Shifting to a sustainable diet offers us a new way to imagine ambitious climate action: one that is joyful, creative, and close to home. Often, the climate conversation centers on action that can feel far away—renewable energy from turbines we’ll never see, carbon offsets from forests we may never walk through. But food is right there on our plates, a daily, tangible, tasty reminder of the ways in which we can all participate in building a better food system.
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Photo courtesy of Dovile Ramoskait, Unsplash
