As key players in producing food, restaurants and farms can take on a central role in creating climate progress. During a standing-room-only Climate Week NYC event, hosted by Food Tank and the James Beard Foundation, panelists discussed the power of a food justice approach among those working on the ground in the food system.
“Food is the gateway to all things justice,” Sheryll Durant, Board President of Just Food, said during the event. “Without justice in food, there is no justice anywhere else. From that, we can’t just think about food: We need to think about how it connects to our broader community.”’
The Summit, “Restaurants and Farms: A Key Solution to the Climate Crisis,” was presented along with partners Planet FWD, Brightly, Guckenheimer, Astanor and Protein PACT. Watch the full livestreamed event on Food Tank’s YouTube channel.
Chefs and farmers don’t only feed us food—they feed us stories, panelists said. For too long, major industrial groups have been dominant, and have pushed a false narrative that harmful chemical inputs and exploitative labor practices and animal treatment protocols are necessarily to feed the world.
“We’ve been sold this story that we don’t need to buy into anymore,” says Anna Lappé, Executive Director of The Global Alliance for the Future of Food. “The science tells us that agroecology is what we need to create farms that are resilient to climate shocks. It’s an incredibly positive story that we don’t hear as much.”
One crucial way this story can be told is through flavor. Climate-smart practices at the local farm level are critical to providing chefs with ingredients they can use to connect with eaters—and chefs can also help educate consumers on how climate change is threatening the foods they may enjoy eating.
“Over the years, us as chefs have seen so many ingredients come in and out of the market due to climate,” says Chef Brian Fowler of BLACKBARN.
In reality, destructive food production practices are not a viable way forward for anyone, panelists said. Looking at food production at restaurants and farms through a food justice lens, caring about the future of food means caring about people.
“The conversation needs to shift from making industrial agriculture even more efficient to serving people rather than corporations,” says Mark Bittman, Founder of The Bittman Project and Community Kitchen and a former New York Times columnist.
“The systems we’re talking about—the food system, the education system—they’re ultimately made up of people,” says Curt Ellis, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of FoodCorps. “The key is for people to start establishing those human relationships and say, what would it look like to open up a supply line between your products and the kids who deserve to be fed high-quality meals every single day?”
Systems-level thinking is important, panelists said, but it’s not enough. Conversations that take place at events like Climate Week NYC can highlight possible solutions, but if those solutions are not grounded in addressing real challenges within the food system, they’ll never work.
“We don’t have the luxury of just looking at adaptation and mitigation for environmental purposes when 3.1 billion people can’t afford a diverse nutritious diet on an annual basis,” says Ertharin Cousin, President and CEO of Food Systems for the Future and former Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme.
So what do people-focused solutions look like?
Small-scale regenerative farmers need to be able to access market infrastructure to sell their products to restaurants and consumers, says Tara Smith Swibel, General Partner for Terra Regenerative Capital. This is especially true for young farmers, who often struggle even more significantly to access the capital they need to make a sustainable life producing food in alignment with their values, says Lotanna Obodozie, Climate Policy Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition. And this also means ensuring cultural competence among those administering financial programs and providing technical assistance, especially to Black farmers, says Seanicaa Edwards Herron, Founder & Executive Director of the Freedmen Heirs Foundation.
And good food policy is crucial.
“We need more federal dollars for organizations that are actually resourcing farmers, especially marginalized farmers, and programs that make food accessible to everyone, not just wealthy people,” says Kathleen Finlay, President of the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming.
Important decisions that impact food are made at all levels of government, says Marion Nestle, Professor Emerita of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. And if your elected officials don’t represent your values, she said, get involved and change the situation.
“Start local. Get on your school board, your water board, your city council, and then you’re in a position to make decisions that will promote public and planetary health,” Nestle says.
At the end of the day, we need to move forward, and we need to move forward quickly, panelists explained. Restaurants and farms have great power—and great responsibility—to educate and empower consumers to drive change.
“We need to force the pace of this reaction,” says Bill McKibben, an author and the Founder of Third Act. “We need it to happen faster. And we can tell stories that allow us to get there.”
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Photo by Ryan Rose for Food Tank.
