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In partnership with Eater, we’re publishing a five-part series about restaurants and climate solutions. As heat, drought, floods, and storms upend every aspect of the restaurant business, from supply chains to service, we look at restaurants that are finding resourceful, nimble ways to deal with the crisis.
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Beyond Farm to Table: How Chefs Can Support Climate-Friendly Food Systems
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BY GREY MORAN • SEPTEMBER 23, 2024
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At the height of summer, chef Rob Rubba and his team at Oyster Oyster, a vegetable-first restaurant in Washington, D.C., are preparing for the dwindling of food in the coming winter. It’s a tedious but worthwhile process: drying mushrooms, vegetables, and herbs, making pickles and slaw, and preserving garlic blossoms and coriander seeds in airtight jars before these ingredients vanish with the end of the season.
This may seem like an antiquated concern for chefs in an era of global food distribution systems,
but it’s an all-consuming preoccupation for Oyster Oyster, a restaurant named after two ingredients—a bivalve and a mushroom—known for their ecosystem benefits. This radically seasonal, regional restaurant sources its ingredients exclusively from the ocean, climate-adapted farms, and wild plants of the Mid-Atlantic.
“Toward the end of winter, it gets a little . . . . scary and sparse,” admits Rubba. “Come February, we have this very short farm list. It’s just cellared roots and some kales. Making that creative takes a lot of mental energy.” That’s when Oyster Oyster draws heavily from its pantry of foraged
wild plants and ingredients preserved from nearby climate-friendly farms. They lend the food “bright, salty, acidic flavor pops throughout the winter” that wouldn’t otherwise be available, and give his food a joyful exuberance that one critic described as “a garden of good eating.”
Rubba, who won the Outstanding Chef award from the James Beard Foundation in 2023, is one of many chefs reinvisioning the farm-to-table movement in the clarifying, urgent light of climate change. At a time when storms, fires, and droughts are lashing the planet with increasing severity, restaurants like Oyster Oyster source ingredients with a heightened due diligence around their climate and environmental impacts. In doing so, they’re also recognizing that chefs can play a larger role in building food
systems able to survive long into the future. Read the full story.
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The US Weakens a UN Declaration on Antibiotic Resistance
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BY LISA HELD • September 25, 2024
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Last May, the United Nations (U.N.) released the first draft of a global plan to tackle antibiotic resistance that aligned with a call from world leaders’ expert advisors to take “bold and specific action.” That included a commitment to reduce antibiotics used in the food and agriculture system, where livestock are routinely fed preventive antibiotics,
by 30 percent by 2030.
But when those leaders meet at the U.N. on Thursday to adopt the Political Declaration on Antimicrobial Resistance, that concrete goal and others will be missing from the latest draft.
After months of negotiations and edits to the proposal, these ambitious—and likely effective—commitments have been replaced with a toothless target: to “strive to meaningfully reduce” antibiotic use in agriculture. Now, experts and advocates are concerned that this new, vague provision, among other weakened commitments, will be included in the final declaration. Read the full story.
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Where Do the Presidential Candidates Stand on Climate Change?
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BY CHRISTINA COOKE • September 24, 2024
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Details on the presidential candidates’ specific climate policies remain scant, but their track records, party platforms, and election-season statements point to the sort of approach each might take if elected. And they could not be more different. When it comes to energy production—the largest emitter of greenhouse gases—and the
regulations that shape it and a number of other climate-related policies, the two candidates’ opposing approaches would have wildly different implications for the state of the climate, and the resulting stability of the food system.
The 2024 Democratic platform acknowledges the climate crisis as “an existential threat to future generations” and reflects that priority with robust support for clean energy and climate-friendly regulation. Meanwhile, to the Republican mantra of “drill, baby, drill,” Trump has called climate change a hoax and promised to achieve “energy dominance” while eliminating regulation and undoing the Democrats’ progress toward clean energy.
Numerous climate and environment advocacy groups have endorsed Kamala Harris for president. Meanwhile, agribusiness interests have poured their money into the GOP. Read the full story.
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The High Cost of Groceries: Experts Weigh In
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BY MOMO CHANG • September 25, 2024
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Last Tuesday, Civil Eats held a virtual salon focusing on a hotly debated topic: Food prices and the 2024 election.
Civil Eats’ senior staff reporter and contributing editor Lisa Held moderated our conversation with expert panelists David Ortega, a professor and the Noel W. Stuckman Chair in Food Economics and Policy at Michigan
State University; and Lindsay Owens, an economic sociologist and the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative.
In this overview, we review each expert’s thoughts on the causes of increased food prices and how much impact each presidential candidate could have in bringing the cost of food down. Read the full story.
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