Is There a Face in Your Food?
Special to Seattlest by sous chef Ryan Tateishi, who can also be found at Canlis.
Last week was a "Face Behind the Food" seminar in Spokane which we attended. Leavenworth author Paul "End of Food" Roberts moderated the round table portion of the seminar.
In his most recent book, The End of Food, Roberts describes how food production became a scaled-down version of the industrial economy. Farms came to be run like integrated factories, and butchers, bakers, and fishermen began to be consolidated into one-stop shopping locations.
Farmers started seeing themselves as producing a commodity, not growing food. Unfortunately, just as sourcing the most affordable car parts may result in components coming from all over the country, producing cheap ground beef in huge quantities means that the meat comes from many different cows--the result being that one tracking error would result in all the beef being untraceable.
The problem lies in the fact that although we apply a mass production model to food, it isn’t suitable because food is a perishable item. Plants and animals have to be engineered so they fit into the model. Current farming and manufacturing methods incur such enormous costs from chemical runoff to poor labor practices to huge carbon emissions that the longevity of the system is in serious doubt.
This all seems rather hopeless and Roberts admits to feeling that way at times--how could you not with books titled The End of Food and The End of Oil?
But the focus of the seminar was people who are doing it the right way. The Shepherd’s Grain farmers have reinvented themselves by changing the way that they grow crops. By direct seeding they don’t have to invert the soil with a plow. The plants are seeded directly into the residue of the crop that came before it. The change from conventional seeding to direct seeding is a major change requiring new equipment as well as a new approach to weed and disease control.
Although the direct seed system has many challenges, it also has many advantages. Less fuel is consumed, which results in fewer carbon emissions and soil erosion into streams and rivers is reduced. Conventional tillage releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere where direct seeding traps the carbon in the soil, increasing organic matter and building a healthier environment for everything living in the soil.
We returned to Seattle feeling encouraged by what the farmers had said. The personal challenge for us is to continue to educate people on the subject. It is the responsibility of a chef to source ingredients of the highest quality, and sustainability needs to be a factor in defining quality.
