Food & Climate
Farm to Table, became not just a slogan of restaurants which introduce to its consumers food was produced without harming the environment, but sometimes they tell stories about biodiversity and also give each ingredient meal a layered story rooted in culture, place, and geographies.
Some climate-conscious restaurants have adopted approach of thinking deeply about the origins of the food they serve in U.S, according a report seen by “Food & Climate” platform.
At Carmo, a tropical restaurant and cultural space in New Orleans, building the knowledge and relationships necessary for ethical, regenerative sourcing has been a lifelong project for the restaurant’s co-owners and chefs, Dana and Christina do Carmo Honn.
Farm to table and origins to table
They’ve forged relationships with Gulf Coast shrimpers and Indigenous tribes in the Amazon to support traditional, ecological food systems. These relationships also give each ingredient a layered story rooted in culture, place, and geographies.
“We’re in it for the relationships,” said Dana Honn. “The whole idea of farm to table has always been so important, but what I realized is that we’re trying to do origins-to-table–we’re trying to tell the story of where our food came from”, according to “Civil Eats”.
Chefs can be part of the next chapter of this story, not only by telling the history of a food but also by helping build a sustainable market for its future.
This is part of the inspiration behind the Honn’s project Origins: Amazonia, the result of a decades-long relationship formed with Juruna Indigenous communities in the state of Pará, Brazil, whose livelihoods and traditional food systems were upended by a megadam.
The project is an ambitious, multidimensional effort to tell the story of the violent destruction of biodiversity and Indigenous land, while also helping support a market for traditional Juruna foods like cassava, which allows the communities to cultivate them once more.
By focusing on the richest source of biodiversity in the world—one that affects the entire planet, where deforestation has eradicated at least 20 percent of the rainforest—the Honns hope to help their customers understand what’s at stake there, and by extension, everywhere.
“If there are more people engaged in production of ancestral foods, they actually begin to consume those foods again,” said Honn about the Juruna communities. Many of their traditional plants, like manioc, are also highly adapted to the environment and climate, cultivated over thousands of years.
Fish waste
Honn has developed a similar approach to supporting a more sustainable market for Louisiana’s shrinking fishing industry, which has been eroding for decades. The local industry is struggling to compete with cheap imported seafood, which currently accounts for the majority of seafood sold in the U.S. Many New Orleans chefs find it easier to rely on cheaper, imported seafood, readily available through major restaurant distributors like Sysco or Restaurant Depot that source from around the globe. Yet the reliance on imported seafood—at the expense of local seafood—can come with steep consequences.
“Seafood processing houses, they just cut the filet off and throw the carcass in the bin. You have the collars and the cheeks and the pectoral fins and the ribs and everything else that could literally just be cooked and put on a plate.”
For instance, shrimp farms in other countries are routinely linked to labor abuses and the destruction of mangroves—a coastal ecosystem critical for adapting to climate change by building carbon-rich soil and buffering against sea-level rise.
To address this, Honn has been working with a group of chefs, fishers, and other experts to build back Louisiana’s seafood economy, including shrimp, by developing a more sustainable, local supply chain. They’re developing a program called Full Catch, a set of protocols for harvesting, transporting, and distributing fish from the Gulf of Mexico, including cutting down on food waste by selling and marketing the whole fish.
One of the challenges of this sustainable approach to sourcing is that it can be unpredictable, without a year-round guarantee of ingredients.
Many farmers don’t grow a fixed amount of each crop every year; instead, they experiment and innovate with different crop plans, the varieties of crops grown, methods of building soil health and minimizing fertilizer use, and other variables.