A revolution is on the boil. Quite literally. Chef Anthony Myint’s mission to halt, and even reverse, climate change begins in the kitchen.
Armed with research, practical ideas and unflagging energy, the San Francisco-based chef partners with restaurants to find bespoke ways to reduce their environmental impact. His work has been so inspiring that he was recently awarded the Basque Culinary World Prize, a €100,000 annual award given to chefs whose work transforms society through gastronomy.
Anthony advises food businesses on viable options to reduce their carbon footprint and has convinced restaurants around the globe to join his crusade, including Noma (Denmark) and Benu (San Francisco). In 2019, via his ‘Perennial Farming Initiative’, he collaborated with the state of California to launch the Restore California Programme, which provides consumers with the environmental footprint of restaurants.
Explaining how he started cooking because he believed that “restaurants can make the world a better place”, Anthony discusses the positive impact healthy soil, thoughtful farming and responsible consumers can have on the world, in an e-mail interview.
Judging by social media, everybody seems to be looking for the perfect meal. Does the current obsession with food make it easier to educate consumers on the effect their choices have on global warming?
The perfect meal, almost depends on your philosophy: are you just a consumer working within an existing, and somewhat broken food system? Or are you trying to create a sustainable, delicious and healthy food system?
If you’re just asking as a consumer, then the perfect meal is something that is part of a farming and ranching practice that is contributing to healthy soil.
If you’re trying to create an ideal food system, then my ideal meal is a carbon-neutral McDonald’s cheeseburger, hopefully in the near future, because it means that corporations have begun implementing managed grazing and compost application in their supply chain, and society is on track to reverse global warming. Until then, it would be any meal where a portion of proceeds is going to fund the transition to renewable farming.
When people talk about the transformative power of gastronomy, it is usually in the context of breaking down social or cultural barriers by bringing people together at the table. Does gastronomy have the power to trigger political change?
A 1,000%. Chefs are the leaders of the food system. They influence each other, their staff and their customers. In the US, restaurants represent the largest part of the food system economically — more than farming or retail. And the industry accounts for one in 10 workers. If a few of the best chefs focussed their efforts on a movement that other chefs and food businesses could follow, the entire food culture would shift. We are already in-process on a state-wide restaurant programme with California, the world’s fifth-largest economy.
Could you tell us how your work with Noma can be used as a blueprint by restaurants around the globe?
There is new science — it’s actually bio-geo-chemistry, which has just confirmed that carbon farming can reverse global warming. Given this civilisation-level finding, we need to urgently create change on millions of hectares of farmland. This does not mean a few chefs sourcing pristine ingredients and hoping that somehow the world reinvents itself — there is too much inertia from the currently extractive food system.
Restaurants like Noma can lead by both high integrity internally, and by inspiring adoption in a global movement that every single restaurant can participate in, which is adding a one per cent charge toward transitioning farming toward practices like compost application, cover cropping, reduced tillage etc.
Consumers have shifted interest from exotic ingredients to local, responsibly grown produce over the past decade. However, your focus is soil health, which is rarely discussed...
Healthy soil should be the number one priority in food. Full stop.
Unfortunately, most chefs, myself included a few years ago, could not define healthy soil. Here’s my definition today: Healthy soil is soil with a lot of living things in it — literally, soil with a high percentage of Soil Organic Matter (SOM). A farm with five per cent Soil Organic Matter has healthier soil than its neighbour with 1.1% SOM. Pesticides and GMOs and certifications are all worth noting, but instead of focussing on false binaries, we could focus on actual data and a metric that would reward a farmer making the crucial jump from one per cent SOM to two per cent SOM.
In today’s food economy, there is no reward for that increase, but farmers have that data and we could start asking and spending accordingly. SOM is 50-58% carbon, and so each one per cent increase per hectare represents about 12 tonnes of carbon that is pulled from the atmosphere — the same as not burning 5,000 litres of petrol. We must re-envision the increase in soil biology along the same lines as planting trees — a very practical and substantive climate solution.
You say that how an ingredient was produced matters much more than what the ingredient is — why? And does more responsibly grown produce result in tastier produce?
Healthy soil — soil with a high level of SOM% — is a complex micro-biome full of beneficial organisms that make minerals bio-available to the plants, resulting in more nutritious food with more depth of flavour. If you have an incredible cherry tomato, it’s probably because the soil was full of living things.
You have been working on mobilising the restaurant industry as part of the solution to global warming. What got you started on this path? And what have the successes been so far?
We got started after having a daughter and thinking about the future and specifically being concerned about climate change. We learned that the food system contributes about half of global emissions (agriculture 15%, deforestation for food 18%, transportation, storage, processing, waste, etc 17%). We learned food and farming could be a practical solution. And then in the past two years, scientists confirmed that a shift to renewable farming could remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.
When we started, zero chefs were working on climate change. It is because not only is the restaurant industry extremely challenging, but these concepts are brand new to almost all chefs. And so the fact that so many great chefs and restaurants are already carbon-neutral, and the jury of the Basque Culinary World Prize has pledged to go carbon-neutral, might signal the beginning of a big global movement toward supporting the shift to renewable farming.
