“Have you ever met a chef or restauranteur that said something like ‘My restaurant is totally unsustainable’? I haven’t” – Magnus Nilsson Faviken 4015 days, Beginning To End
How we source our ingredients, and what those ingredients are, is arguably the most tangible way we as chefs can make steps towards the perfect restaurant. The world has changed drastically in the last decade with regards to sustainability and with that increased scrutiny has come vast quantities of information. Companies everywhere are falling over themselves to tell us about how sustainable their products or ingredients are and whilst this has made it easier to make informed decisions, it’s safe to say there’s a fair amount of stretching the truth going on too.
‘The Perfect Restaurant’ would have complete traceability on everything that came through the door. It would be able to say with absolute certainty that each ingredient was grown with the proper care and attention for environment and that those who worked on it manufacture were paid a fair and living wage. It would also lead the way in championing under-utilised, lower impact ingredients whilst at the same time shunning certain things that no amount of greenwashing is going to make any better for the planet.
A daunting and time-consuming task, as ever. But one that can be incrementally achieved, largely, by shortening our supply chains and dealing, where we can, directly with farmers and producers.
Being able to talk to the people who grow our food has masses of benefits. It allows us to build up connections and friendships with them which in turn means we are likely to gain a greater understanding of their craft and their struggles. This then mean we might give the produce proper care and attention because we can picture the face of the person who grew it, thereby wasting less of it. There’s also a chance that they might hit us up if they have something cool and limited that we can have first refusal on or even just send us the best quality stuff they have. It also means that we can do our own due diligence on their methods and find out for sure that these are people who share our common values.
Building relationships with our suppliers can also introduce us to ingredients that we have never heard of. As custodians of our land, farmers know far better than we do what grows well in a certain area and if we listen to them and are willing to explore and experiment, we can come up with new and exciting ways to cook for our guests. Dan Barber’s famous Rotation Risotto was developed after he discovered farmers had no commercial outlet for the crops they were growing to fix nitrogen into the soil.
Now, I know. It’s a lot of work and this might all seem overly idealistic for many restaurants. Working with small scale farmers and independent producers is usually more expensive (it should be!) and the time it takes to phone round and order from all the various people takes time, which there’s never a lot of. Your restaurant might be in the middle of a city where it’s harder to connect with producers. And if you do manage to find someone proclaiming to sell what you are looking for, in the way that you hoped, there’s not necessarily the means to allow you to go and visit to make sure so you end up taking their word for it.
There is this prevailing sense within food these days that as long as something is local and seasonal then it’s fine. Whilst seasonality is definitely important in terms of quality and lower impact, locality is a little more of a grey area. For example: the wheat grown in the field outside my house is sprayed with all manner of chemicals whilst it’s maturing. There’s also a commercial factory farm down the road from the restaurant rearing thousands of chickens a week. Both provide incredibly local ingredients, but they are definitely worse in quality and environmental impact that the wheat or chicken I get from farms further afield. That’s why doing due diligence, but mostly just taking an interest in where our food come from and how is it grown is so important if we are to be able to make steps towards our perfect restaurant.
The main practical issue with this model of sourcing, after price, is consistency. Smaller producers don’t have the stock levels to supply a long-term menu and of course, as the seasons get weirder and weirder, trying to predict when a crop will be ready or not is a nightmare, meaning that a degree of flexibility is required when writing menus and developing dishes. This again takes time but also a lot of skill and confidence in what your team can create.
I personally love the creativity that comes from necessity. Some of my favourite things I’ve ever cooked have been born out of having to change plans and think on the spot. There’s such a sense of achievement from solving a puzzle and jigsaw-ing a dish together. Don’t get me wrong, there have been some duds too (more than a few) but the duds also bring knowledge and understanding with them that can’t be overlooked.
Restaurants are inherently unsustainable, and our need to produce consistent and tasty food for our customers is always going to be wasteful in some ways. I prefer to look at sourcing as making a series of responsible, (rather than sustainable) decisions - an idea put forward by Magus Nilsson in his last Faviken book. If we consider each ingredient and supplier we use and make a responsible choice about where it comes from or whether we should really be using it at all then we can start to make changes for the better.
