Page 266 - How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You

year 2045. As we’ve discussed, a carbon footprint doesn’t
cover everything related to sustainability (water is still
mega-important, for example), but it does check quite a few
boxes—from food waste and energy use to healthy soil and
animal agriculture.
Certified by a nonprofit called ZeroFoodprint, some rest-
aurants have gone carbon-neutral year-round, like world-
renowned noma in Copenhagen and benu in San Francisco.
Hundreds more across the globe—from Fort Wayne, Indiana,
and Nashville, Tennessee, to New York City and Shanghai—
have gone carbon-neutral on Earth Day in recent years. You
can imagine being able to search OpenTable or Yelp by a “sus-
tainable restaurant” or “carbon-neutral restaurant” filter. For
now, check zerofoodprint.org for the complete list. New restau-
rants are coming on board all the time, and soon enough the
status won’t be confined to the fine-dining, break-the-bank
type of places.

THE CHEF ’ S ROLE
Whether we think it’s a good thing or not, chefs hold tremen-
dous influence in our culture. Through their celebrity status,
big personalities, huge social media followings, vast product
lines, cookbooks, and ubiquity online and on TV, they help
shape our perceptions of how things are, or should be, in soci-
ety. Case in point: Chef José Andrés, of Washington, DC, and his
nomination for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. (He did Herculean
humanitarian work feeding millions of Hurricane Maria survi-
vors in Puerto Rico.)
It’s not just celebrity chefs who are levers for changing
norms in our culture, though. The fact that the food industry
overall is one of the largest employers in our country, coupled
with the fact that everybody eats, creates a situation where
the experience we have at a restaurant—the things we learn

Stuff that’s made in restaurant kitchens 255

Conscious Eater_04 PT_4th patches.indd 255 10/23/19 1:38 PM