How to Be a Conscious Eater

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

St u f f t h at’s made in restaurant kitchens 255

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