Celebrating Chefs: Cultivating a Sustainable Food Culture

Good food should be a defining feature of the places we live.

This is the belief of Food Partnerships all over the UK.

I’m personally interested in the pivotal role that chefs and restaurateurs play in a food culture: at the interface between good food producers and hungry communities.

The sad reality is – in the struggle to keep prices down and to stay commercially viable in difficult times – chefs’ roles are increasingly relegated to unskilled “ding-and-ping” in an anonymous and notoriously wasteful sector.

Chefs at the heart of food culture

But vibrant food culture both relies on and nurtures skills; job satisfaction; flourishing local economy; variety, nourishment and pleasure!

There are, of course, restaurants with genuine connection to local producers, a sense of seasonality, ethical principles, who shun wastefulness and who understand the connection between nourishment and flavour… but they don’t necessarily communicate it.

Many restauranteurs are not interested in boasting or preaching or making their customers “think”: they just want their guests to have a great meal, a nice time, and not worry about a thing.

Of course, we at the Food Partnership REALLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT!

The White Horse, Lincoln

So I was very delighted to meet with Benjamin and Jack from the White Horse in Lincoln, who decided to organise a sustainable dining event last month – a tasting menu of dishes with a special focus on environmental impact.

Through short explainers between courses, Benjamin (White Horse) and Ben (Lincoln Wine School) foregrounded some of the thinking that goes on, normally behind the scenes.

Learning from chefs

Reducing waste takes a bit of skill and imagination, for example…

Making delicious use of potato skins generated by more popular dishes;

Using the outer cabbage leaves, which can be bitter, in a gazpacho soup where the bitterness is perfectly offset by sweetness and spice (and “bitter is better” – as Prof Gabriella Morini, University of Gastronomic Sciences, loves to say!)

Carrot top dressing… Coffee grounds brownie…. tasting is believing!

Buying and using a whole carcass, including the lesser known cuts; and making broth, stocks and sauces using bones and shells. Delicious, but involves thought and planning. To many people, this is also a matter of respect to animals who have died for our dinner;

Sourcing from producers who are environmentally considerate (take biodynamic wine; flour from organic Lincolnshire wheat) and often imaginative (rum using discarded banana peel; Toast IPA, made using surplus bread).

Sometimes you just want to enjoy a tasty meal and trust others to do the thinking and the ethics. But if, like us, you want to celebrate the unsung heroes of better food systems, and want to hear more from the foodie talent in our county, we have a request and an invitation:

Good Food Cook Off

We are looking to organise a Lincoln Cook off – the ingredients will be deliberately chosen with a community- or environmentally themed challenge, for example, seasonal produce, sustainable diets, or “surplus food”.