Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability

About

The centrality of food to the human experience always places it at the crux of global crises, whether catastrophic climate change, the collapse of biodiversity in our shared ecosystem, the threat of pandemics, or the poverty and suffering associated with resource scarcity. The continual reality of these challenges has prompted professionals throughout the food industry to seek innovative solutions, as chefs and restaurateurs adjust to customer demands and political imperatives for socially responsible civic action.

Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability explores how chefs around the world approach culinary sustainability in highly unstable times while working in myriad professional domains. Building on empirical data collected from a wide range of cultural, historical, political, and economic settings, the contributors to this collection provide a sophisticated and engaging examination of how chefs in diverse culinary contexts tackle the increasingly urgent societal and environmental need for a more secure food future.

Editors

Carole Counihan is professor emerita of anthropology at Millersville University (USA) and editor in chief of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways. She is the author of Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia, A Tortilla Is Like Life, and Around the Tuscan Table, and coeditor of Making Taste Public.

Susanne Højlund is an anthropologist working on taste and food culture, chef education, and children’s perceptions of taste. She is head of the Center for Food Culture Studies (FOCUS) at Aarhus University (Denmark) and coeditor of several books, including Making Taste Public and Sugar and Modernity in Latin America.

Praise

“With the acceleration of the ecological crisis, Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability is the first book to show from an anthropological perspective how cooks and chefs can and do play an essential role in the co-evolution of sustainable food systems and eaters.”
—Claude Fischler, emeritus director of research, French National Centre for Scientific Research

“Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability highlights the role that chefs and restaurants can play in fostering more sustainable food systems. By offering a fresh look at what sustainability means in different contexts, the contributors show that hospitality, an industry that is often discounted as elitist and commodified, holds instead great potential for positive change and innovation.”
—Fabio Parasecoli, professor of food studies, New York University

“In this fascinating volume, a rich set of ethnographies addresses crucial issues such as climate change crises, social justice, and ecology through the practices of food professionals who are experiencing sustainability in their kitchens, on their plates, and in their provisioning networks.”
—Valeria Siniscalchi, author of Slow Food, Politics and Economy of a Global Movement

“Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability—impressive in both scope and depth— redefines sustainability in ways that should capture the attention not only of food scholars but restauranteurs and diners alike.”
—Ken Albala, Tully Knoles Endowed Professor of History, University of the Pacific

“The editors of Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability, Carole Counihan and Susanne Højlund along with the fifteen contributors do not set out to offer a definite single understanding of what the idea and practice of “food sustainability” means and entails. On the contrary, this collection offers a multi-directional and multi-dimensional approach to underscore challenges and possibilities that a genuine commitment to the core values of sustainability enfold. A valuable read for all of us interested in adopting sustainable food practices in our daily lives, but an invaluable must read for those with substantial influence within the food system: chefs. Through the editors’ concept of culinary sustainability, a four-leg model addressing taste, craftsmanship, social relations, and political activism, the contributors show how chefs, in different parts of the world, take on the responsibility to alter the status quo of our current broke and unsustainable food system.”
–Professor Meredith E. Abarca, founder of El Paso Food Voices and editor of Latin@’s Presences in the Food Industry

Series

Food and Foodways is a series from the University of Arkansas Press that explores historical and contemporary topics in global food studies. We are committed to representing a diverse set of voices that tell lesser known food stories and to provoking new avenues of interdisciplinary research. Our strengths are works in the humanities and social sciences that use food as a critical lens to examine broader cultural, environmental, and ethical issues. In addition to scholarly books, we publish creative nonfiction that explores these topics with a focus on food’s sensory dimensions.