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Chef Kieran Price explores the true meaning of sustainability at MAD Academy.
Environment and sustainability are, to put it simply, buzzwords in the world of hospitality. I myself come from agricultural beginnings in the rural English county of Shropshire, and with my parents and grandparents representing a long line of farmers themselves, growing up around and feeling connected to the food you eat is as much a necessity as anything else.
Too often I open produce from suppliers focusing on sustainability and biodiversity only to find the produce has been flown from the other side of the world.
Fast-forward a decade or two, and now working in Michelin listed and starred establishments, too often I open produce from suppliers focusing on sustainability and biodiversity only to find the produce has been flown from the other side of the world. What’s the point in focusing on seasonality, heritage produce, and all the other elements of sustainability when there are thousands of air miles attached? This highlights the problem facing sustainability in the hospitality industry as I see it, uniting the elements of locality, seasonality and biodiversity to create a product that is just as good as ingredients flown in from all over the world.
This is truly what drove me towards applying for MAD Academy. And so, encouraged by a friend who had had a similarly enlightening experience the previous year, I did just that. MAD Academy, operated by the famous NOMA, describes their purpose as aiming to “inspire and empower the global hospitality industry to create sustainable change and transform food systems for the future” and throughout the week, this focus was clear. People from all over the world had gathered in this typically scandi-minimalist room on the outskirts of Copenhagen in the glorious sun for just that purpose, to transform food systems as a whole.
As we lined up and introduced ourselves, a distinct first day of school atmosphere was apparent, despite the level at which people in the room were working at; Executive chefs from Dubai and Taiwan, two from Hawaii who were focused on a frankly idyllic regenerative farming operation, a winemaker producing bottles in Napa Valley who, on the side, runs a food security charity working in Iraq. And me? Yep, I’m a chef. In Manchester. In England yeah. Yep, like the football teams.
You don’t have to work as a chef for long to witness first hand the sheer amount of waste that is produced by working in that sort of environment, bag after bag of animal scraps, vegetable peelings and the like are thrown away day after day, and on the scale of an industry, this is catastrophic
The whole ‘me feeling out of my depth’ thing was to continue however, when we were introduced to our tutors for the week; David Zilber, previous head of fermentation at Noma, and the author of the one book that every chef buys when they decide they actually want to try, ‘The Art of Fermentation’. The way that David spoke so in depth and impassioned about the ways we can utilise fermentation to focus waste streams in hospitality environments, and how the microbiological scale at which the process of fermentation operates mirrors humanities own descent into entropy, was fascinating. You don’t have to work as a chef for long to witness first hand the sheer amount of waste that is produced by working in that sort of environment, bag after bag of animal scraps, vegetable peelings and the like are thrown away day after day, and on the scale of an industry, this is catastrophic.
David spoke about the renegade, experimental approach that Noma took to fermentation in the early days. Any waste whatsoever was channeled into some kind of project of fermentation, be it facilitating bacteria growth of rice to inoculate Koji, or aging animal bones to create garums, this openness of imagination is what drives the industry forward, and what gave NOMA the reputation it has today. This approach is immediately applicable to any setting – even domestic ones. Even though it may seem like a big undertaking to process all the waste we produce, the results that can be yielded from shifting our focus to viewing waste as the beginning of a new cycle, rather than the end point, is truly groundbreaking.
The week continued with another speaker, Douglas McMaster from SILO in London, who has long served as an inspiration for me. For those that don’t know, SILO is a true zero-waste restaurant which has been operating in East London for over a decade. When they say zero-waste, they mean it.
Listening to Doug reel off the ways in which they make their operation truly circular is astounding. The corks from the wine bottles get turned into chef shoes, the sugar is delivered by sailboat to negate carbon footprint, and the waste from the restaurants entire history of operation is condensed down into a cube that can be held in the palm of your hand. This cube (dubbed ‘The Tesseract’ by SILO) tells an important story for Doug that, despite our best efforts, sustainability is an imperfect process.
With all this being said, what is just as important is where our food comes from. In the middle of our time in Copenhagen, we were ushered onto a bus to drive for an indeterminate amount of time across the admittedly beautiful Danish countryside. Many asked where we were going, “Well” replied Ed, our venerable Dutch instructor, “that would be telling”. Finally, we arrived in a nondescript Danish field that, despite its beauty, was much like the several other gorgeous Danish fields we had driven past on our way to this one.
We were greeted by Joanna, farmer at Hegnsholt, a regenerative farming project in central Sjaelland, around an hour west of Copenhagen. The work that Joanna does is simply astounding, rearing animals and growing produce the way it was intended to be raised, with respect for both the animals and the natural area. Instead of importing industrial, nutrient- deficient animal feed like many farms, Joanna works closely with the restaurants that buy from her. Simply, if you want her organic, free-range produce that is of the highest quality available, you need to trade. In return for her dairy, eggs or pork, you send her restaurant scraps that are then used to feed the chickens and compost for the gardens that this produce came from. This approach to agriculture, shunning the destructive industrial processes that are not only massive polluters, but also largely immune to considerations of environmental impact, in favour of a truly circular, farm-to-table-to-farm approach, was inspiring to someone who grew up in a similar environment.
When the easy option is to fly food in from all over the world regardless of seasonality, extra effort and commitment are needed to support local suppliers and producers who are focused on doing things the right way
This highlighted the message that is important for me and, I’m sure, for supporters of the Slow Food movement: if producers like this are going to succeed, they need to be supported. In Joanna’s case, very literally, but the same applies everywhere. When the easy option is to fly food in from all over the world regardless of seasonality, extra effort and commitment are needed to support local suppliers and producers who are focused on doing things the right way, with respect for biodiversity and using agriculture in a regenerative and restorative way.
To summate, MAD Academy was a truly inspiring week that I found enlightening. I think that when faced with the question of what sustainability means, most peoples minds immediately go to the typical notion of recycling and organic produce etc. However, once we open our perceptions to what sustainability can mean, taking a holistic approach to preservation, food systems, and supporting local suppliers, there is so much potential in what can be achieved.
There is, admittedly, a hangover upon returning from such a symposium. Coming back from an environment so solely focused on how to achieve amazing thing, with such a diversity of perspectives on the hospitality industry, and then often finding myself the only one in the room with an interest in these topics in conventional hospitality settings, can be difficult. However, this is precisely where the most impactful work can be done to improve the hospitality industry and its overall approach to sustainability.
If every one of my classmates from that week returns to Hawaii, Baghdad, or Liverpool and implements small-scale changes in their environments, the cumulative effects over time can be significant, as SILO exemplifies. As hospitality professionals, I don’t think we have a duty to teach people on sustainability, but rather a duty to learn. We have a responsibility to learn from people from all over the globe, hear their perspectives on what they do to impact change in their community, and apply what we learn to our own practices. For those who subscribe to the Slow Food philosophy, MAD Academy is the place for you. It goes beyond where our food comes from, innovating processes in which we can make our food systems more circular and be positive forces in what can be a sometimes-troubling industry of hospitality.
Kieran is a Slow Food Chefs Alliance member living and working in Manchester. He is launching his own sustainable dining concept ‘Rover’ later this year.
