Counihan, Carole, and Susanne Hojlund eds. Chefs, Restaurants and Culinary Sustainability. University of Arkansas Press, 2024. 392 pp. ISBN 9781682262658
Krishnendu Ray (NYU)
How does one write an honest review of a book authored by so many friends and acquaintances in a small field such as food studies? My technique here is to foreground the reader, and in a hopeful act of tactical alienation remove the author from the mind’s eye. I try to be as critical as possible, without being harsh. There is a second problem. Sustainability, like Neoliberalism (which is dying) have become clichés. Every neoliberal scoundrel wears the cloak of sustainability today. So, I needed to dig deeper into the details of the material to drain my skepticism. Finally, edited books are notoriously difficult to judge given their inevitable unevenness. This is an uneven book but the problem isn’t insurmountable here.
It is divided into 15 chapters in 4 sections with increasing levels of abstraction, beginning with close reading of sustainable efforts in small institutions, such as restaurants and cafeterias, to broader questions of geography and location, multi-species relations, and social cohesion and antagonism. The throughline is sustainability as the process of assuring environmental, social, and cultural replicability over time and across generations.
In concise and clear language the Introduction sets the terms of the investigation in the context of the multiple crises of climate change, loss of biodiversity, the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict and war. It posits that the food system figures prominently in both the problem-side and the solution-side of the equation. Restaurants are important to study, they argue, because they are numerous, with global sales estimated at over $3 trillion, and even fuzzier estimates of half-a-billion jobs in travel and tourism worldwide (the editors slip and cite the much smaller US number of 15 million jobs without specifying location). As some of the chapters argue, if we include street vendors, that number would be even larger, especially in the Global South. That sets the stage for the importance of this study of commercial cooks and chefs. This is where Counihan and Højlund underline the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as specified at the Rio summit of the United Nations (UN) in 2015. Similarly, they quote the EAT-Lancet Report of 2019 recommending a planetary plate made up of at least fifty-percent vegetables and fruits, with the other half constituted of whole grains, plant proteins, unsaturated plant oil, with modest amounts of animal protein. They go on to criticize the limits of both these universalist suggestions, which they argue, pay little attention to location and the everyday ways of getting there. As a result, their book focuses on the pragmatics of sustainable practices, as articulated by practitioners at the level of the chef and below it. Hence almost every chapter redefines sustainability through the work and imagination of locals about “ways that cooking, cuisine, and kitchen-work foster cultural, social, economic, and environmental survival and reproduction” (p. 7). I like that about this book – its dynamic modesty. It is a worm’s eye view of big questions about how to operationalize sustainable practices at the level of small institutions and communities. Which is both the strength and limits of anthropological methods.
The first four chapters on taste take us to initiatives at refreshingly varied locations. We begin at the New London, Connecticut school district, ably studied by Rachel Black. The challenging task here is feeding children, cooked-from-scratch food, while navigating the famous DOE bureaucracy. Astonishingly, Dan Gusti, an alumnus of Noma, Copenhagen has taken on that task to feed every child under $3.93. In the next chapter, Chef Eduardo Martinez’s Mini-Mal restaurant in Bogota invites us with the catchy slogan “Surprisingly Columbian.” The surprising part is that he infuses its meals with Zenú ingredients, techniques, and knowledge forms. In the process, pursuing the aesthetic re-evaluation of indigenous foods and traditional models of city-to-country relations, which is a persistent theme throughout the book. A fuller discussion of the economics of it, as in the previous chapter, would have added to the pragmatic thrust of the volume. Chapter three, poses questions of environmental and cultural sustainability in expensive institutions, such as the vegan Bellies Restaurant in Stavanger, Norway, where there is a lingering naivete about doing good while feeding the virtuous appetites of elites. The price of a meal here is 200 Euros per head. The authors imply that since this is not a “world elite restaurant,” it could be the model for other average restaurants. That is technically correct, but substantively difficult to sustain, with any globally inclusive approach to eateries. Yet, it does a good job in positioning the alternative restaurant in the matrix of Norwegian oil rent that can be hard to replicate elsewhere.
Chapter four in this section is the most un-anthropological one with a windy universalism about the need to add umami and kokumi (creamy texture) to all vegetarian food to enhance their consumption. There “are two fundamental reasons why human beings do not prefer the flavor of plants,” the authors assert all-knowingly, pinning the blame on bitterness and lack of richness (which can stand in for umami and kokumi here). It is where the scientist and the star-chef assume that all vegetarians in the world are waiting for their intervention to give them a taste of vegetables and grains that are analogous to “eggs and bacon, cheese and ham, tomatoes and meat, and tomatoes and mackerel” (p. 77). Such claims sit incongruously with the one constant refrain in this book, which is, don’t forget culture. What we have here is an ambitious, technocratic, universalism that is a product of unimaginative cultural provincialism. Yet, in its odd universalism, it posits an interesting lesson about the limits of localism and the ethnographic method, as a contrasting type. It did challenge me to think about the project of sustainability that is not confined to the very local. And the eternal problem of anthropology about how to add up all this localism that is more than mere patchiness. That project is usually assigned to Theory with a capital T – typically by making metaphors such as the various scapes of modernity, social life of things, moderns and ancients, flows and friction, ruins of capitalism, etc. – which is mostly missing in this book.
The next section takes us through four chapters on meager establishments, instead of haute cuisine temples (such as Noma and Eleven Madison Avenue). Raul Matta’s chapter is an excellent description of modest approaches, with modest means, taking us through five eateries in Paris, where the chefs try to serve local (variously defined) and seasonal produce, while reducing waste. Similarly, Liora Gvion describes a number of Israeli vegan restaurants, with more or less explicit self-positioning on animal rights, good taste, and the public/private divide. This chapter discusses various postures towards questions of morality, that anthropology and sociology are terrific at bringing down to earth. Nevertheless, I was distracted by the current Israeli destruction of Gaza, at this moment of writing. It left me wondering, how this chapter would be read before and after October 7, 2023. That disjunction between questions of everyday ethics and total warfare is not Gvion’s problem but mine, in reading this book at the wrong time and the wrong place. I wonder if this tangent is too tendentious on my part? You be the judge while you read this linked piece.
The next two chapters take us to Danish Culinary schools and US corporate kitchens with the figure of the institutional cook and her better paid variant, the research chef. We must take the corporate research chef more seriously than we do, the reader is advised, primarily because of the extensive impact of their efforts. We are all eating their handiwork when we are eating on airplanes, for instance, we are reminded. That brings us back to questions of sustainability as viewed from professional locations that anthropologists tend to avoid in the name of the people. Here some good post-Latourian theorization on knowledge production and the laboratory would have been productive.
Three chapters in the next section titled “Culinary Sustainability and Social Relations” broaden the frame, from insider views of eateries to wider contexts such as New Orleans, Vermont, and a network of Native Chefs. The chapter on Vermont restaurateurs provides detailed examples of improvisation during the COVID-19 pandemic that strengthened trust and resilience along shorter supply chains, which connects to some bigger arguments about instrumental and relational logics, risk and recrimination, Ulrich Beck and Karl Polanyi. David Beriss and Lauren Darnell, open with the most provocative line in the book: “Is New Orleans seafood–and with it, New Orleans culinary culture–sustainable?” (p. 181). That is the right question to ask for a city pummeled by hurricanes, declining population, racial division, hyper-tourism, contamination by agricultural runoffs, and oil spills, in a state that is an exemplar of right-wing revanchism. They do two things very well. They bring in social drama, which is missing in most of the other chapters. And they report on the details of a divided view of sustainability in a city. Here culture is contentious, as it is everywhere. For instance, vegetarianism in India is a grenade waiting to explode as a tool of upper caste domination and Hindu nationalism, while it is uniformly considered a good thing in most of the book (and in fact most of the Euro-American literature). Location matters. History matters.
This section ends with a report on a network of chefs which asks the question: why are there so few Native American restaurants when we are eating so much of indigenous foods, such as corn, turkey, beans, squash, quinoa, fish and shellfish, wild rice, berries and nuts, pollen and sage? It shows how cultural under-appreciation is linked to ecocultural destruction, impoverishment, and dispossession. If sustainability is to mean anything beyond its Euro-American frame based on private property and the destruction of the commons, it has to reach beyond anthropocentrism too, to include the shared care of more-than-human relatives, re-rooted in specific landscapes. This chapter puts the work of Loretta Barrett Oden, at the Corn Dance Cafe in Santa Fe (which we will return to below), and Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley, at the center of its argument. That thread of restorative justice is continued in the next section – chapter 12 is an analysis of six journalistic pieces on African American chefs in Philadelphia – that points to, among other things, the disadvantage that Black businesses face in securing small business loans. An analogous study of eleven chefs of Slow Food’s “A Cooks Alliance” in Kenya needed some enlivening, richer framing, and deeper conceptualization. But the authors pose an interesting challenge for the rest of the book, calling for the inclusion of cooks in school canteens (as the first chapter does) and street-food vendors if we are to seriously think about sustainable employment for poor people in the Global South, and make sustainability real on the triple register of economics, environment, and society. The last chapter is an interview with the chef, journalist, and photographer, Santiago Rosero in Quito, Ecuador, conducted by Joan Gross.
Two tight little stories, about native American restaurants, the Silverbird in New York City, and the Corn Dance Cafe in Santa Fe (cited earlier), in the penultimate chapter of the book, by L. Sasha Gora, stand out as a subtle product of archival sleuthing, throwing up the odd figure of chef Rahul Akerhkar (also spelled as Akerkar). An Indian who ran the first Native American restaurant in New York City, called Silverbird, and returned to India in 1989 to devise a plethora of high-end, high-reputation, restaurants in Mumbai, such as Indigo and Qualiya, bringing to a full circle the confounding Columbian conceit of discovering the “Indian.” It is such dynamic specificities that commends this book as a terrific pedagogical tool.
It is a robust collection of real attempts at getting to sustainable practices at local levels, with regional interpretation of the concept. That is what makes this book distinctive, its attention to vernacular practices, and the insistence on staying there, without the temptation of bureaucratic universalism. It is attentive to the location of the chef, which allowed me to evaluate the various projects studied here, sussing out the inevitable greenwashing that we are drowning in today. Of course cooks are only one node in a network of material, social and multi-species relations that need further attention.