It’s 2:46am, and I can’t sleep.  Been tossing and turning for almost 3 hours, and now I’m fully surrendering to being awake.  Why so restless?  I’m all wound up with ideas and determination.  Sustainability and localizing our food system cannot become something dismissed as puritanical, elitist or irrelevant.  I know that there is a lot of work to do to even out the imbalance of access, but this is a huge issue, man, and we’ve really gotta start paying attention to our food.  The current dismal state of food affairs is a mess that we all got ourselves into, and it’s gonna take all of us to get us out. 

In particular, I’m thinking a lot about my fellow chefs.  Just the other day while I was painting my kitchen, I was listening to a panel discussion that included Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert, two serious New York chefs who have earned their stripes in tough kitchens, and who enjoy a reasonable amount of fame at this point in their careers.  One of the last questions they were asked, was whether they as chefs feel as though they have the opportunity to speak out about food and help educate people about how to eat.  I was so interested to see how they answered this question, and was so seriously disappointed.  Though he acknowledged that there was a food revolution in America, Eric Ripert said that he was more interested in cooking in his restaurant than he was in teaching people anything.  Anthony Bourdain doesn’t want to be forced to give anything up, and though he thinks that local eating and Slow Food are “nice alternatives”, he doesn’t want to be forced to play along, because it’s all about pleasure for chefs.  I was so deflated after I heard this, as I didn’t believe that two famous and relevant chefs would take such a selfish position on this issue.  With all respect for their many more years of hard kitchen work than mine, I say this to my fellow chefs who think that sustainability is a restrictive or something that can be opted out of: open your eyes.  There is talk that the waters around our continent will be out of fish and seafood in the next 20-30 years.  So you’ll serve your skate and sea bass for another 20 years, then what?  Find something else to exploit?  There is responsibility that comes with fame, whether you acknowledge it or not.  Chefs are and must be leaders, and it’s time for some new thinking about how we run our kitchens. 

Arrgh!  My pulse is racing, and my fingers can’t keep up with my thoughts about this.  Food needs a champion, and our government (at any level) is clearly not paying any attention at all.  If we chefs don’t answer this call, then who will?  Our dedication to food must go beyond heirloom varieties and concerns about waste and food costs.  What’s on our plates is inextricably linked to what’s happening outside the doors of our restaurants.

Alice Waters has taken a number of hits in the last while for being out of touch, and preaching about  buying good strawberries over another pair of shoes.  Alice also has lots of big ideas, and while she may not be the best source for grassroots strategies, she’s a visionary, and has left an undeniably influential mark on food in North America.  This bit is from an article about her at gourmet.com: “The history of great professional cuisine is largely about feeding the rich, and few chefs or proprietors ever thought to include anyone in their constituency except the people who ate in their restaurants. Waters was the first high-end restaurateur to put her kitchen at the service of social change, and to define her clientele far more widely than the glamorous crowd in the dining rooms.”  If they’re calling Alice crazy, then you can call me crazy too, but to me, a holistic, sustainable approach to food and cooking is the only one that makes sense.

Tonight, at the Slow Food Ontario Game dinner at Hank’s, I was so inspired by the community of slow chefs we have in Toronto (and Ancaster), because they get it, and are serious about working for change.  I realize I’m a bit more extreme with my socialist granola leanings, and can’t expect everyone to share my politics, but I can try to be inspiring with some big ideas about how things could be.  And after this, I need some sleep, ‘cause I’ve got a lot of work to do.