Sustainability, best practices and local cooking can affect organizational outcomes
Chef Michael Smith is American born and educated, but today he proudly calls Canada his home. Hailed as “Prince Edward Island’s Food Ambassador,” this award-winning chef has four popular books and four Food Network TV shows to his credit. A fifth book and fifth series are on their way this fall. He is also proud to be national sustainability advocate for Sodexo. Clearly, Chef Michael Smith has a thing or two to say about food. He talked to Dialogue+ about local food, sustainability, engagement and the inevitability of age-related decline unless we make healthy daily food choices. (http://chefmichaelsmith.com | http://www.sodexo.ca)
Sustainability
Tell us about your role as a “sustainability advocate” for Sodexo and your role as a chef and mentor for the company?
I am proud to be Sodexo’s national sustainability advocate. That manifests itself in quite a few ways, both internally and externally to the company. I work closely with my culinary colleagues, inspiring them to incorporate local, attainable food solutions. It’s also an opportunity for me to get a good working knowledge, a good grasp, of the true issues that face our industry today. As a chef, it’s very easy for me to open a little restaurant on one corner in one city and influence perhaps 100 guests per night and basically do whatever I want as an independent operator. But that’s not really going to help solve some of the tremendous issues and hurdles facing us today. This is a great opportunity for me to gain insight by positioning myself right in the middle of the food service industry where true change is both needed and happening.
What qualifies as “sustainable food”?
Food that is respectful of the environment in which it is produced and consumed.
Engaging with food
You say that people should “engage” with their food (become aware of the people and resources behind it) and that once they do, it will become easier for them to make good sustainable choices. How can retirement residence chefs engage with the food they prepare when they are usually far away from the people who produced it?
To tackle such issues is tremendously complicated. We don’t yet know all the possible solutions. We’re victims of a certain cost-driven approach to providing food, and this skews our societal expectations. We all recognize that there’s only so much you can do with a budget, and when these budgets are as low as they often are, your only option is to turn to inexpensive processed food devoid of nutrition. It is not local, nor does it have any interwoven sustainability story behind it. The best that I can do is issue a call to action. My role is to serve as a catalyst to bring light and focus to these issues because, ultimately, the solutions will come from us all. The days of wilfully, blindly ignoring the issues and challenges facing us are behind us now, as is the outsourcing to others. We all have to take responsibility wherever we happen to be; we all have to look for these solutions.
Is there a role for residents in terms of engaging with the local farm/food community?
Absolutely! There’s a role for everybody. We’ve got to move on from this bottom-line driven approach that’s disrespectful of our producers and disrespectful of the people eating the food. There’s such a missed opportunity here to tell great stories and to be respectful of all the people who are working within the system.
“Big Food Inc.”
You have been known to say that we can’t let “Big Food Inc.” cook for us. What is Big Food Inc. and what solutions can retirement residence chefs use to overcome it?
“Big Food Inc.” is my way of describing an approach that excludes everything but profit. I am referring to processed-food franchisers—essentially everyone in that “ingredient chain.” It is often not even food to begin with, but rather disingenuous crap. How can our unit chefs incorporate more solutions? The first and foremost step, regardless of what the solutions might be, is engagement. It is quite powerful once we start to engage and pay attention to sustainability and health and nutrition and, increasingly, to sodium. My first step is to advocate for engagement and to stop taking for granted all these issues and to start paying attention to them in a meaningful way.
Beyond that, I advocate for certain co-operation with colleagues and fellow industry members. There are all kinds of great solutions out there that we can leverage, access and incorporate if we start to engage.
Taking food for granted only results in supply-chain issues and nutrition problems. Like it or not, we are food and food is always the touch-point for an individual’s health and morale.
Local foods
Food pioneers of the 1980s have said, “You don’t need to be French to be local.” In other words, you can do as they do and use local ingredients to stir up local traditions. Is this what you would suggest that retirement residence chefs do?
I would suggest that all chefs do that. There does not need to be a differentiation between retirement residence chefs and other chefs. We’re all in the big picture here together. Everybody needs to engage. There’s just too much of this waiting around and excuse-making—abdicating us from our personal responsibility as chefs. We need to know that at the end of the day we’ve done the best job possible within the sphere of our influence.
Is cooking with local, fresh ingredients a cost savings? Wouldn’t cooking almost exclusively with local food cost more?
It depends on how you define cost. Very often our ingredient costs are externalized. When we’re using processed food, what is not in the price is the ruinous effects on health and morale. It’s a complicated answer only because the word “cost” is, well, complicated. For example, one of the areas where we see this argument pop up the most is when we speak of organic food. There’s often a disingenuous argument made that organic food is more expensive when, in fact, organic food is priced fairly; it’s respectful of the person who produces the food. It is the so-called conventional food that is costly only because it externalizes many of its costs.
We’re in a gigantic social experiment here in North America that’s just not working. We’ve got the cheapest food in the history of mankind and, quite frankly, we’re getting what we pay for. We are the only society in the world today that is spending twice as much on health care as we are on food, while the rest of the world is doing the reverse. Is there a correlation? Hell yeah, there’s a correlation! We’re basically dancing around a societal upheaval. We need to get back in touch with what food is and what it can do for us on so many levels: personally, for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, for our farmers. We’ve allowed ourselves to get lazy and we’ve allowed all these gigantic Big Food Inc. consortiums to take over and make decisions for us. Now it’s time to take responsibility and get back to making more local, sustainable decisions.
Is integrating local food solutions into the way we do business as food service professionals the biggest challenge of the food service industry?
Integrating local food solutions certainly is a challenge, largely because of supply-chain issues. We, as an industry, have some supply chain issues that we have to solve—largely because of the expectations on our supply-chain that our clients place on us. For instance, our clients expect a product that is insurable. This is a more important factor for many of our clients than where the food comes from and whether or not it is actually nutritious. Therefore, there is an impediment for many of our chefs to work with local food suppliers. Our local food suppliers are often small and independent and are not in a position to carry the kinds of liability insurance that our industry requires. So we need some kind of industry solution to the insurability issue–one of the biggest challenges we’re dealing with at the moment.
You often quote Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Many seniors are more comfortable with the foods they’re used to rather than newer food combinations—especially lots of vegetable dishes. How can chefs satisfy this credo?
Cook more plants! Get creative with what’s local. It’s about making the vegetables and grains and leaves—the produce in general—just as sexy as the rest of the menu! Many chefs tend to overlook the potential in the world of produce and tend to focus all of our efforts on the protein, and we miss the opportunity for truly nutritional work with our produce. Produce is the stuff that makes us tick!
Best practices
What best practices can food service operators and retirement residence operators and chefs use?
Stop thinking of food as a commodity and start thinking of it as a living, breathing opportunity to engage our guests each and every meal. Start telling stories. Start looking for those stories. I don’t accept the chef who immediately turns around and says, “I’m too busy. I don’t have enough resources. I can’t do this.” I don’t accept that. Move on then! We are chefs. We are on the front lines. We are actually in the position to do something about these problems facing our society. We are there, actually there. I don’t accept these excuses anymore. Get busy. Start looking for solutions. Be creative. The days of looking to external forces to come up with solutions are over; more often this attitude is just an excuse for not taking personal responsibility. True solutions lie within our units, regardless of the kind of kitchen we are running. We know our kitchens best. We all have to serve as advocates for this; we all have to push forward. Very specifically, I’m not talking just about local food. This is about regaining a connection with food that’s been lost, and one of the ways of regaining that connection is through local food connections.
Fundamentally, there’s a piece missing here. Part of the discourse has to do with this viewing of food as merely a commodity and not truly what it really is and what it can do for us.
Organizational outcomes
How can sustainability and local cooking affect organizational outcomes in retirement residences?
In the same way that we’re seeing differentiation in our university and campus accounts. This is an incredibly competitive industry, and it’s only going to get more competitive as time goes by. There’s a solid business case to be made here for this: that it can help you distinguish yourself in a crowded marketplace. We’re seeing exactly that happening with our university clients. We have students on campus today with extraordinarily high expectations of food. You wouldn’t recognize food on campus today! It’s now a way for a university to distinguish itself. In the very same way, we can leverage that within the retirement residence community. Not all operators are hampered with $7-per-day food budgets. Many are in a position to get a little more meaningful. What is missing from that discourse is just intent, engagement and work. It’s too easy to take the cheap route and just pick up the phone once a week and make that one call to that one broad-line supplier instead of trying to be a little more ingenious. Bottom line: we are chefs; we gather, prepare and share food; we are in the hospitality industry; we do our best on behalf of others. If you can’t look at yourself in the mirror and know that you are doing your best, then you are in the wrong business.
About Nancy Solomon
Terrific interview. Chef Smith is so articulate and knowledgeable. His comments make me think there are ways we can manage our kitchens and the healthy food in them—that we don't even know about yet!