Culinary school

Is culinary school sustainable?

fish

Learning to cook produces a lot of waste. Questions of sustainability pushed forward in my thoughts last week as I gutted, prepped and cooked fish that I would ultimately throw out. The fact that so much food goes in the garbage while learning to cook runs counter to the frugal realities of professional kitchens. Your average restaurant cannot afford to throw out the pieces of meat, vegetables and other ingredients that are excess or that were not cut correctly. Perhaps this is why we pay so much for culinary education–the material costs are high. Yes, in learning we need to make inedible mistakes but we also need to understand that waste is not on the menu in the real world.

How could culinary schools promote sustainability? Shouldn’t frugality be programmed into the culinary student’s DNA? Using every little bit of each ingredient seems like an invaluable skill that should be part of any good culinary curriculum. When I asked about composting, the chef nearly began to laugh. What about planting a didactic vegetable garden in the sunny spot behind the school? These ideas met with looks of amazement. Well, I have always been an idealist.

If we aren’t going to learn to practice sustainability through minimizing waste, perhaps we could at least talk about it on a larger scale. Last week’s program was dedicated to seafood. Shockingly, we not once discussed issues of declining fish stocks, the fragilities of marine environments or the plus and minuses of aquaculture. Slyly, I tried to bring up these topics each time a new fish or mollusk was introduced.

It has always been my dream to incorporate hands-on culinary activities more fully into food studies classes. I think they both need each other. Chefs, especially aspiring chefs, need to be made aware of the larger political, economic and social issues surrounding food. Food activists, policy makers and intellectuals in training need to understand the labor and skill involved in farming and preparing food. True understanding comes from the development of personal relationships between actors in a food system and through honest engagement in each other’s work. In my mind, this marriage will some day lead to greater sustainability.