In Good Taste
Local, Sustainable, Delicious
Eating sustainably means rethinking how we approach food
BY
Becky Selengut
PHOTOGRAPHY
Kate Baldwin
STYLED BY
Christy Nordstrom

Culinary students work nights. Subsequently said students are barely functional for early-morning lectures, no matter what the topic, let alone “Sustainable Food System Practices.” So I hesitated when my friend Karen Jurgensen called me to ask if I might take over her spring-quarter class at Seattle Culinary Academy—at the unsavory hour of 7 a.m.

Could I keep the attention of 35 culinary students riveted on topics such as local, sustainable food, recombinant bovine growth hormone, food additives and organics—while they sucked down Cokes and gummed Pillsbury Toaster Strudels?

Throughout my career as a chef and educator, I’ve been interested in these topics, but wading through the morass of issues around food and sustainability was overwhelming even for me. I knew I needed to present the issues in a way that would move my students to critically examine how they think about food.

First I talked with Karen. I wanted to know what inspired her to dedicate her career to educating chefs, culinary students and the general public about a sustainable food system.

“Why am I so committed?” she asked. “For purely selfish reasons: As a chef, I want access to flavor that only comes from just-picked freshness. I want diversity of products to choose from (2,980 varieties of tomatoes) and create with. And finally economics—if my local farmer, rancher or fisher prosper, my community prospers, then so do I.”

I then talked with executive chef Adam Stevenson of Earth and Ocean, specifically about his house-made charcuterie. After a tour of his curing room, we discussed how sustainability informs his desire to bring back the art of charcuterie. “I choose to use sustainably produced pork because of the flavor it lends to the meat—that wellness will come through in the final product,” Stevenson says.

Fortified with the insights of my colleagues, I enriched myself further by cramming Michael Pollen’s treatise on sustainability, An Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. I became enamored with his clear explanation of how food is sown, subsidized, slaughtered and sold.

When the witching hour of my first 7 a.m. seminar was upon me, I felt inspired and ready to tackle the challenge of partially comatose students, simple sugars flowing through their veins. I expounded on the benefits of eating seasonally and pointed out how it benefits our bodies, which crave warm, braised dishes in winter and fresh, sliced tomatoes in summer. I noted the perfect symbiotic relationship between feeding our families with seasonal food from local farms as we feed our local economy. We discussed the fact that food grown locally tends to be more nutritious. Picked ripe and eaten soon after harvest, the nutrients are preserved, far more than in unripe or artificially ripened food shipped from thousands of miles away.

Clutching it to my chest, I waxed poetic on Pollen’s book, so smitten that later in the quarter my students groaned in unison when I made my umpteenth reference to its pages. With a dramatic sweep of my hand, I told my class that, in my humble opinion, it is one of the most important books written on food in the last 20 years.

Soon, like a proud parent, I let my students run free to debate and discuss antibiotics in our meat supply, truth in labeling and the hidden costs of our cheap food supply. I knew my work was done when one Tuesday near the quarter’s end, my students began loudly debating the pros and cons of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). A broad smile crept onto my face as their passionate and lively debate nearly erupted in fisticuffs.
Today Karen is back at the helm teaching her course and I am back to my old ways of working late and sleeping in. I bumped into one of my students the other day and he informed me that he’s now reading food labels. Oh, he’s still eating Toaster Strudels, but at least he knows what he’s eating now.

Becky Selengut is a Seattle-based private chef and cooking instructor. She is the founder of  SeasonalCornucopia.com, an educational Web site that celebrates the foods of the Pacific Northwest.

Sustainable Web
The Internet is a great source for tips on eating and living sustainably. Here is a sampling of Web sites that offer recipes, tips and other helpful information:

Cascade Harvest Coalition
Chefs Collaborative
Puget Sound Fresh
Seattle Neighborhood Farmers Markets
Sustainable Ballard
Sustainable Table
 
Sustainability Education
Seattle Culinary Academy
Quillisascut Farm School for the Domestic Arts