Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.
Issue link: https://specialtyfoodmagazine.epubxp.com/i/912382
R egenerative agriculture as a means of offsetting environmental impact, the benefits of space-efficient farm- ing, and how plant-based and so-called clean meat can improve food security, human health, and the planet, are among the thought-provoking innovations the food industry is shaping. Karen Liebowitz, co-founder of San Francisco restaurant, The Perennial, is fighting climate change one meal at a time. "I was trying to reduce my impact on the planet, but I felt like climate change was inevitable," she says. "Then I learned that agriculture actually can draw down greenhouse gas, thereby improving the atmosphere while building healthy soil that yields food that is more delicious and nutritious, not to mention more sustainable. We built The Perennial restaurant as a place to share that optimistic shift in thinking from conservation to restoration, by serving food raised through regenerative agriculture and proving that sustainability can be delicious." The Perennial's menu is inspired by Liebowitz's goal of softening the tread of the restaurant's carbon footprint in an outside-the-box way. "For too long we've thought about sustainability like a diet, but regenerative food offers another, more optimistic way to proceed," she says. "Using regenerative ingredients brings the carbon footprint down immensely, and we've found it's actually more impactful than any other area of restaurant operations, such as energy or waste." Menu items like sourdough bread are made with kernza, a relative of wheat that has been developed from a perennial plant. "It grows more than a year, sending down deep roots that restore the soil and support a whole ecosystem of life that also draws down carbon dioxide," These eight companies are upending the status quo and influencing the direction of food. BY JULIE GALLAGHER Regenerative Agriculture, Cell-Grown Meat in Food's Future PHOTO: KAREN LEIBOWITZ WINTER 2018 95