Pittsburgh-born food and climate writer Caroline Saunders is always on the look-out for climate-friendly food innovators, what’s coming out of their kitchens, and what’s on their plates. She’s also the author of climate-friendly baking newsletter Pale Blue Tart. She looks at a few chefs from across the globe with our planet’s health (and ours) on their minds.
Climate-Friendly Restaurants Across the Globe
What do a chili oil-drizzled pizza, an oversized buckwheat breakfast pastry, and a briny oyster topped with potato salad and fingerling potato chips have in common? They’re among the kaleidoscope of dishes that chefs are whipping up to make gastronomy a climate solution.
Chefs have long connected the dots between cooking and the health of the environment. But over the past handful of years, as it has become ever clearer that the food system is both a major driver of climate change and vulnerable to its effects, a small but growing number of chefs have started coming up with different takes on what we might call climate cuisine: restaurant menus and recipe collections reflecting a range of ideas about what good eating might mean in the era of climate change.
Shuggie’s Trash Pie
At Shuggie’s Trash Pie in San Francisco, a self-described “climate-solutions restaurant,” co-owners David Murphy and Kayla Abe developed a simple environmental directive for their menu: take purveyors’ and farmers’ food waste and make pizza with it. Reducing food waste tops the research organization Project Drawdown’s list of climate solutions necessary to keeping warming below critical levels, a fact that inspired the approach at the maximalist, glam-ified restaurant.
From starters to pies, the menu is peppered with up-cycled ingredients from the many “little breaks in the food system,” Abe said. Off-cuts like chicken hearts, gizzards, and livers feature in a no-holds-barred take on buffalo wings, and flour made from the pulp leftover after processing oat milk features in the pizza dough along with whey discarded during cheese-making. Pies might have broccoli leaves, stalk pesto, and cheddar, or layers of pepperoni and drizzles of chili oil made of peppers that another company couldn’t sell to their typical customers because the chilis were an unexpected variety.
Aponiente
While minimizing waste from purchased ingredients is a common goal at restaurants, designing menus around a pantry of up-cycled ingredients is a rarity. It’s also part of the mission at Aponiente, a three Michelin-starred restaurant on Spain’s southern coast that champions ocean conservation. There, in a converted 19th-century tidal mill, chef Angel Leon up-cycles marine bycatch and under-loved fish cuts into refined fare like seabass-skin biscuit rolls and an entire line of “marine charcuterie.”
Oyster, Oyster
Across the ocean in Washington, DC, chef Rob Rubba is bringing a mid-Atlantic take on sustainable gastronomy to life at Oyster, Oyster. There, the cooking is as close to zero-waste as possible, almost exclusively vegetarian in order to reduce emissions, and based on ingredients sourced from climate-friendly farms. Oysters, Rubba said, tell the story of how over-harvesting in the Chesapeake Bay can paradoxically be reversed by sourcing in moderation from sustainable oyster farmers, who help rebuild reefs by re-depositing empty oyster shells. All the producers the restaurant works with are vetted, since being ‘local’ doesn’t inherently mean ‘sustainable,’ Rubba pointed out. He and his staff look for fair labor practices and regenerative farming techniques, which can include no-till agriculture, crop rotations, and cover cropping.
Sustainability at Home
Climate-friendly farming is also the basis of Los Angeles chef and entrepreneur Camilla Marcus’s sustainable cooking philosophy. Regenerative techniques improve soil health and water retention in ways that make farmland more climate resilient, and also draw carbon out of the atmosphere (though the jury is out on how long). Marcus’s 2024 cookbook, My Regenerative Kitchen: Plant-Based Recipes and Sustainable Practices to Nourish Ourselves and the Planet, outlines several climate cuisine principles: regenerative sourcing, more frequent vegetarian and plant-based eating, zero-waste cooking, and the use of biodiverse ingredients.
Eating a wider variety of foods, Marcus said, is a natural extension of regenerative farming, which typically entails growing more diverse crops than the monocrop farms prevalent in industrial agriculture. Cover crops, for instance, feature in her recipes: popped sorghum makes a resilient popcorn alternative, and buckwheat flour adds a savory-sweet note to a skillet-baked Dutch baby. Her focus on resilient grains echoes that of Pierre Tham, a chef who put West African fine dining on the map and has argued that “lost” crops like fonio can improve food security in a warming world.
Not Only Helpful but Delicious Too
It may still be the exception rather than the rule for climate action to shape menus, but the chefs doing it are receiving increasing attention. Shuggie’s was featured on multiple best new restaurants lists in 2023— the same year that Rob Rubba won a James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef and Oyster, Oyster earned a Michelin star. Oyster, Oyster and Aponiente are both among the more than 500 restaurants worldwide that have been awarded Green Michelin stars since the Guide launched its sustainability-focused honor in 2021.
Camilla Marcus sees the critical acclaim that these expressions of climate cookery have received as an indication that a critical mass of interest is approaching. She said, “I think we’re at the tipping point.”
Story by Caroline Saunders
Photo by Álvaro Fernández, Courtesy of Aponiente
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