Zero Footprint, Edible Schoolyard, Slow Food: Worthy Goals

Originally published in the Fall 2019 issue of Spoke+Blossom

CAT MAYER

We are coming to the end of yet another busy summer. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel of our scheduled events. Last week I was one of a group of chefs called the Colorado Five who were cooking an eight-course Japanese Kaiseki-themed menu to help raise money for charity. This event was held at Knapp Ranch in Edwards and it was the most beautiful table setting I’ve ever had the privilege to be a part of. The FIVE team used Colorado-grown ingredients, Colorado wines and spirits and Colorado themes throughout the ambitious menu inspired by Chef Bryan Redniss of The Rose in Edwards. The previous week, the team was at the Crested Butte Food & Wine Festival. We were raising money for the Crested Butte Center for the Arts by cooking a menu inspired by European ski culture. Swiss and French traditional classics reimagined with — you guested it — Colorado ingredients. In mid-July, I was in Denver with the FIVE cooking at the Colorado Fare party at Slow Food Nations; their motto is “Good, Clean and Fair” food for all. If you aren’t already familiar, Slow Food Nations is an annual festival which takes place in downtown Denver. This year there were 30,000 participants over the week of events.

One of those events was the Slow Food Chefs Summit which was hosted by a panel of experts within the field of responsibly-sourced food. If you have been an avid reader of this #thenewwest column in Spoke+Blossom, it should come as no surprise that I am an avid supporter of the Slow Food Movement and a member of the Slow Food Chef’s Alliance. This panel was important to me as two of the speakers of the panel, Alice Waters and Anthony Myint, were there to promote their work within sustainable agriculture. Alice Waters of Chez Panisse has pioneered local and sustainably-sourced food for over 40 years and created the Edible Schoolyard Project in 1995. The Edible Schoolyard, in a nutshell, is an outline that allows students to farm vegetables for use within the schools, then compost from the school’s cafeteria to help sustain the farm. Anthony Myint of Mission Street Food has been working to push this agenda one step further with the ZeroFoodprint initiative: a program allowing restaurants to analyze their carbon footprint, then offsetting that footprint to carbon neutral through credits used to support community and statewide composting projects.

In July, our restaurants made a commitment to moving towards a carbon neutral model through ZeroFoodprint. However, here in western Colorado, the infrastructure doesn’t yet exist to allow us to do as much as we could be/should be. On one hand, here we are, all of us collectively in a day and age that our convenience store salads are locally sourced. We are able to source local and regional ingredients (more on regional sourcing soon) from the least expensive menu item, our sweet corn ice cream to a $300 per person seven-course Japanese-themed dinner on a mountaintop outside of Vail. On the other hand, our farmers are doing all they can to keep up with the never-ending demand of more food, higher yields and rising costs. Somehow what we’ve all been creating to improve our economies and provide better products to our guests is also taking resources from our soil and is only replenished by our dwindling water supply.

Grand Junction, like most smaller western Colorado communities, currently does not have a commercial community composting facility in place. Composting is the easiest, least expensive and ultimately probably the only way to improve soil health by introducing life (microbes) back into the soil which we farm upon. The ability to increase soil biodiversity allows us to grow better produce and at a lower cost, but it also contributes to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. If 50 restaurants/coffee shops/universities/bars throughout our region were to compost our food waste, we could transform the small farms that support us.

Let’s take that one step further. The five farms we work with the most within the restaurants combined probably total less than 25 acres combined. Meanwhile the small hemp farm down the street is likely 50 acres. I’ve written about CBD in the Western Slope in the past — we are having an absolute boom of hemp farms, all of which rely on soil health and biodiversity. Let’s enlarge that 50 commercial composting accounts into 500 households and add the acreage being converted to hemp to continue to help offset our carbon emissions and improve our air quality in doing so. In other words, let’s take inspiration from the public lands which surround us and do our part to leave no trace before we love our local land to death!

ZeroFoodprint: zerofoodprint.org
Edible schoolyard: edibleschoolyard.org
Slow Food: slowfoodusa.org