'A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." In just one example, eating meat causes almost 40 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined. The report concludes that the meat industry "should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity."'

'Agriculture is increasingly reaching limits in terms of arable land and water availability, reduction in soil fertility and increasing environmental impacts. Modern industrial agriculture considers these impacts as extraneous even though the loss of ecosystem services undermines the very basis of what sustains agriculture. If our modern agricultural systems continue to focus only on maximising production at the lowest cost, agriculture will face a major crisis in 20 to 30 years time. There is a collective ignorance about how agriculture interacts with natural systems and this must change.'

What did it mean to be a chef? What happened to chefs cooking? Had the profession spun out of control? Had we, the audience? What was going on here? Had we built it up too high, being a chef? Are we in danger of burning out on chefs, of suddenly turning on them, shouting that they have no clothes on, and dumping them in favor of the latest pop idol or sports giant?

Perhaps, on the other hand, our chef-mania, our grossly out-of-reach understanding of the work, is a good thing, a way for America to at last get a grip on its own relationship with food. Since the end of World War II, this country has been out of sync with the natural order of sustenance and nourishment, embracing processed foods, revering canned goods, "instant" breakfasts, and frozen dinners, then elevating fast food to a way of life with such force that its impact has become global, then simultaneously abhorring animal fat for health and dietary reasons, while still becoming the fattest community on earth, then turning around to proselytize on diets composed entirely of salt-rich protein and animal fat, and banishing bread of all things--the staff of life was now the evildoer, and just when bakers in this country had figured out how to make it well. We completely upended the food pyramid we'd always accepted as undeniable and good common sense. Ours is a country that for years held out a silver cross at eggs. Eggs are bad for you! Eggs! The most natural food on earth, a symbol of life and fertility, a compact package of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates whose versatility in the kitchen, pleasure at the table, and economy at the store is unmatched by any other food. We learned to hate the egg! Do you need any further proof that something is seriously wrong with this country that teaches people to avoid eggs? Only when they become a good strategy for slimming down did we reverse ourselves on the egg quandary.

But in addition to inept thinking about the egg, we've also managed to debase our eggs on a massive scale, to contaminate them so that they may actually make you sick if you don't cook them until they're hard, and downright dangerous for the very young and the very old. We've done the same to our animals, too, by pumping them full of chemicals and feeding them crap that they wouldn't naturally choose in generations of evolution. Our major commercial hog producers are breeding the fat out of hogs to try to please the knuckleheaded consumer, who doesn't know anymore what's good for him or not--how could he? he's been taught to fear the egg!--degrading a once-fine animal beyond recognition, and yet we think nothing of supersizing our french fries and burgers and Cokes. We're breeding chickens without feathers. Most people scarcely know anymore what their food looks like when it's alive. They get grossed out at a proper pig roast. They wouldn't know what to do if they saw an asparagus growing wild--you can't eat that, it's gotta come in a bundle with a rubber band around it. If food doesn't come in a package or a box or wrapped in plastic, we aren't comfortable with it, don't trust it. It might hurt us. Gotta be processed. Gotta have an expiration date. It's sometimes hard to remember that what comes out of our boxes and packages first comes out of the earth.

Chefs, thanks to their celebrity, now have the clout and the passion, as well as the knowledge, to point us back to the things that matter--to sustainable farming, to raising animals naturally in fresh air, rather than inside cement barracks pumped full of antibiotics. We're slowly, too slowly, recognizing the scary results of chemical-laced livestock in over crowded spaces--not merely inferior beef and tasteless chicken, or unpleasant bacteria such as Salmonella and Listeria, but also the evolution of truly deadly bacteria such as E. coli O157:H7.


Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse, began working with farmers thirty years ago and asked us to understand better where our food comes from because it matters. This former schoolteacher had the authority to do this because she ran a popular restaurant. A generation later, chefs are a powerful force in the way we raise hogs, cattle, and chicken because Americans are spending their dollars at these chefs' restaurants and buying their cookbooks--capitalism at its best--and reading about their beliefs and philosophies, in addition to trying to actually cook their food, and believing what these chefs believe. Which is, as Keller has said, "If I have a better product, I can be a better chef than you." Or, to put it in more sweeping but no less accurate terms for the rest of us: We better take care of the earth or we're gonna have shitty food, and having shitty food is no fun.