Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability

The centrality of food to the human experience always places it at the crux of global crises, whether catastrophic climate change, the collapse of biodiversity in our shared ecosystem, the threat of pandemics, or the poverty and suffering associated with resource scarcity. The continual reality of these challenges has prompted professionals throughout the food industry to seek innovative solutions, as chefs and restaurateurs adjust to customer demands and political imperatives for socially responsible civic action.

Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability explores how chefs around the world approach culinary sustainability in highly unstable times while working in myriad professional domains. Building on empirical data collected from a wide range of cultural, historical, political, and economic settings, the contributors to this collection provide a sophisticated and engaging examination of how chefs in diverse culinary contexts tackle the increasingly urgent societal and environmental need for a more secure food future.

Carole Counihan is professor emerita of anthropology at Millersville University and editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways. She is the author of Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia, A Tortilla Is Like Life, and Around the Tuscan Table.

Susanne Højlund is an anthropologist working on taste and food culture, chef education, and children’s perceptions of taste. She is head of the Food Culture Studies (FOCUS) center at Aarhus University. She is coeditor of several books including Making Taste Public and Sugar and Modernity in Latin America.