Tag: Food

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7248 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-09-30 17:57:50 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-09-30 17:57:50 [post_content] =>

Who's taking the biggest hit in the global fast food boycott?

In the proxy war over fast food that’s now enveloping the Muslim world, it’s clear who took the first shot. But unlike the war that triggered it, who exactly is footing the bill is another matter.

In the early days of the War in Gaza, Israel’s McDonald’s franchisee, Alonyal Ltd, set off a tidal wave of controversy when it announced it would give free food to Israeli soldiers. In January, the Israeli franchisee behind Pizza Hut appeared to follow suit, when the Palestinian news source Quds News Network posted screenshots from Pizza Hut Israel’s Instagram account of smiling IDF soldiers holding stacks of pizza boxes which, according to the caption, Pizza Hut had given them for free.

Both Alonyal and Tabasco Holdings, the Israeli Pizza Hut franchisee, appear to have acted alone, without approval from the American companies that own their respective brands. But their decisions to give food to soldiers fighting perhaps the world’s most watched conflicts has led to serious global ramifications. As the news ricocheted around social media, regular McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and KFC customers all over the world, but especially in predominantly Muslim countries, announced plans to boycott all three restaurants. (The KFC and Pizza Hut brands are both owned by the same company, Yum! Brands.)

Attempting to quell the outrage, McDonald’s Corporation, the US company that Alonyal paid to use the Golden Arches logo and menu, released statements insisting McDonald’s was politically neutral and had no ties to either side of the conflict. Soon after, McDonald’s franchisees from Turkey to Oman—all of them unrelated to Alonyal, except in their common relations to the McDonald’s brand—distanced themselves from Alonyal by issuing their own statements of support for the people of Gaza and pledging support for relief efforts in the region.

But for millions of customers, the presumed complicity of any business wearing the brand of a global fast food company was already a foregone conclusion. Either they did not grasp the fact that franchisees were independently owned, or they believed independent ownership did not absolve them from their Israeli counterpart’s choices. The fact that the United States government is the leading international sponsor of the IDF only added fuel to the flames: Regardless of ownership, customers still considered these brands to be inherently American. Franchisees in countries with large Muslim populations in the Middle East and Asia soon reported massive drops in sales. In February, the McDonald’s Corporation announced it had missed sales estimates for the first time since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Boycott promoters on social media took declining sales as a clear sign they were hitting the intended target. “Let this be a lesson to any company that wants to continue supporting the Zionist entity,” a PhD student in Canada, who goes by the handle @palfolkore, said in a TikTok with over 14 thousand likes, posted the day McDonald’s released its sales figures. “Your stocks will drop. Your earnings will be hit … There is no amount of rebranding you can do to dissuade us … We know what you are. We know what your politics are.” (@palfolkore did not respond to a request for comment.) Their post was one of countless others celebrating the apparent victory, and the boycott continues to this day.

The conceptual simplicity of a boycott, and a fast food boycott in particular, has made it especially easy for activists to get behind: Fast food companies are huge, global, and, unlike arms manufacturers, whose connection to the war is as direct as it is obvious, they depend on money from the general public to keep going. But fast food, like globalization itself, does not easily lend itself to such a straightforward line of attack. Before taking aim at fast food, it helps to understand who’s actually behind it.

If you know something about how the fast food industry works, you’re probably familiar with the concept of franchising. It works like this: The fast food company, called the “franchisor,” gives a company or individual, the “franchisee,” the right to use its name, menu, and likeness in a given area. In exchange, the franchisee typically pays the franchisor an annual fee and gives it a cut of its revenue. During the industry’s early rise in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, franchising gave companies like McDonald’s and Burger King a way to expand without staking their own capital. Instead of borrowing money themselves to build new restaurants, they could rely on people with their own savings and lines of credit to underwrite new operations. It would ultimately benefit customers, too: A person could walk into a McDonald’s in Portland, Maine and another three thousand miles away in San Diego, California and expect the same food and service, despite the fact that each was independently owned.

As the industry became larger and richer, the capital advantage of franchising became less important. Many companies backed off the practice, electing the more profitable route of opening their own restaurants. But overseas, franchising still proved critical to the industry’s expansion. First, franchisees knew their own regions more intimately than a large corporation, headquartered on another continent, ever could. Secondly, local ownership allowed the industry to blur the lines around its own national identity. Depending on the mood of its customers, McDonald’s or KFC could be an American brand, a local one, or some indistinct fusion of the two.

But almost as long as global fast food companies have maintained a presence outside the US, they’ve been the subject of political protest, and even political violence, as was the case in a series of attacks and bombings in Latin American countries, such as El Salvador and Peru, from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and in majority Muslim countries, such as Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, and Lebanon in the 2000s and the 2010s. In many cases, it was clear the activists, rebels, or terrorists who targeted a particular fast food outlet intended to make it a proxy for something bigger. Often, the United States was the primary target. Other times, it was globalization itself. In his book-length account of his travels in India, The Age of Kali, William Dalrymple recounts how, on the 51st anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1999, members of a farmers’ union in Bangalore trashed a KFC in the name of a “second freedom struggle” to stop “the invasion of India by multinationals.”

Drawing a line from India’s independence struggle to KFC may have been a stretch. But it made striking at a locally-owned fast food outlet easier to justify. After all, if multinational corporations were colonial powers, what were franchisees if not their collaborators?

A similar question hovers over the current wave of consumer action sweeping the Muslim world. If symbolism is the point, does it matter who among the multitude of people and institutions behind various international fast food brands takes the biggest hit during a boycott? Fast food corporations may be nebulous, but franchised restaurants are their real-world manifestations. They may be independently owned, but they are nothing if not closely affiliated with the corporations whose names they carry. Why not go after them?

We might see the current wave of boycotts as an attempt to apply that same logic on a massive scale. But the result has been that people are going after franchisees with no business in Israel at all. In August, Americana Group, a franchisee that owns more than 2,000 KFCs and other restaurants across the Middle East and Kazakhstan, reported a 40 percent loss in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period in 2023. QSR Group, the leading KFC and Pizza Hut franchisee in Southeast Asia, temporarily closed over one hundred KFCs in Muslim-majority areas.

“Let’s give it up for Malaysia, everybody,” another TikToker going by the handle @anti__mia said of the news. “The Malaysians really know how to boycott.”

Yet the people most affected by these boycotts may not actually be protesters’ intended target: Neither Americana nor QSR Group has any business in Israel. In fact, the largest backers of both franchisees are agencies of governments that have taken positions against Israel. Americana Group’s largest investor is the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia—a country which has never recognized Israel and has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. The controlling shareholder of QSR Brands is an investment company owned by the Malaysian state of Johor, and one of its largest minority shareholders is another government entity, a pension fund controlled by the Malaysian Ministry of Finance. The Malaysian government is so at odds with Israel that, last year, it adopted a boycott of its own, banning all Israeli ships from entering its ports.

Fast food ownership might be fuzzy by nature, but the effects of the current boycotts are quite vivid. Earlier this year, QSR Brands intended to put itself up on the local stock exchange, attracting more investors and likely bringing in additional money for the state-owned agencies that control it. But after closing stores and watching profits tumble, those plans are indefinitely on hold. Despite the avowedly pro-Palestinian position of the Malaysian government, to activists and Gaza-watchers on TikTok, the KFC name—and its American ties—speaks louder.

Back in Israel, McDonald’s has gone through an even more dramatic transition. In April, McDonald’s Corporation made the drastic choice to buy back all 225 of Alonyal’s restaurants for an undisclosed sum. Owning Israeli McDonald’s outright will expose the company to more risk, but it will also give the company more control, and the local stores more stability during a period of political upheaval. Boycott or not, the fast food industry finds a way.

Ownership also means McDonald’s Corporation gets to capture the profits for itself instead of sharing them with a local partner. Ironically, a boycott of Israeli stores now would do more harm to the US company’s bottom line than it did when the boycott began. Despite the protestations of its corporate masters, the fast food industry—like any global industry—is enmeshed in world politics, after all.

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September 30, 2024October 4, 2024

The Proxy Fast Food War

by Alex Park

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7073 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2024-07-18 21:17:51 [post_date_gmt] => 2024-07-18 21:17:51 [post_content] =>

The short answer is yes—but it hasn't proven easy.

When the all-organic frozen food company Amy’s Kitchen went into the fast food business in 2015, it seemed like the industry was primed for a major shift.

That year, McDonald’s had given customers the option to have a salad instead of fries with their meals for the first time, even adding a baby kale and spinach blend to its menu. The “signs point to a sea change in consumer demands when it comes to fast food,” read one article in Civil Eats—and Amy’s’ founders, husband and wife team Andy and Rachel Berliner, were ready for it.

“We’ve just reached a tipping point in a whole new level of interest in eating better,” Andy Berliner told TIME. In July, they opened their first Amy’s Drive-Thru location in Rohnert Park, California, a small city north of San Francisco. From the start, they sought to do things differently. Workers made $12 an hour—at the time, well above the state minimum wage of $9 an hour, the standard pay for starting workers at most California fast food restaurants. The way Amy’s purchased ingredients for its all-vegetarian menu was different from the big fast food chains, as well: The restaurant’s suppliers were the same small and medium-scale organic farmers they worked with on the frozen food side of the business.

By 2021, Amy’s had opened two more drive-thru locations in Northern California, with plans to open 25 to 30 more in California, Oregon, and Colorado over the next five years. The idea was to show everyone from Wall Street to McDonald’s that organic, plant-based fast food could be profitable, and that people accustomed to eating mass-produced beef burgers would gladly eat an alternative made from fresh vegetables as long as it was convenient, tasty, and cost around the same price.

But then, last February, less than two years after announcing its expansion plans, Amy’s closed a store near Sacramento, then another near Los Angeles. Their entire drive-thru business seemed to be scaling back. To some, it seemed as though Amy’s’ grand ambitions for a more ethical fast food chain had been mislaid. This wasn’t exactly the case—but looking under the hood reveals some of the challenges that come with creating an industry more focused on the wellbeing of its employees and suppliers, instead of just perpetual growth.

Perched next to a freeway exit right alongside an In-N-Out and a Chik-fil-A, Amy’s’ flagship drive-thru in Rohnert Park looks a lot like its fast food peers, but with a few differences, like a plant-covered “living roof,” a water tower to collect rainwater, and a dining room and patio filled with recycled wood furniture. At 4,000 square feet, it’s a big restaurant, but even at three o’clock on a Thursday afternoon—typically one of the slowest hours of the week for any fast food joint—there were quite a few people dining in, and even more lined up in their cars outside to grab a bite from the drive-thru window.

“When we first opened, there were cars up the street,” Rachel Berliner told me as she and Amy’s president Paul Schiefer showed me around. The customers aren’t overflowing like they were on that first weekend, she explains, but there are plenty still coming in.

With her long white hair and grandmotherly demeanor, Berliner looks nothing like the typical fast food executive, for whom a family farm—let alone the farmers themselves—would be about as familiar as the surface of the moon. But over the last few decades, she’s grown used to standing out. When Rachel and her husband started Amy’s Kitchen in 1987, organic food wasn’t a consumer trend, much less a standard enshrined in federal law. But they believed access to it was important, and as certified organic food—meaning food grown without pesticides or genetically-modified seeds, among other criteria—boomed, the Northern California company spearheaded its entrance into grocery and convenience stores across the US with a line of vegetarian pizzas, burritos, and frozen entrees, now sold in nearly 50,000 stores in twelve countries.

After more than two decades in business, expanding into fast food wasn’t necessarily an obvious choice. But for the socially-minded pair, it made sense for the same reasons frozen food had years earlier: It was a way to bring the virtues of vegetarian organic food to the masses by giving it to them in a form that was familiar and accessible.

That sense of familiarity permeates throughout Amy’s’ flagship store. Inside the kitchen, flatscreen monitors list the current orders for staff, just like they would at any fast food restaurant. All the way in the back, there’s a walk-in freezer for storing patties and buns, made in the same factories where Amy’s makes its frozen foods. A long row of flat-top griddles churns out these “burger” patties, made from organic soy, bulgur wheat, oats, and a few kinds of vegetables, and “chik’n” patties, made mostly from soy. Salads are made to order. Whereas most fast food kitchens receive their lettuce prewashed and chopped, each of Amy’s’ now three drive-thru locations receives daily produce deliveries, complete with whole heads of lettuce, which staff tear and wash by hand each morning—a characteristically old-fashioned way of preparing food in an otherwise high-tech environment.

In an industry that’s constantly looking for ways to speed up service, and pushing staff to their limits in the process, Amy’s’ often low-tech but labor-intensive methods stand out. So does its commitment to paying staff above the industry standard: While a statewide boost to the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 an hour threw most fast food companies into a panic earlier this year, the move hardly affected Amy’s, which had been paying workers above minimum wage since its inception. (Better pay is also one reason why Amy’s says it retains employees at a higher rate than the industry at large.)

But what is most radical about Amy’s compared to its fast food peers is its model for sourcing raw materials. Instead of buying ingredients from the massive, intermediary corporations that dominate the food system in the way virtually any fast food company does today, it works directly with the farmers that have long supplied its frozen food business: For its burger alone, Amy’s says it sources ingredients from 30 farmers.

“We’re definitely deeply embedded in the small, mid-size farming network as a long-term partner,” Schiefer said on our kitchen tour. “A lot of these farms… want someone who’s stable and consistent and who will be there for each crop cycle.”

A supply network built on small-scale farmers is unique within the fast food industry today, but it’s not entirely without precedent. When it started in Southern California shortly after the Second World War, even McDonald’s sourced most of its beef from local ranchers. In the early 1950s, the company went as far as experimenting with raising cattle itself on a ranch in Grass Valley, California—a fact it proudly announced to customers.

By the 1960s, McDonald’s had locations all over the country and relied on a network of up to 200 different beef producers to supply them. But with the advent of cryogenic freezing technology at the end of the decade, the deliverable range of beef increased dramatically. Instead of buying from a network of small producers, McDonald’s went to a handful of big ones, like OSI, JBS, and Tyson Foods, to provide the vast majority of its beef, both in the US and around the world. Since they dominated the industry, these companies could keep their prices down, usually to the detriment of the ranchers who raised the cattle.

While different fast food companies have adopted their own tactics over the years, the biggest have all turned to the same playbook, pressuring suppliers to grow exponentially alongside them to keep costs down, or risk getting replaced. It’s an arrangement that’s given fast food companies massive influence over the food system. But some environmentalists have argued that such concentrated power isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to sustainability. Writing for Wired, Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg say a concerted effort by fast food companies to bring meat alternatives to the masses, for example, would lower the cost of fake meat and “propel research and development that could slash GHGs and improve [their] nutritional profile.”

“Unlike foodies’ delusional nostalgic agrarianism and unrealistic calls to ‘deindustrializ[e] and decentraliz[e] the American food system,’” the pair added, “pragmatism tells us that big problems demand big solutions.” (Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg will elaborate on that argument in an upcoming book, Feed the People!.)

As more people start to see their dietary choices as ethical ones, fast food companies, new and old, are already plotting ways to get just as big as the major chains, but with more “ethical” menu offerings. One newcomer is Kernel, a high-tech vegetarian chain launched in New York earlier this year by Steve Ells, the founder of Chipotle. Though not a vegetarian himself, Ells says he was inspired to scale vegetarian fast food after reading about the climate impact of animal agriculture. Itsu, a British chain serving Asian-esque food, is considerably older, having launched in 1997 by Pret a Manger founder Julian Metcalfe, but still dynamic. Once known for selling sushi to London office workers, as it started expanding outside the UK two years ago, the company shifted more of its menu over to vegetable dishes made with rice and noodles. Unusual for a chain that still sells a lot of sushi and poke, Itsu even banned yellowfin tuna from its menu entirely in 2022—a move Metcalfe called both “ethical and economical.”

While vegetarian menus have some inherent environmental and ethical benefits, many of the problems that have made the food system so ethically flawed in the first place are tied to its opacity rather than its choice of protein, and thus run deeper than menu changes can fix. When McDonald’s vowed to stop sourcing beef raised inside the Amazon biome in 1989, activists all over the world cheered the decision. More than three decades later, McDonald’s’ promise has proven more easily made than kept. In 2022, an investigation by Réporter Brasil and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that a McDonald’s supplier in Brazil had purchased cattle raised on land deforested just months before.

In a statement, McDonald’s said it disagreed with Réporter Brasil’s findings and that it was “focused on conserving forests and supporting the people and communities around the world who depend on them.” But as the original investigation found, “There are no comprehensive mechanisms in [McDonald’s] supply chain to track—from birth to slaughter—the origin of cattle arriving at slaughterhouses” and eventually going into their burgers. In other words, McDonald’s knows which suppliers it’s purchased its beef from, but not who raised the cows.

There is also no reason to believe a big move towards fake meat would make its ingredients’ origins any easier to account for: The grains and vegetables that go into popular meat alternatives, like Burger King’s Impossible Whopper, are just as untraceable as McDonald’s beef. Regardless of what it’s selling, the fast food industry’s interlocking system of suppliers is almost too large to manage or even monitor—much less reform.

Amy’s’ supply chains are, in some ways, more complicated than either McDonald’s or Burger King’s, but the complexity is a conscious choice. Since the company buys directly from farmers instead of on commodity markets, it knows exactly which farms supply the ingredients for everything it sells, both in the frozen aisle and at its drive-thrus. (Traceability is also one of the requirements of the federal organic certification which Amy’s adheres to.) Some of those relationships have persisted for more than a decade, Schiefer says, with suppliers that grew produce for Amy’s Kitchen's frozen foods fifteen or twenty years ago now growing food for Amy’s Drive-Thrus. Amy’s even dispatches representatives to visit its partner farms at various stages of the crop cycle, from planting until harvest, to check on their supplies.

In another contrast to the big fast food chains, Schiefer adds that Amy’s doesn’t pressure suppliers to scale alongside it. By continuously buying organic produce, he says, the idea is to encourage more farmers to grow organic food and join it as suppliers instead of pressuring existing suppliers to get bigger.

“It’s harder, but it’s also more rewarding,” Schiefer says. “It means getting involved with agronomy researchers and seed breeders, working in partnership with growers. You can’t think of it as a commodity business. When you accept that complexity, you find your way there.”

Of course, getting raw materials is only one part of the fast food business. Labor is another part, as is real estate.

This last part is one that Amy’s turned out to be less prepared for. After Rohnert Park took off, the company opened other locations that were equally sizable. Business was good, Schiefer says of the store near Sacramento, but not good enough to stay open.

“We had hoped that it would be just a big trending thing everywhere,” Rachel Berliner says after our tour. Instead, Amy’s learned that the appetite for organic, vegetarian fast food was stronger in some areas than others. In the short term, Schiefer says, future restaurants will be smaller, and the company will be more particular when choosing where to open new locations. Once they master their “core demographic,” he says, Amy’s will be ready to pursue a more ambitious expansion plan once again.

The company’s founders don’t seem to mind pressing pause. In fact, Rachel Berliner sees a parallel between the drive-thru business and the company’s early days. “We grew very slowly when we started Amy’s because there were no organic farms,” she says, recalling they had to turn customers away for lack of supply. With more successes, more farms started growing certified organic food, widening the base of suppliers without farmers having to scale relentlessly, as they would working for most processed food companies. Now that the drive-thru business is growing, Berliner says, they’re following their own model and adding new stores gradually, paying workers a decent wage and maintaining their rigorous standards as they get bigger.

The difference is now there are plenty of farms to supply them.

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July 18, 2024August 28, 2024

Is An Ethical Fast Food Chain Possible?

by Alex Park

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5693 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2023-03-20 17:53:11 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-03-20 17:53:11 [post_content] =>

How my culture's food brought me closer to myself.

“That’s the whitest pronunciation I’ve ever heard before.” My friend, Kian, stood to my left, joking or maybe humiliated, while a smiling Persian kid spooned a scoop of faloodeh and a scoop of pink rose ice cream into a cup, passing it to me over the register at Saffron & Rose.

“Fuh-LOO-duh,” Kian mimicked.

“You know I don’t speak Farsi,” I laughed, joking but actually humiliated. The kid handed a cup of Saffron Pistachio, described as a “love potion of Middle Eastern flavor,” to Kian. As we walked out, it occurred to me that while everyone in the shop had been Iranian, myself included, I had still been the other. I couldn’t even pronounce what was allegedly the first frozen dessert in the history of mankind, a delicious ancestral treat of paper-thin rice noodles and chilled rosewater sorbet. But I could learn, right? It was in my blood.

“Ok… so, how do you pronounce it?” I asked.

“FAH-loo-deh.”

FAH-loo-deh. Got it. I practiced a few times — and fucked up a few times — as I inhaled my pink rose ice cream and FAH-loo-deh. Being cultureless is so embarrassing sometimes. I promised myself the next time I ordered it, I’d be able to pronounce it, too.

I’m convinced I’m on this earth to eat. While adulthood has insurmountably jaded me, food is the one thing I still have child-like adulation for. I spend nearly a third of my waking life debating what to cook next, the ingredients I’ll experiment with, and which new restaurant I’ll make a sweaty, 40-minute, gridlocked-Los-Angeles-traffic drive for. I’m a proud member of probably 30 recipe subreddits. On TikTok, I’ve strategically lassoed my algorithm into serving me solely food-related content where I watch people cook with pride and eat with joy, just like I do. All Day Long I Dream About Food.

But as a half-Iranian raised by two white parents, I grew up more on hot dogs, steamed veggies, and the occasional Pennsylvania Dutch indulgence—like apple dumplings, or pork chops with sauerkraut—than anything with even a remote nod toward my Middle Eastern heritage. For a long time, I honestly didn’t even know what Middle Eastern food was.

Growing up, I never wanted to disappoint the people who raised me with excitement for something they weren’t or couldn’t understand. But naturally, I never felt my parents understood me, either. I was an insecure, unibrowed, deeply tan, and raccoon-eyed kid supremely confused about her identity. I’d stare at maps and wonder what it meant to be from “I-Ran,” as my folks and other Pennsylvanians pronounced it. Was I Asian? I wasn’t fully white. Was I Arab? Kids at school told me I was. Was any of this the reason why my hair was so thick and my eyebrows so nauseatingly connected? I liked to think I looked like Princess Jasmine with a plait down my back, but her legs weren’t nearly as hairy as mine were at eight years old. I couldn’t ask my parents questions, either, so if someone said “what are you?” and then looked at me funny when I replied “Iranian,” I’d quickly correct myself and say that actually, I was German. It was technically true, on my mom’s side. And the Pennsylvania Dutch are, after all, also German. So for me to be singularly German was easier for everybody.

While it took me much less time to admit I was also definitively Iranian, it took me nearly 30 years to explore Persian food. In a way, I was scared of what I’d find, or how much I’d enjoy it. I’d always wondered what I’d been fed during the months I’d spent in Iran as a baby. If I tried those foods again, would some small part of my soul recognize the flavor; the texture; the feeling it invoked? Would it trigger something inexplicable in me, good or bad? Would it just make sense? Would I finally become Persian?

When I first sought it out, I found Iranians are happy to share their culture of food with you, and through it, their love. They’ll also readily accept you as their brother or sister even when you know nothing about it. If you’re Persian—even half, like me—you’re unequivocally part of the tribe, fused by some ancestral chemistry and recognition I can’t quite explain. It’s like we’re all aware of the possibility we’ve known each other in previous lives and in previous, ancient lands. There within lies some familial bond.

“I don’t really know much about Iranian food,” I told my friend Nilu, who was visiting from London, over a lunch of raw onions, Persian naan, beef koobideh, and chicken kabob at Glendale’s Shamshiri Grill. It was still early in my cultural food odyssey, and we were celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which marks the beginning of spring equinox and the start of Farvardin, the first month of the ancient Solar Hijri calendar. Despite knowing nothing about it at the time, I’d already been kindly greeted with “Norooz pirooz!” and “Nowruz Mobarak!” (both roughly translate to “Happy New Year”) by several Persian friends that morning, simply for existing and being Iranian. I did not feel like I deserved it.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re Persian, and it’s Persian New Year. That’s why we’re here!” Nilu said, having admonished me just moments ago for not knowing Iranians eat plain, raw white onions the way some people might bite into an orange. “NOW TRY MY CHICKEN!” She’d ordered chicken marinated in saffron and yogurt over saffron rice with green veggies. I eyed it suspiciously.

I knew to “become Persian” I’d have to get over my immense dislike for chicken. My mom, god bless her, fed me and my family boneless, lightly seasoned, baked chicken breasts with steamed veggies several nights a week, though in my memory, it felt like every night. Pair that with a nightmare I had in college where I bit down on a chicken nugget filled with human teeth, and you’ll find chicken and I don’t have the best relationship.

I begrudgingly forked the chicken up with some rice and bit into it like a child taking a bite of asparagus. Hm, I thought, chicken’s not half bad when it’s seasoned properly. Maybe the onions would grow on me, too.

The next step in my journey was cooking a fully Iranian meal. Even though I cooked all the time, this was uncharted territory; and while I could do it myself, I knew who to call to help. My friend Jasmine (Yasi) had lived in Tehran until she was seven, and, unbeknownst to her, had given me the kindest gift a few years prior: She’d taken me to my first ever Iranian restaurant, Café Glacé, a Persian pizza spot in Westwood. There, I’d eaten a popular Iranian street food for the first time: pizza with thick bread, minced meat, loads of cheese, and no tomato sauce. Delicious. Chef’s kiss. Five stars. The stomach ache I had afterward was worth it.

Yasi had also recently given me a handful of Persian fruit leather and candies from Tehran that I think may have caused my entire awakening. So when it came time to actually try cooking something, I asked her if she wanted to make her favorite childhood meal with me, her mom’s Iranian macaroni, or spaghetti tahdig, an upside-down cake of thick noodles with tomato sauce and ground beef, seasoned with traditional Persian spices like turmeric, cumin, and cinnamon. I knew Yasi had the recipe because her mom had recorded a video of herself making it for her at the beginning of the pandemic.

“Duh,” she replied.

We dumped a can of Carbone pasta sauce into a Dutch oven already simmering with diced onions and minced garlic. After adding spices, we broke up a pound of ground beef into the sauce and let it simmer for 45 minutes, boiling bucatini in a pot for the last 15. We then filled the empty Carbone jar with boiling pasta water and dumped it into our sauce. I felt like a kid watching Yasi prepare our dinner. She was Mother at that moment, telling me how to break up the ground beef or stir the bucatini, and how much seasoning to add into the sauce. More turmeric, less cinnamon. Okay, even more turmeric.

I stirred both the sauce and the noodles individually, and watched the water evaporate along with many of my cultural anxieties. I am Iranian. It wasn’t my choice to grow up without any of the culture, and it’s fine that I was just now learning about it. I was done feeling embarrassed at my lack of knowledge. It’s not like the Persians in my life hadn’t been patient, kind, and generous with theirs.

After seasoning the sauce generously with cinnamon one more time and draining the pasta, it was time to form it into a traditional tahdig, which literally translates to “bottom of the pot” in Farsi. The point is to create a hard shell of pasta on the bottom that becomes a crispy crown once you turn it over and onto a plate. Yasi drizzled some olive oil on the bottom of the saucepan and started layering the bucatini as I heaped spoonfuls of our sauce over it. Once the pasta crisped up, we awkwardly placed a plate over the saucepan and used all four of our hands to topple it over. We ate it on her back porch with olives. She snapped a photo for her parents and I snapped one for myself.

My appreciation for this food is now indelible. Saffron has become a pantry staple and rosewater pistachio ice cream can always be found in my freezer. I intend to try a new Persian meal each month until the words, flavor combinations, and textures become second nature — this month, it was Albaloo polo: rice and sour cherries. Maybe by next year I’ll have developed an affinity for raw onions. Or maybe just a tolerance.

I live in Los Angeles, cheekily dubbed Tehrangeles, as it actually has the largest Iranian population outside of Iran. I’m in no better place to “become” Persian, because I’m in no better place to eat my way there. The beauty of food being at the center of culture is that food is a language everybody understands and, thus, can bring everybody together. When you’re breaking bread, you don’t have to speak. You all know what you’re tasting. And — outside of the idiom — I don’t need to “become” Persian. I am as Persian as my Safavid era ancestors who cut pomegranates from their trees and scooped sweet-and-sour stews up with their hands. But you can only be so close to a culture without knowing its food. Food is the dock in a harbor that guides your boat in and grounds it back to the earth. It’s a holy connector. It unifies and reunifies and is one of the only things everyone needs and enjoys. It’s home.

Now that I’ve learned them, Iranian flavors feel almost inherent to my palate. Some, in fact, taste so familiar I wonder if, as a tot, I’d ever been given a spoonful of ghormeh sabzi, Iran’s national dish of meat and kidney bean stew loaded with herbs and dried limes, or a spoonful of rosewater ice cream, which has been one of my favorites since I tried it for the first time as a teenager. Maybe I’d even had a taste of FUH-loo-deh as a baby. I know someday my children will. And I know I’ll be able to pronounce it then, too.

[post_title] => Becoming Persian [post_excerpt] => How my culture's food brought me closer to myself. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => persian-iranian-food-culture-identity [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5693 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 20, 2023August 28, 2024

Becoming Persian

by Helen Donahue

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How McDonald's, KFC, and other American eateries spread around the world.

Even before the war, Aban Pestonjee’s business was doing rather well.

In the 1970s, Swedish and American home appliances were the kind of thing that lots of people in Sri Lanka wanted, but hardly anyone knew how to get. In response to a series of economic shocks, the government largely barred imports, including luxury goods like washing machines and dryers. But Pestonjee had an idea. She bought used appliances at embassy auctions and sold them at a markup out of a corner shop in the capital city, Colombo. Even with the economy largely restricted, business was good on the Indian Ocean island. But when Sri Lanka descended into civil war in the 1980s, it exploded.

Pestonjee started importing appliances from Korea and offering environmental cleanup services. Later, she expanded into tourism and property. Her three children joined the business, making her family a dynasty and her company, the Abans Group, one of the most powerful in Sri Lanka. In 1998, with the war mostly relegated to the north and east of the country, Colombo slipped into an eerie calm, and at the urging of one of her sons, Pestonjee made her biggest move yet.

She opened the first McDonald’s in Sri Lanka.

It’s easy to forget when looking at it through the nostalgic lens that often filters our view of the era, but American fast food was also born in the aftermath of war. When Richard and Maurice McDonald built their namesake restaurant chain in the Southern California desert in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the area was the frontline of a profound economic disruption. The industrial economy that had ended the Great Depression and closed out the Second World War had turned inwards, building prefabricated homes and four-door sedans instead of tanks and planes. In short order, this inverted war economy had also transformed American agriculture: When chemical manufacturers stopped making munitions and started making fertilizer, they supercharged corn production, setting off a livestock explosion which has never abated. As a business that sold meat to car-bound customers in new suburbs, McDonald’s and the industry it launched were ideally positioned to get ahead in an era of chaos.

As the same systems which made it thrive in the United States spread internationally, fast food rushed headlong for the rest of the world. In 1996, the New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman argued the industry’s global nature pointed to a deeper trend about the state of the world. As he summarized it, “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.” Friedman said his idea was “tongue in cheek,” and as a hard-and-fast rule, it was always a little shaky, before coming apart entirely with Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. But as an observation about the conditions necessary for capitalism, not an axiom of world affairs, Friedman’s “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” pointed to a real correlation between a nation’s international fast food offerings and its stability. If a country was at peace (at least in its urban centers, like Colombo in the late 1990s), was prosperous enough to sustain a consumer class, and was integrated with the world economy, it was likely ready to host a McDonald’s or some other global fast food chain. Seen the other way around, fast food was evidence of a country’s stability.

The last few years have made that observation especially relevant, as the global fast food boom has reached countries which were at war in living memory. You can find Burger King in Côte d’Ivoire, Dairy Queen in Cambodia, and KFC in Sudan, a country that was heavily sanctioned as recently as 2017 for committing acts of genocide in Darfur. In these and other nations, fast food’s arrival is nothing if not an indication of peace and a rejoining of the international order.

Yet even as fast food continues to evidence stability, its global expansion has depended on entrepreneurs—like Aban Pestonjee—who sharpened their business acumen in chaotic times, including times of war and occupation.

If you know much about the business of fast food, you’ve likely heard about the franchise system. Since McDonald’s’ early days in the Southern California desert, fast food has depended on independent businesses and entrepreneurs, or “franchisees,” to buy into their system. For a fee and a cut of the revenues, a fast food company (i.e., McDonald’s Corporation, or CKE Restaurants, owners of the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s brands) gives the franchisee a regional monopoly, allowing them to use its likeness and adopt its methods of doing business. In the industry’s early days in the 1950s and 1960s, franchising allowed fast food companies to expand wildly across the United States on the backs of countless smaller, independent businesses—all with only marginal investments of their own capital. As they’ve plotted expansions around the world, fast food companies have found additional benefits to franchisees, as these local entrepreneurs typically bring local contacts and knowledge to the endeavor which their corporate overlords generally lack.

As an entrepreneur who made her fortune in war, Pestonjee was perfectly suited for the role. She had grown up as a child of an immigrant family and a member of Sri Lanka’s tiny Parsi community. In a war that pitted the nation’s two biggest ethnic groups against each other, she was an outsider. Conflict was little more than minor disruption and background noise as she grew her business.

“You get used to it,” she told a researcher many years after her business first took off. “Knowing that one bomb has gone off here, then everything goes down, business gets slack for a month or two, people forget it and then again it starts.”

Den Fujita, the Japanese entrepreneur who brought McDonald’s to Japan, similarly navigated a messy period in history to amass a fortune. Fujita’s father was an engineer for a British company, and he had picked up some English at home. He studied English in high school, and, at the end of the Second World War, with much of the country leveled and his father and two sisters having been killed in American bombing raids, Fujita left home to translate for the former enemy at the seat of their occupation, the General Headquarters, or GHQ, in Tokyo.

Soon after, Fujita started an importation company. It was a simple business model: He figured out what the American occupiers wanted, and then he figured out how to get it to them. As the Americans left, he expanded his business, importing luxury goods for the Japanese themselves. When McDonald’s first began laying plans for an overseas expansion two decades later, Japan looked difficult, if not impossible, to enter. The bureaucracy was dense, the culture was perplexing. But Fujita was the perfect partner in a country fraught with risk—a bridge between those American corporate executives and the Japanese people, whom they knew nothing about. In 1971, his company, Fujita & Co, became McDonald’s’ first franchisee in Japan. Before long, its first location, in the Ginza district in Tokyo, became the world’s busiest McDonald’s.

There are stories in the rubble of every conflict of shrewd entrepreneurs building a fortune as the nation rebuilds itself. In the early 1990s, as Cambodia recovered from years under Khmer Rouge rule, a refugee named Kith Meng returned from his adopted Australia to take the reins at his family’s company and tap some of the billions of dollars in international aid then flowing into the country. Kith’s Royal Group became a source of basic provisions for UNTAC, the United Nations’ body managing Cambodia while the national government assembled itself. Crucially, for the sprawling, multilingual force inundated with paperwork, Royal also imported copy machines.

As UNTAC packed its bags and left in 1993, Royal invested in a slew of other money-making ventures, some of which, such as a cellular network, a bank, and some TV stations, proved useful to a country getting on its feet, and some of which, such as a casino and a lottery, mostly served to line the budding tycoon’s pockets. Meng’s many ventures put him at the center of a vast network of his own creation, making him an ideal middleman for foreign companies looking to break into Cambodia. In the early 2000s, one of those companies was a Malaysian KFC franchisee. Soon after, Royal founded a separate company with it to bring KFC to Cambodia. The first location opened in 2008.

So, what does war have to do with running an international fast food chain? No matter when or where they take place, wars are times of creation as much as they are times of destruction. When war-ravaged people find that the commercial networks which once supported their purchasing habits have collapsed—because of sanctions, a shifting frontline, or because a manufacturing base was obliterated the night before—their usual consumer preferences evaporate. They don’t care who they bought from in the past. They’ll just go to whoever can navigate the tumult to deliver the goods, now.

When opening in developing countries, fast food’s corporate giants are similarly lackadaisical, if only because they have to be. In countries where industrial-scale beef and poultry production (let alone french fry-ready potatoes) don’t exist, they can’t work within existing systems to meet them, even if they would prefer to. Instead, they have to build new systems, and to do that, they need locals who understand these places intimately. Often, entrepreneurs who cut their teeth in war have exactly the skills they’re looking for.

War has another effect: It reveals the artificiality of old social hierarchies. Meng, Pestonjee, and Fujita were all ambitious and hungry for opportunity. But they were also outsiders—Pestonjee because she was a Parsi; Fujita, because his mother was a Christian and the Japanese he spoke was actually a dialect of his native Osaka; Meng, because he had spent most of his youth abroad. In an era of peace and stability, determination might have only led to modest success. But the social-leveling effects of war and occupation offered chances that would have never existed otherwise.

It’s fitting, then, that after the bombs and gunfire went quiet in their countries, all three would gravitate to fast food. Even though they promote their goods as luxuries in developing countries, fast food brands still retain the welcoming spirit of undiscerning capitalists wherever they operate. Through their doors, the old hierarchies have no place. Everyone is welcome, just as long as they have the money to pay.

Additional fact checking by Apoorva Tadepalli.

[post_title] => The Wartime Roots of the Global Fast Food Boom [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => the-wartime-roots-of-fast-food [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=4783 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 1, 2022August 28, 2024

The Wartime Roots of the Global Fast Food Boom

by Alex Park

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[post_content] => In northern British Columbia, a female chef draws on her native heritage and introduces diners to local, pre-European cuisine.

Generations ago, Indigenous communities living in harsh environments found comfort and sustenance in a basic bread recipe.

For many remote First Nations communities throughout North America, flour wasn’t available, so bread was made with ground-up roots, bear fat and berries to sweeten, it was then cooked in an open fire or wrapped around a stick to bake.

This bread, called bannock, changed over the years incorporating ingredients like flour, fat, and sugar that were rationed to people after the government forcibly removed them from their land. It was then fried and became an important staple at powwows. Indigenous people took the scraps of oppression and made something delicious with it.

Powwows are a meeting, a chance for Indigenous people to get together and showcase dancing, singing, artisan creations and spend time in cultural appreciation and celebration. They have also served as an act of powerful resistance against continuous attempts to destroy, legislate and remove Indigenous culture. They are a demonstration of pride.

Sharon Bond, who is from the Nooaitch Indian Band in Merritt, British Columbia, has made her “bannock and butter” from bringing this ancient food to modern diners and the public can’t get enough.

“Bannock was a survival bread that really brought communities together through celebrations and gatherings. And it was one of the roots of keeping people alive,” she says.

Bond owns Kekuli Cafe, which has become the first Indigenous-owned restaurant franchise in Canada. With two locations and a third set to open in the near future, Bond’s long-held desire to run her own restaurant has come to fruition. But it doesn’t stop there; by offering franchising opportunities, Bond is helping to empower another generation of Indigenous entrepreneurs to taste success with bannock too.

“Indigenous youth can be supported from the time they are in high school. We need to bring entrepreneurs and business people into schools to teach and inspire youth, to bring out their ideas and to be creative and know that they can make their dream into a business. Mentors are needed,” she says.

She herself guides and empowers youth and aspiring business owners through an initiative called Futurpreneur and through monthly Indigenous Women Networking Sessions. She also sees mentorship as a cycle and continues to benefit from her own mentor, a successful restaurant owner, who she can talk to about any industry-specific questions she may have.

Her journey to becoming a restaurant owner was a long process, in part because she wanted the endeavor to be a success and took her time to design a winning product.

“It took a few years to do the business plan, we took our time to make sure that everything was going to be just right, the colors, the logo, the slogan. We just wanted to have a very strong business. It took time to get to that point and then when we finally opened our doors people thought we were a franchise which was pretty cool. So, I said, Well, we're not, but we will be now!”

One of the decisions she grappled with was the name for the cafe, she eventually found the word “Kekuli” in a book by James Teit, a Scottish anthropologist who wrote extensively about the people of the Interior Salish First Nations.

It’s the name for a winter dwelling, found across the Okanagan region, a house built into the ground to provide shelter and warmth. Pronounced ke-koo-lee, it seemed like the perfect moniker for the type of space she wanted to create, she registered the business name the very same day.

Even though the process of launching the business was a slow burn, Bond has been interested in cooking since she was a child, when she was making a mess in her mom’s kitchen and watching her bake cinnamon buns and bread. She remembers enjoying the smell of spices and recently found an old recipe book with a missing cover, the pages of which were decorated with her childish doodles and colorings.

One of her mom’s regular recipes was chili, which also features on Kekuli Cafe’s menu, although Bond says its quite a different recipe. A staple offered at powwows; chili is traditionally served atop a piece of bannock to catch all of the meaty juices.

Bread forms a part of almost every human culinary culture across the globe and Bond has often been told that her bannock reminds customers of other fry bread that they remember from their childhood, whether that was in China, Scotland or anywhere else across the world.

Different Indigenous communities across North America make their bannock to their own unique recipes, in fact, at Kekuli they have their own ancient and secret recipe.

Bannock fans will find that the familiar frybread taste replicated perfectly at Kekuli Cafe with regulars often praising the softness of the bannock. But you can also find a number of innovative menu items like dessert topped bannocks, BLTs and bannock-wich sandwiches.

“Time has evolved so now we've got flour and oil and cast iron pans and fryers. It’s bannock with a twist, you know a little bit more contemporary bannock,” she says.

That contemporary bannock topped with sweet treats remains very popular but the traditional bannock is favored by purists as are some of the sweet yet naturally Canadian flavors from the land like Saskatoon Berry, Maple Glaze, and Maple Walnut.

The restaurant’s slogan “Don’t Panic... We Have Bannock!” came about from one of the first customers who ran up to the counter worried that they may have sold out. Sharon reassured them by stating the now-famous line and they all broke into laughter.

Bond is an incredibly warm person who makes people feel at ease, no doubt due to her genuine care and concern for how others are feeling. One of the philosophies that Kekuli Cafe is built upon is that all her customers should feel acknowledged when they arrive.

“I wanted to open a restaurant for 20 years and I always thought ‘Oh I'm going to do this with my restaurant,’ I'm going to make sure everyone smiles and is acknowledged, you're not just someone who comes in and orders and sits down and that's it. You know, I engage with all my customers and I really felt that there wasn't enough compassion or empathy, it's important to make someone's day,” she says.

Bond is also humble and credits her success to the whole team. In fact, she was recently awarded the Indigenous Woman-Business Award of Excellence from The National Aboriginal Capital Corporation but was almost too shy to tell me. She admitted that she sometimes finds it difficult to enjoy her success without feeling like she’s bragging.

Where she excels, however, is in empowering other women to proudly and confidently promote themselves. A culture she is trying to develop in her local community through her Indigenous Women Networking Sessions.

“I can see it becoming a very important networking group. I've been to other networking groups for women and sometimes I just feel out of place, it doesn't seem to be me, I'm not a high heel wearing type person and everyone's all decked right out and I am more of a Doc Martens person!” she says.

Through mentorship, encouragement, and plenty of bannock, Bond is building a culture of shared success.
[post_title] => In Canada, a female Indigenous chef popularizes local, pre-European cuisine
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April 10, 2020August 28, 2024

In Canada, a female Indigenous chef popularizes local, pre-European cuisine

by Fiona Tapp

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[post_content] => With environmentally conscious, humane butchery, Hannah Miller stakes a position between factory farming and veganism.

Picture a butcher and what do you see?

Perhaps a burly mustachioed man swinging a meat cleaver into a carcass. Hacking away, smeared in blood, working in a quick and inelegant fashion. Heaving body parts up onto his thick shoulder and then slamming them down onto a cutting table.

That out of date image persists but at a New Zealand company, aptly named “A Lady Butcher,” owner Hannah Miller does things quite differently. First of all, there’s no music blaring and no loud power tools or machinery running. In fact, it’s rather quiet—Zen-like, even.

Miller, originally from Portland, Oregon, practices a type of butchery called seam cutting. It’s careful, precise work where every part of the animal is used. Miller describes this nose to tail work as “mindful” and finds it peaceful.

“When it's just you and a knife you have to pay attention to what you're doing. The seams and the muscles tell you what to do, it's very obvious where to cut. You can't be joking around and having a laugh and singing to music because you'll miss it, you'll miss the intricacies and the detail of that style of butchery, it's that mindful practice, I call it the Zen of butchery,” she says.

Before learning to butcher in London, Miller was a culinary student in New York. After a lecture delivered by world-famous chefs Anthony Bourdain and Fergus Henderson, she was inspired to make the move to the United Kingdom and found that butchery and cooking go hand in hand.

“They're completely intertwined, I don't think you can have one without the other,” she says.

The more butchers understand about the restaurant industry the better they can respond to operational matters like creating workarounds to offer little-used cuts of meat to prevent waste. For instance, when a trend for lamb rumps meant that restaurants might require dozens of lambs a week but were only using one part of the animal for their signature dish.

Practically sharing information and skills also means that butchers can better educate customers on the cuts of meat they need to create the recipe they have in mind. Miller says she would challenge butchers to go home and cook a particular cut and then have them share their experience with the crew the next day.

Before settling in New Zealand, Miller had traveled all over the world always finding that butchers were in short supply. When she landed in New Zealand at dawn, she had her first interview and had secured a job by lunchtime.

Despite New Zealand traditionally having a meat-heavy diet, with dinner often called “meat and three veg,” Miller was surprised to discover that the majority of cured meats in New Zealand were imported.

A Lady Butcher began to provide homegrown Pancetta, Prosciutto, and Bresaola using grass-fed lamb, local free-range pork, and wagyu, from First Light Farms.

Sharing meat education continues to be one of the most important parts of Miller’s business philosophy. She gives workshops to chefs in restaurants in Auckland, teaching them how to prepare different cuts to serve in order to use the animal economically. This is a better way for the restaurant to maximize profits and introduce customers to new cuts, but it also serves to reinforce her commitment to less wasteful meat production.

“We've chosen to take an animal for our own nourishment, so absolutely nothing can go to waste. I make sure the bones are perfectly clean, that everything's trimmed properly, part of the whole process is being in the moment, but also ultimately it's about respecting the animal,” she says.

She has also spread that message of education by offering workshops to chefs and in April when her new restaurant, Churly’s Brew Pub & Eatery, opens members of the public will be able to sign up for butchery classes too. This new venture will be a leader in nose to tail restaurants, changing the menu up regularly, sometimes even during service, to ensure all meat cuts are utilized and that nothing goes to waste.

From a 90-kilo animal, Miller says only about 150g should be thrown away. But she says to do this you really need to focus. “You can use absolutely everything, but you need to pay attention. When I teach butchery, I set out the rules and, safety is first, second is nothing, absolutely nothing goes in the bin unless I put it there.”

She says that the skill of the butcher determines much of the waste. Trimming fat from muscles meticulously results in a much higher yield of usable meat. She then renders down all the fat and bones for broths and even dehydrates sinew to make dog treats. Lately, she has also been giving away bones and skulls for people to decorate.

Her message of sustainability may at first glance seem to be at odds with her job. After all, veganism is often touted as the cure for much of the earth’s problems. I asked her if she ever thinks about the impact of meat production on the planet and she said it’s something that she considers daily.

“It's not really so much about eating meat or not eating meat, it's about eating local, and seasonally. You don't need to eat a tomato in December, if you live in the northern hemisphere,” she says.

Her remedy is that we all need to eat better quality meat from farmers that we know and trust, returning to a time before supermarkets and discount stores disrupted the relationship consumers had with the people who produced their food.

“Eat meat, but eat less of it, eat a better-quality meat. My husband and I eat meat most days. This week we had beautiful sausages, on the barbecue, I know the farm it came from and we had one sausage and then the rest of the plate was full of cauliflower salad and beautiful guac because right now we have tons of avocados. We should first be eating local, and secondly, eating better but less.”

Developing a relationship with your local farm is an important step in becoming a more conscious food consumer, as I discovered when I first met Miller at the Taurapa Station in Napier, on New Zealand’s North Island. She gave a butchery demonstration using lamb from Atkins Ranch, who raise 100 percent grass-fed animals that wander and graze over beautiful pasture lands; it’s about as idyllic as farming can be.

In that way, New Zealand which is often described as 18 hours ahead and 20 years behind the rest of the world, really is a pioneer. Miller explained to me that the resurgence of interest in local foods and the proliferation of trendy farmers’ markets seen in the United States has always been part of the food culture in New Zealand.

Sustainability goes further for Miller though, it’s an entire way of life where she aims for balance. “We say regeneration instead of sustainability. Because regeneration is the idea of giving back. So, you're not just taking you actually make sure that this circle is completed. Think about it as a circle, instead of an A-Z,” she says.

Miller knows her customers care about where their meat comes from and how it was raised. At her new restaurant and pub, Churly’s, opening in Auckland, she’ll continue this education.

The restaurant takes its name from a popular kiwi expression. “Chur” can mean thank you, cool, OK, and a range of other expressions. It’s also the name of the mascot at her husband, Andrew Child’s, brewery Behemoth Brewing Company, which is a big part of the new brand.

To help with her increased workload, Miller has just taken on an assistant, another lady butcher, who sent her a message on Instagram asking to be mentored.

“I love that the people approaching me to come work for me and to learn and to invest their time are women. These women that I’ve worked with have said how empowered they feel, they're just so excited and they have that feeling that they can take on the world and it just fills me with so much pride. I will definitely teach anyone and have a great time with it but there's something special about being a lady butcher,” she says.

[post_title] => Nose to tail with a lady butcher
[post_excerpt] => For those who avoid meat because they don't wish to participate in cruel factory farming methods, New Zealand butcher Hannah Miller offers a different approach.
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March 13, 2020August 28, 2024

Nose to tail with a lady butcher

by Fiona Tapp

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[post_content] => Celebrity chefs and food manufacturers are setting an example for us all in reimagining and repurposing discarded food

When I first began to cook, learning to discriminate between what I could and could not eat was essential to understanding my way around the kitchen. Dark green tops of leeks, for instance, are considered waste. Radish roots are for salad, but the greens are usually discarded. As a cook and an avid eater, I generated a significant amount of unused vegetable matter. Eventually, I began composting those food scraps. But what if those radish greens and leek tops had value? What if they were not considered waste?

Unused food product has become a major environmental issue. One third of the food produced globally goes to waste every year, along with all the resources spent on its production, even as 1 billion people around the world starve. Meanwhile, the methane produced by food discarded in landfills contributes 8% of greenhouse gases that are rapidly warming our planet to dangerous levels.

When restaurants, food manufacturers, and caterers break down raw ingredients, peel vegetables, and trim cuts of meat, they generate enormous quantities of scraps. Supermarkets, meanwhile, throw away produce just slightly past its aesthetic prime, sending wilted lettuce and imperfect-looking bananas to the landfills.

In 2016 ReFED, a U.S. non-profit consortium that is committed to reducing food waste, produced a report called “Rethinking Food Waste through Economics and Data: A Roadmap to Reduce Food Waste." Among their findings: in the United States, $218 billion is spent each year just to grow, process, distribute, and then dispose of food that nobody ate. Landfills receive 52.4 million tons of food in a year. Restaurants in the United States alone produce 11.4 million tons of food waste annually, worth about $25 billion. The quantity of waste is mind-bending.
Problem of perception
Now some celebrity chefs are setting an example for us all in reducing waste with creative methods. Massimo Bottura, owner of the Michelin three-star Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, is a famous advocate of using discarded food scraps rather than throwing them away. In his cookbook Bread Is Gold, published in 2015, he provides recipes that reclaim unused food items, including one for chutney made from banana peels.

Plenty of foods considered inedible in some cultures are part of the diet in others. Koreans, for example, make a tea from corn silk. Many chefs today appreciate the woody flavor corn husks add to broths. The green tops of leeks can be used for soups, and radish greens add a peppery bite to salads.

“Waste,” says Chef Douglas McMaster of Silo, the U.K.’s first zero waste restaurant, “is a failure of the imagination.”

Waste is also a byproduct of affluence and privilege. I often think about the disconnect between my grandmother’s kitchen sense and my mother’s: My grandmother survived the Second World War with her family in Siberia, where food was scarce and hunger widespread. When she speaks of that period, she often recounts digging in the ground to find discarded potato peels, which for her were a nutrient-rich food. When I was growing up in suburban New Jersey during the 1980s and ‘90s, we never thought twice about discarding our potato peels — or most food, for that matter.
Converting organic waste into soil
Composting — the process of converting organic materials into densely nutrient-rich topsoil — is a commonly practiced solution to food waste. San Francisco is one of several American cities that has established a municipal program to collect and treat organic waste. New York City currently requires commercial kitchens to dispose of organic matter in separate bins.

Huge digesters, essentially in-house machine-operated composters that convert food scraps into soil using special enzymes, help offset the volume of waste generated by large food establishments that would otherwise be hauled away and processed off premises.

To be sure, alleviating the burden on landfills and turning organic matter into soil is an incredibly important solution for cities and companies to pursue. But, as many food waste entrepreneurs are realizing, a better solution is to limit the creation of waste in the first place and compost only what is truly inedible. In the case of commercial composting, hauling tons of food scraps in tractor-trailers across state lines to commercial facilities (sometimes great distances) and operating fossil fuel-powered machinery to process waste expends energy and places carbon in the atmosphere. Profit is another incentive: according to a recent report, restaurants save seven dollars for every dollar invested in methods to limit food waste.
Turning liabilities into assets
By rethinking how we cook and what we consume, we can create innovative solutions that bring huge ecological and social benefits. Some new food companies have already implemented systems to prevent nutrient-rich foods from being thrown away.

Take, for example, the case of acidic whey. A byproduct of Greek-style strained yogurt, it cannot legally be disposed of by throwing it down the drain or into natural waterways, because it sucks up the oxygen in water and destroys aquatic life. The whey is, however, tangy, probiotic, and nutrient-rich. And so large yogurt-manufacturing companies like Chobani pay to have it transported in bulk to farmers, who feed it to their animals.

Homa Dashtaki, the owner of White Moustache, a Brooklyn-based artisanal yogurt brand, calls whey, which is full of vitamins but contains no calories or fat, a “golden elixir.” She has begun supplying restaurants with whey for their own experiments, like specialty cocktails, but still has a significant quantity left over. Rather than pay someone to haul it away, Dashtaki created innovative products, like a probiotic tonic made of flavored whey, and a probiotic popsicle infused with fresh fruit.

On a much larger scale, the New York-based specialty foods distributor Baldor has pursued a zero waste strategy by creating an entirely new business ecosystem. Thomas McQuillan, the company’s vice president of strategy, culture, and sustainability, understands the value of carrot peels. “Food product has to be consumed by human beings, it has to be consumed by animals or it has to be turned into energy or compost,” he said recently, while giving a lecture at New York’s Food Waste Fair. He added that food “should never go to landfills.”

In 2016, Baldor set into a motion a program called SparCs (scraps spelled backwards) to eliminate food waste from their fresh produce processing facility. It takes the150,000 pounds of fruit and vegetable by-product it generates each week and turns it over to animal or human consumption. Baldor partners with chefs to create baked goods, broths, juices, and sauces with these scraps, and with farmers who use them for feed. Since its inception, the program has diverted 6,000 tons of produce from landfill. Baldor has thus not only generated new revenue streams, but also reduced its waste haul by 73%. It is now a zero organic waste company.
A new consciousness
While not every food service company can afford to rethink its business model, companies with the resources to do so must take the lead. This is the only way to create a cultural shift that will set the standard for small food businesses.

When companies like Baldor and White Moustache notice inefficiencies in the existing structures and begin looking for creative and environmentally sustainable solutions, they change how we as a culture understand the value of food. By strategically intervening and reframing the idea of waste while reasserting the value of the whole vegetable, for instance, we not only limit food waste, but we also ease the burden on our environment and maximize the nutrition of food to reach more people.

These ideas and policies can affect how we all cook and eat in our own homes, so that we create a more sustainable and innovative food culture. We already have the capacity to feed the entire world. Reframing waste as food is the first step toward ensuring a more just and sustainable food system.
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June 7, 2019August 28, 2024

We would have enough food to feed the planet if we stopped wasting so much of it

by Jeffrey Yoskowitz

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