My panel this morning focused on how to scale sustainability, a topic I think is the next big thing. It’s also a subject that I think should be of particular interest to chefs. In this economy, the opportunities to to charge high prices at white tablecloth restaurants are dwindling, and an increasing number of chefs are choosing to focus on serving pizza, burgers etc., at lower prices.

To succeed, they’ll need to figure out how to source greater quantities of sustainable food and how to market it to a new demographic. My panelists offered lots of smart insights.  Here are some highlights.

• Drew Robinson, executive chef of Jim n Nicks in Birmingham, Alabama, said that in his market, sustainability doesn’t sell. The customers are extremely price sensitive — the average check is $13. A message about supporting the local community or providing jobs might work better. But in the end, it comes down to taste. If customers don’t taste the difference in, say, a free-range chicken, they will not pay more.
• That’s true, even in Portland, Oregon, what I think of as ground zero for foodie consciousness. Piper Davis of Grand Central Bakery says that even there, sustainability isn’t what brings people in. It’s the taste of the food and the quality of their experience. What makes people pay that little bit more is a friendly atmosphere and good service.
• That customer loyalty helps Davis pay for higher quality ingredients. She buys directly from many farms. But she also taps into the existing distribution system. Her Shepherd’s Grain flour is milled and transported by railcar by agricultural giant ADM. The Sysco truck takes it to her door.
• Tom Philpott, food writer for Mother Jones, talked about the importance of working with old-school farmers for his CSA in North Carolina. They are key to bringing more growers into a market that still lacks supply. They also have a accumulated experience that can make them both successful and mentors to new farmers.

Much to my delight, this was not the only session focusing on these issues. Bob Perry of University of Kentucky led a discussion about finding the “value in value chains” and on Tuesday Corie Brown of Zester will tackle how to buy sustainably without breaking the bank.

Got thoughts on how chefs can learn to scale sustainability? Leave them here.

Courtesy: The Food Network

The food world erupted into another tizzy over culinary elitism yesterday after Frank Bruni scolded bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain for criticizing Paula Deen’s lard-laden cooking while he and his friends gorge on pork belly and foie gras in pricey New York restaurants. Bruni was right to call Bourdain out. But, as I wrote in a piece on the Atlantic, he’s wrong to say that chefs like Deen don’t have a role to play in helping America slim down.

In his New York Times op-ed Bruni argues that access and affordability, not Food Network chefs, are the reasons that Americans don’t eat well. But as my six months in Huntington illustrated, these issues are sometimes overblown. It’s values, priorities and taste that decide what many families put on the table.

As I write in the piece:

While my husband and I bought organic produce and meat from the local butcher and cooked most of our meals, the families we were reporting on ate sugary cereals for lunch and soda and frozen pizzas for dinner. It wasn’t price that motivated our different habits… The difference was taste and convenience. Cooking three meals a day at home, as we did for research purposes, is a hell of a lot of work. And for many families, putting in the effort doesn’t pay off. Last fall, Heather James, a Huntington mom, tried to make mac and cheese from scratch—but it wasn’t a hit. “It’s just not boxed mac-and-cheese,” she told me. “And sometimes that’s what you want.”

Food Network chefs such as Deen, Guy Fieri, Sandra Lee, and Rachael Ray (who to her credit got involved in the campaign to reform school lunch) are sneered at by the urban fooderati. But they have real power—and wouldn’t it be nice if they used it?

Doing their part doesn’t mean embracing a preachy all-organic, all-from-scratch philosophy. (And that won’t work, anyway.) But food network stars could offer a few healthy recipes as well as substitutions on their more indulgent creations. They could highlight diners and dives that serve human-size portions instead glorifying the 105-pound burger. They could promote sensible eating as enjoyable, rather than as a punishment.

Many Americans actually like to cook and a growing number want to learn. What if the magic ingredient to changing the way we eat turned out to be Paula Deen after all?

The Harvest Table in Meadowview

The reason I vanished for more than two weeks is that I was felled by this terrible virus that’s kept me in bed and off email, twitter, web — everything. Still, I somehow managed to get the edits through on this piece for the New York Times about culture clash over local food in Appalachia. The story looks at the Harvest Table, a fabulous local eatery owned by Steven Hopp, a.k.a. Mr. Barbara Kingsolver and co-author of the 2007 bestseller “Animal Vegetable Miracle.”

The Harvest Table would have been an instant success in a progressive, urban enclave like Brooklyn or Berkeley. But in Meadowview, Virginia, it struggles to attract the locals, who see organic, home-cooked food as elitist and expensive. The lesson: It’s hard to compete with chain restaurants when no one thinks there’s anything wrong with them.

This is the culture clash we are going to see play out across the country as the food “revolution” tries to move beyond the coasts. I hope to be writing more about it in Appalachia and elsewhere over the coming year.

The Pork Board’s move follows a related tactic by industrial producers, who in this era of conscientious (even militant) know-your-food-ism have taken to assigning virtues to their products, no matter how dubious, that reflect the current obsession with all things wholesome and handmade. Haagen-Dazs has its Five line, which boasts that no pint contains more than five ingredients; this, when Haagen-Dazs’ original vanilla, chocolate and strawberry don’t have more than five anyway. Tostitos, an easy target in a country where one in three children is overweight, now touts that its chips are made of nothing but “white corn, natural oil and a dash” – 120 milligrams per serving – “of salt.”

Even soda, that dark lord of food villains, has found a way to co-opt the all-that’s-simple trend. PepsiCo recently added Pepsi and Mountain Dew Throwback to its permanent lineup. Both come in retro packaging—the Dew can is a re-release of a 1960s design—and boast “real sugar,” not high fructose corn syrup, as ingredients. In test runs, the new offerings had boosted the company’s market share, on an annualized basis, by $220 million.

Food marketers have always tried to tailor their pitches to the latest fad. (This is how, during the Atkins craze, the world was introduced to low-carb bread.) But today companies have no choice but to try to keep pace with food evangelists spreading the vote-with-your-fork gospel. According to an analysis by Hank Cardello, director of the Hudson Institute’s obesity solutions initiative, 80 percent of consumers now believe their purchases are a way to send a message to corporations, and 44 percent have actually switched brands to drive change. “Ten percent would get their attention,” says Cardello. “Forty-four percent tells them that something serious is going on.”

Yet there are limits to how effective these efforts at fabricated authenticity can be. That sugar in your old-timey Mountain Dew will still make you fat, as those gruesome city New York City Health Department ads are eager to remind us, and the heritage labeling only validates consumer preferences for brands that genuinely qualify as homespun and small-batch. It gets even more problematic when your product is meat: At a time when vegetarianism is on the rise, particularly among young people, attempts to cater to informed consumers unavoidably, and awkwardly, lead to appetite-killing discussions of what happened before that pork chop ended up on your plate.

Of course, this assumes that everyone really does want to think about where their food came from and that dining choices are universally viewed as a statement of political values or a status symbol. The pork board seems to be betting that there’s a significant chunk of America that doesn’t view food that way, especially when it comes to meat. (Indeed, not knowing much may be a big reason they are able to continue eating it at all). Pork’s new slogan may seem a bland replacement. But when meat, white and otherwise, is tainted by negative connotations like never before, it also might be, in its way, kind of inspired.

A day after I posted that the giant food distribution company had pulled its financial support for Huntington’s Kitchen, I received an email from a company spokeswoman, Christina Koliopoulos, who maintained that the company had indeed fulfilled its obligation. Its year-long commitment actually began in November, 2009, not in April 2010, which is when the company announced the deal in a press release.

“Representatives of Jamie Oliver contacted U.S. Foodservice in October 2009 requesting financial assistance to launch Jamie’s Kitchen in Huntington. U.S. Foodservice signed an agreement to provide start up funding of $20,400, consisting of $18,000 in food and $2,400 in cleaning supplies over a one-year period beginning November 2, 2009.

As you may know, Ebenezer Medical Outreach Inc. took over Jamie’s Kitchen in February 2010, four months into U.S. Foodservice’s sponsorship term. Despite the fact that the Jamie Oliver ‘spotlights were gone,’ as you phrased it, U.S. Foodservice maintained its commitment and ultimately donated more than $21,400 in food and cleaning supplies over a 13-month period ending December 28, 2010.”

If that’s the case, why wait nearly five months – until after its local representative had appeared on an episode of Food Revolution – to make public its donation?

Koliopoulos’s answer: “The producers for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution wanted to take the lead in announcing and publicizing Jamie’s Kitchen. As such, U.S. Foodservice agreed to wait until the final episode had aired before announcing the donation.”

I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that this is how these things work: Oliver needs money to make his good deeds a reality. U.S. Foodservice has plenty of money, but no reason to support Oliver’s vision of reforming America’s food culture, which doesn’t exactly celebrate the work of big food companies. The world is a messy place. And real reform, as well as reality TV, requires compromise.

U.S. Foodservice deserves credit for fulfilling its commitment to Huntington’s Kitchen. But none of these new details changes the fact that once the media machine had moved on to the next hit show, the corporation quietly dropped its support for a worthy organization still trying to make ends meet.

Indeed, Koliopoulos made clear in her initial note to me that the sponsorship of the Kitchen “was somewhat unusual in that the company primarily concentrates its charitable contributions on one national organization—Feeding America, which is the largest domestic hunger-relief charity in America. We believe Feeding America is a natural partner to our food distribution business and have found the organization to be the best way for us to reach the largest number of Americans in need.”

When you’re a $19 billion company, $20,000 for a bit of good PR on national television must sound like a good deal.

At Thanksgiving we ponder, what is the real all-American meal? Olga Lyubkin - Fotolia.com

Here’s a cliff notes version of our argument: Until now, proponents of a more progressive food system have sought to avoid a paternalistic tone. They have focused on systemic failures that prevent families from making healthier choices. Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative, which aims to end childhood obesity within a generation, addresses access (Is fresh food available?) and affordability (Can poor and working-class families afford to buy it?). When reformers talk about personal decisions, they are mostly urging people of means to “vote with their forks” by consuming from places such as farmers markets and Whole Foods.

Access and affordability are indeed problems.  But, as we’ve found in Huntington, they are not insurmountable. We’ve bought local eggs, buffalo meat and un-homogenized milk in glass bottles.  So far, we’ve prepared nearly all our meals at home and are averaging about $100 a week on groceries. That breaks down to $2.38 per meal, per person, though it doesn’t include the gas and time it took to run down leads on food sources.

In other words, access to and the cost of “elite” food isn’t beyond the budgets of many, perhaps most, Americans. For the good-food revolution to have a chance, people have to make finding and preparing fresh food a priority at a time when everything about our modern food system urges us not to bother. And, we argue, that won’t happen if people think healthy food is an elitist plot to take away their McRib.

The topic of food and culture has exploded in the media in recent weeks. Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck have all weighed in. And we’re not the only ones who have noted how important it is that foodies fight back. Judith Warner wrote an excellent piece in the New York Times magazine making essentially the same case.

The right’s argument — don’t let them take away your Big Mac! — is depressing. But as Ghandi once said: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you. Then you win.

So as you might expect, there were some frayed nerves and unchecked emotions on display at the first annual Roger Smith Food Writers Conference in New York. Veteran Wall Street Journal restaurant critic Ray Sokolov derided David Chang’s account of Hudson Valley foie gras in the Momofuku cookbook as a work of an inexpert and gullible work of reporting. (This despite the fact that co-author Peter Meehan is an excellent, former New York Times journalist.) Jane Daniels Lear, a former senior editor at Gourmet, could not imagine why her 68-year-old alma mater should have vanished – the readers were so loyal! – and picked a fight with Jordana Rothman of Time Out, a magazine whose ad pages jumped 9.2 percent last month.

Of course, if any of us were smart enough to know what is to become of us, we probably wouldn’t be journalists. (We’d be rich business magnates instead.) But there was one food luminary with a vision. Molly O’Neill. And I just hope she’s right.

O’Neill is a former New York Times columnist and the author of cookbooks, a memoir and an excellent food writing anthology. This fall, she will publish what may be her greatest work: A “door-stop” size tome of American regional recipes and oral histories, titled “One Big Table.”

Food writing is not a new invention, O’Neill argued. Food and the bounty of the American continent was a main topic of many reports of the new world. The descriptions of cooking and of elaborate meals gave insights into regional development, culture and class.

Over the last several decades, however, Americans’ attitudes about food and cooking changes, and writing changed to reflect that. People were less interested in expressing themselves through their cooking traditions than showing off what they had experienced.(There was, according to research O’Neill did for an article in the New Yorker, an inverse relationship between the amount of money that someone spent on a stove and the number of times they used it.) “Cooking for me had always been a way of affirming one’s life. The voyeuristic had replaced the real,” she said.

The popularity of televised cooking competitions (and their grotesque, sado-masochistic cousin shows such as Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen) would seem to confirm a dark future for food writing. But O’Neill is optimistic: “Yes, there’s a dark side. There’s a sense you have to say, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, here’s my bowl of noodles. But it’s the last gasp of macho cuisine…There are other voices out there that are fresh and clear.”

One-note people will have their 15 minutes of fame. (Julie Powell and whoever wrote that Cake Wrecks book jump to mind.) But if you take food seriously and are diligent about reporting, there is always room for enterprise. One thing is sure, O’Neill said: “There’s no future in hand-wringing. Except repetitive stress syndrome.”

Hear hear.