Here’s Why The Culinary Institute Of America Wants Restaurants To Serve Less Meat

No longer satisfied with simply “apple” or “bread,” we want to know how and where that apple was produced and what chemicals and preservatives were put into that bread; we want to know whether our food was sprayed with pesticides and how nutritious it is for us. But this shift in consumer attitudes represents more than just a health movement. Food has become a question of ethics for many people, too. It isn’t as though an increasing number of people has decided they dislike the taste of meat. Rather, they cannot condone supporting an industry which relies on the torture and confinement of animals in order to sustain itself. Factory farming is a modern day horror, and the more we learn about it, the harder it becomes to ignore.

There are also environmental issues to consider. Meat has a far greater water footprint than grains, vegetables, or beans, as it takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce just 1 pound of meat, according to PETA. And animals raised for meat consume vast amounts of food — food that we ourselves could be eating, and then some — for which enormous swaths of land must be farmed.

The world’s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people — more than the entire human population on Earth. And while the vegetarian movement continues to gain momentum as education and awareness about these moral and ecological implications increases, the healthier dining guest isn’t solely seeking more plant-based menu options because they don’t eat meat. As we are slowly discovering, plant-based food tastes incredible, and leaves enormous room for creativity. Not wanting to be behind in the times, the Culinary Institute of America and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health are on a mission to redefine what a complete meal looks like in restaurants by shifting the focus away from meat proteins and onto plant-based ones instead.

They are encouraging the restaurant industry to do a “protein flip” and offer less animal meat in meals. “It came about in response to a clear need among foodservice leaders for an integrated, comprehensive, evidence-based set of guidelines for addressing the most pressing health and environmental concerns through business strategies that will keep their culinary operations thriving for decades to come,” said Sophie Egan, director of programs and culinary nutrition for the Strategic Initiatives Group at The Culinary Institute of America.

The CIA and Harvard’s “Menus of Change: The Business of Healthy, Sustainable, Delicious Food Choices” aims to promote health and sustainability in the foodservice industry. Three of the program’s initiatives, listed below, involve using plant-proteins. From their website: The CIA recommends nuts and legumes as alternative sources of protein. It’s important to note that the CIA is not saying restaurants need to remove meat from their menus, but rather that it should function as more of a condiment than the main focus of most dishes.

They also admit that because many restaurant-goers view both dining out and eating red meat as a treat, they want red meat to be the focus of their meal, in order to get their money’s worth and make the most of the special occasion. But Menus of Change asks restaurants to start shifting this paradigm, luring diners away from the traditional large hunks of meat and towards dishes that offer a blend of either meat/vegetable or meat/legume. This isn’t about demonizing meat, particularly if it has been ethically and sustainably produced, and it’s not about convincing consumers to choose healthy foods even when they want to treat themselves. It’s about changing how we define a meal: “Menus of Change discourages foodservice leaders from hitting diners over the head with messages about a food’s health benefits. Instead, we always lead with flavor. In fact, that is one of the 24 Principles of Healthy, Sustainable Menus: ‘Lead with menu messaging around flavor.’ Because if it doesn’t taste delicious, the rest won’t matter. Research shows that taste trumps just about everything. So the healthier, more sustainable options can’t merely taste pretty good; they have to be so delicious they’re craveable.

They’ve got to make diners want to come back to your restaurant time and again,” said Egan. In addition to these guidelines, Menus of Change has released Protein Plays, an 8-page toolkit that outlines less-meat focused protein solutions and an infographic called The Protein Flip. “The Protein Flip showcases some of the ways that chefs around the country are offering creative plant-forward dishes, from cauliflower steak at restaurants like Chalk Point Kitchen (of chef Rebecca Weitzman, a CIA graduate) to a broccoli dog and other center-of-the-plate celebrations of vegetables at Dirt Candy (of chef Amanda Cohen). For plant-based proteins specifically, one of the many ways we are seeing chefs use them to achieve fantastic flavor is with blended burgers, like juicy patties made from combinations such as peanut, mushroom, and farro, or lentil, barley, and black bean, just to name a few,” said Egan. Source: http://www.foodabletv.com/blog/2016/7/10/why-the-culinary-institute-of-america-wants-restaurants-to-serve-more-plant-based-proteins .

Read the full article at the original website

References:

• http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/facts-on-animal-farming-and-the-environment/
• http://www.foodabletv.com/blog/2016/6/13/on-foodable-insight-series-chefs-innovating-for-sustainability
• http://www.menusofchange.org/
• http://www.menusofchange.org/images/uploads/pdf/CIA-MenusOfChange_ProteinPlays_(May_2016)1.pdf
• http://www.menusofchange.org/images/uploads/pdf/CIA-MenusOfChange_ProteinFlip_(May_2016).pdf
• http://www.foodabletv.com/blog/2016/7/10/why-the-culinary-institute-of-america-wants-restaurants-to-serve-more-plant-based-proteins