As part of the project, I have organized sustainable dinners in collaboration with restaurants. The aim of these dinners has been to raise awareness of how the dominant food system contributes to global warming and to familiarize people with sustainable foodways: to introduce the idea that sustainable dinners can be tasty even though they are mostly vegan or contain produce that people are not familiar with. Despite being 3-course menus, they have cost the equivalent of 20-35 USD. Vegan food is not expensive!
I am far from the only one who is doing this. The Guardian recently published an article that describes how former White House chef Sam Kass creates dinners that focus on the foods that may disappear as a result of the biospheric crisis, and that also introduce new and less environmentally hostile foodways. He terms these events “last suppers” and at the one The Guardian reports on he served an amuse bouche with shrimp and salmon skin, followed by a first course of oysters and mussels, a second course of Norwegian salmon, a main consisting of lamb with wild rice seasoned with both coffee and wine, and finally a sticky toffee pudding with chocolate and coffee. The entire menu apparently cost 300 USD.
I think that Kass’s effort to create dinners that make people aware of the fact that the unfolding social and ecological crisis will make certain types of food scarce or impossible to find is a step sideways rather than forward. It is true that oysters, salmon, shrimp and many land-living animals (such as lamb) that are common in the Euro/American cuisine today are likely to become rare in the future. The global manufacture and circulation of coffee, wine and chocolate will undoubtedly also suffer as a result of global warming, soil erosion, climate migration and other effects of social and ecological erosion.
It is not wrong to draw people’s attention to this development, yet Kass’s dinners do not highlight how the diet he celebrates is part of the reason why the planet is getting warmer. Again, the existing food system and the meat-heavy diet it promotes are a main driver of the climate crisis, and also, as former Executive Secretary of UNFCCC Christina Figueres has argued, of the profoundly related inequality crisis.
In addition to this, Kass’s dinner seeks to create awareness through a trope that can be called privilege deprivation. Kass’s gambit is that if “we” don’t do anything about global warming, “we” will not be able to savour foods such as shrimp, oysters, salmon, lamb, chocolate, wine and coffee. This is problematic first because it elides the fact that a substantial number of people already do not have access to such foods (or to food at all). It is also problematic since it seeks to motivate action by imaginatively locating (privileged) people in futures where they have been deprived of their food privileges. But if inequality and the privileged diet are driving the ongoing crisis, how can any program designed to maintain them serve the needs of the planet?
The people who can pay 300 USD for a dinner will, in all likelihood, be the last ones to have to abandon the traditional, western diet that Kass’s last dinner menu tacitly normalises. From this perspective, it can be argued that Kass’s dinner commodifies the disappearance of the current food system and of existing diets. It is not the way to go.
Photo by Pylyp Sukhenko on Unsplash