Outstanding Chef

Rob Rubba, Oyster Oyster, Washington, D.C.

Outstanding Restaurant

Friday Saturday Sunday, Philadelphia, PA

Best New Restaurant

Kann, Portland, OR

Outstanding Restaurateur

Ellen Yin, High Street Hospitality Group (Fork, a.kitchen + bar, High Street Philly, and others), Philadelphia, PA

Outstanding Hospitality

The Quarry, Monson, ME

Emerging Chef

Damarr Brown, Virtue, Chicago, IL

Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker

Margarita Manzke, République, Los Angeles, CA

Outstanding Bakery

Yoli Tortilleria, Kansas City, MO

Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program

Ototo, Los Angeles, CA

Outstanding Bar

Bar Leather Apron, Honolulu, HI

Best Chef: Midwest (IA, KS, MN, MO, NE, ND, SD, WI)

Itaru Nagano and Andrew Kroeger, Fairchild, Madison, WI

Best Chef: Mountain (CO, ID, MT, UT, WY)

Kris Komori, KIN, Boise, ID

Best Chef: South (AL, AR, FL, LA, MS, PR)

Natalia Vallejo, Cocina al Fondo, San Juan, PR

Best Chef: Northeast (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT)

Sherry Pocknett, Sly Fox Den Too, Charlestown, RI

Best Chef: Southwest (AZ, NM, NV, OK)

Andrew Black, Grey Sweater, Oklahoma City, OK

Best Chef: Southeast (GA, KY, NC, SC, TN, WV)

Terry Koval, The Deer and the Dove, Decatur, GA

Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, PA, VA)

Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon, Kalaya, Philadelphia, PA

Best Chef: New York State

Junghyun Park, Atomix, New York, NY

Best Chef: California

Justin Pichetrungsi, Anajak Thai, Sherman Oaks, CA

Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific (AK, HI, OR, WA)

Vince Nguyen, Berlu, Portland, OR

Best Chef: Texas

Benchawan Jabthong Painter, Street to Kitchen, Houston, TX

Best Chef: Great Lakes (IL, IN, MI, OH)

Tim Flores and Genie Kwon, Kasama, Chicago, IL

In 2021, the latest year for which ReFED’s food waste data is available, 33.8 million people lived in food-insecure households in the US, according to the US Department of Agriculture, including 5 million children. Still, less than 2% of the excess food was donated, ReFED reported.  While 18% was composted and nearly 9% recycled into animal feed, about 36% of the surplus food went to landfills. 

“We are not making anywhere near the progress we need to be to reach the 2030 goal,” said Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED. The organization aims to reduce food waste by half by 2030 compared to 2016 levels, in line with goals set by the United Nations and the US.

In addition to exacerbating food insecurity, food waste is a major emissions culprit, and by some estimates generates about 8% of all human-caused greenhouse gases. ReFED estimates that the 2021 surplus accounted for 372 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, or about 6% of total US emissions. 

Despite the dire numbers, the newest data does mark an improvement in measurement for a waste stream that is notoriously difficult to track. ReFED’s new model updates earlier years’ numbers and makes use of reported data from grocery stores to estimate retail waste. (The organization previously used two older datasets, relying on information from 2008 and 2012 — one from the USDA and one from an industry report.) The updated data shows retail waste is about half of previous estimates. “There’s hope that we’re making more progress than it seems,” Gunders said. 

But the very nature of food waste, which is usually tossed into one of many piles of unmeasured garbage, means that estimates are needed to make up for significant gaps in data. “We’re not separating, we’re not measuring, we’re throwing it out in different places,” Gunders said. Even figuring out total food produced is difficult. 

ReFED’s latest numbers are its best effort to fill in some of those gaps, drawing on more than 80 data sources, including the updated retail numbers. But Gunders recognizes there is still plenty of room for improvement. “I’m optimistic that we’ll get better at capturing it,” she said.

Other groups providing food waste estimates include the US Environmental Protection Agency, which published its own numbers this month. It estimates that in 2019, the US wasted 66.2 million tons of food, most of which went to landfills. Gunders notes that the EPA does not include farm-level waste and measures manufacturing waste differently than ReFED. 

To address the underlying problem, experts say the most important change in developed countries like the US will have to be one of mindset and cultural expectations around food, where cheap abundance is the norm. ReFED proposes 42 food waste solutions, with a public information campaign at the top of the list. Such a campaign would need to be government-funded and should run for at least a decade, Gunders said. 

In the meantime, investors have poured money into technologies to reduce waste in every sector, and there are plenty of tips available for people who want to throw away less, from buying more frozen vegetables to keeping foods beyond “best by” dates that indicate quality not safety. But getting businesses and consumers to stop throwing food away is a major challenge. 

“There are lots of little nudges and incremental improvements that you can make,” said Liz Goodwin, senior fellow and director of food loss and waste at the nonprofit World Resources Institute, “but until we really value the food, it’s not going to happen.” 

Deena Shanker

It’s that time of year, y’all! The Oscar season of the culinary industry is upon us, and we’re here to join the fun with a brief yet highly informative history of the James Beard Awards! 
 
And, what better way to start than by learning a bit about the man himself, James Beard? 

By Akito Tanaka, Dylan Loh, Jada Nagumo and Pak Yiu

JULY 22, 2022

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Feeding-Asia/Asia-s-new-food-frontier-The-rise-of-edible-tech

Every Thursday night, at an invitation-only event in an upscale Singapore hotel, a small group enjoys a four-course dinner while watching videos about an unfolding environmental crisis.

Menus in the dimly lit room at the JW Marriott are designed to highlight the environmentally destructive impact of industrial cropping and livestock breeding. 

Corn is served three ways to evoke deforestation, while a dashi broth is poured over colorful vegetables and seaweed to represent rising sea levels.

Then comes the main dish: chicken nuggets, served with maple waffles and a Chinese-style bao bun. Guests put down their wine glasses, slice the meat carefully into bite-sized pieces and linger on the taste.

The ceremony is a sign that the nuggets are far more than standard fast-food fare: No chicken died to make them. They were created from stem cells, made by a U.S. startup and, so far, available only in Singapore. 

Silicon Valley foodtech unicorn Eat Just is selling its meat in the world’s only nation to have approved the commercialization of lab-cultivated chicken. 

The Marriott meal is an early taste of a food technology revolution whose advocates say could feed Asia’s fast-growing population, curb damage to the planet and eventually cost less than traditional meat. 

“We could theoretically grow anything that might come from plants or animals, from cells instead,” Isha Datar, executive director of cellular agriculture research institute New Harvest, said in a talk.

“Vanilla doesn’t have to be rainforest-farmed, egg whites don’t have to come with the yolk, foie gras can be completely cruelty-free, and leather and silk don’t have to come from the back of an animal or the home of a silkworm.”Isha Datar

Food inflation in Asia, where more than 1.1 billion people lacked access to adequate food last year, is hovering near its all-time high and not expected to ease any time soon. 

The region’s population is projected to increase by 700 million in the next three decades. Widening income gaps, supply chain disruptions and extreme climate conditions are causing price surges and accelerating a food security crisis long in the making.

Asia is home to ideas still in early stages of research but potentially transformative in feeding more people, with fewer resources, in the decades to come. Innovations such as lab-grown meat and 3D-printed food are at the forefront of efforts to rethink how, and what, we can feed the region’s next billion.

By 2030 alone, Asia is expected to add 250 million people to its current population of 4.6 billion. 

By then, meat consumption will increase by 18%, but agricultural production will grow only 2% or less, according to a joint report by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Around 65% of the world’s middle class will be living in the region by 2030, according to a report by PwC, Temasek and Rabobank. Total spending on food in Asia is expected to double to $8 trillion, the report said, adding that “Asia is unable to feed itself.”

The numbers are opportune for investors with deep pockets and big ambitions. Temasek, a Singapore state-owned investor, has said traditional food solutions can “no longer meet the world’s demands.” It has committed more than $8 billion to foodtech since 2013.

Some of that has been poured into Eat Just, which has also received funding from Mitsui & Co. and Khosla Ventures, as well as private investors such as Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff. 

Valued north of a billion dollars, the company has raised more than $800 million so far. And as food prices have soared, it has received more attention from investors. “In the last three months, I got more phone calls, more emails, more direct messages, more introductions, more interest than I ever had at any time,” Josh Tetrick, co-founder of Eat Just, told Nikkei Asia last month.

On a sunny Singapore afternoon last fall, in the trendy heritage neighborhood of Tiong Bahru known for its famed hawker center, Loo Kia Chee received a phone call. It was someone from Eat Just offering a limited-time collaboration with its cultivated meat division GOOD Meat, to serve up their nuggets with his curry.

“I was surprised,” Loo recalls. “I was the first one to get picked for doing this in Asia or the whole world,” and “before that, I didn’t know about the cultivated meat.”

This spring, Loo made history by becoming the world’s first hawker stall to serve lab-made chicken. Customers flocked to Loo’s Hainanese Curry Rice, his popular lunchtime haunt, for the novel treat.

Loo said he thought it tasted “like normal chicken … (and the similarity to conventional chicken is) I think 98%.” 

Asked if he might make the cultivated meat his signature dish some day, Loo seemed receptive to the idea. “If the price challenges [that of conventional meat],” he said, “I will use it.”

Currently producing less than 1,000 kg of cultivated chicken a year, Eat Just is planning a new facility in Singapore that will help scale to tens of thousands of kilograms annually, Tetrick said.

The company expects to achieve cost parity with conventional meat, or become even cheaper, this decade.

Any research funded and developed in Singapore could be scaled to help feed the rest of Asia, where a fast-growing population is coping with rising rates of hunger and malnourishment in the face of surging food prices.

More than 489 million people in Asia were severely food insecure last year, meaning that they had run out of provisions. That is an increase of 112.3 million people in two years in this region alone.

Food prices are expected to keep rising not only in Singapore, but across the region, making self-reliance the latest buzzword.

new report questions the dramatic environmental claims that alternative proteins can save the planet, disrupt the status quo, or challenge the power of the corporate food industry.

Russia’s aggression in Ukraine will have “severe” effects on the world economy, the International Monetary Fund warned Saturday. Grain and fuel prices have surged to historic peaks. This seems like an awkward time to offer hope. Yet hope remains.

Our world is much more rigid. than it was even a generation ago, especially with regard to food. The food shock of 2022 is not a good-news story. The news is bad. But our “bad” is less bad than ever before.

Russia and Ukraine are massive growers of grain, especially wheat. Russia produces about 10 percent of the planet’s wheat; Ukraine about 4 percent. Some of that production is consumed at home, but after their domestic use, Russia and Ukraine together provide about one-quarter of all the planet’s wheat exports. They are important exporters of corn and barley as well, and of cooking oils, especially sunflower oil. Now the Russian invasion has closed the ports through which Ukraine’s wheat moved to world markets. Insurance costs have jumped for all shipping in the Black Sea. Spring crops will probably go unplanted in Ukraine; Russian crops face sanctions and embargo. Russia and its ally Belarus also are—or were—important exporters of the fertilizer that other food-raising countries use to grow their own crops.

The upheaval will touch every food consumer on Earth, even those living in food-secure countries such as the United States. Food prices are set in efficient global markets. All countries face similar prices, whether they are sellers into those markets or buyers from those markets. If the price goes up for anyone, it goes up for everyone.

Again: Sudden increases in global food prices are not good news. But also again: Some context is necessary. Four points of context, actually.

1. We live in an age of food abundance.

Maybe you retain some memory of old predictions about global famine? A best-selling book published in 1967 carries the lurid title Famine 1975! America’s Decision: Who Will Survive? Among other predictions, the authors identified India as the nation most inevitably doomed to mass starvation and economic collapse.

So … guess which country is the world’s second-largest producer of wheat in 2022, accounting for more than 13 percent of all output? That’s right, the former alleged basket case India. Since the 1960s, Indian wheat production has increased by nearly an order of magnitude, to almost 110 million metric tons last year. Indian wheat exports will probably exceed 7 million metric tons this year, up from the previous peak of 6.5 million in 2012–13.

India also exported nearly 18 million metric tons of rice in the 2020–21 marketing season, more than any other country. That’s impressive, but not as dazzling as the performance of Vietnam, which has vaulted from exporting basically nothing as recently as 1989 to second place among rice exporters in the 2020s. (The United States ranks fifth.)

Read: Debating the link between food prices and revolution

2. Many food-importing countries can cope.

The world’s largest wheat importer is Egypt. I spoke with Mirette Mabrouk, the director of the Egypt Program at the Middle East Institute, in Washington, D.C. Based on my conversation with her, I’d characterize the food outlook for Egypt as serious but not critical. Egyptian authorities estimate that their reserves will be sufficient for at least the next six months, perhaps the next nine. Egyptian governments have been in the business of managing food reserves for 5,000 years. From the days of Joseph’s storehouses to now, they have accumulated some considerable management capacity.

Egypt buys wheat through a system of reverse auctions: posting a tender for a certain quantity, then accepting the lowest bid for that tender. Since the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt has operated a system of subsidized bakeries that sell low-priced loaves to qualified buyers. More recently, Egypt has begun to convert to direct cash assistance provided through cards that function very much like American electronic-benefits-transfer cards. In a crisis, the Egyptian government can effectively provide more cash assistance to low-income buyers.

Many other major wheat-importing countries are either rich (Italy, Japan, South Korea) or led by reasonably effective governments (Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey) that can emulate Egypt and deliver assistance to the hard-pressed. The countries to worry most about are those wracked by war and political instability: Yemen above all, but also Ethiopia, Mali, and other disrupted states.

3. Global emergency aid can help.

Where famine does threaten, the international community can save lives. In 2021, international relief agencies provided in-kind or cash food assistance to 13 million Yemenis. Such programs will cost more in 2022, but not impossibly more. Before the war in Ukraine, the United Nations’ food program projected a Yemen aid budget of $2 billion for this year. That number will likely go up by 25 percent or more, but the money can be found.

An even more terrifying food crisis faces Afghanistan under its new Taliban rulers. The Taliban’s self-imposed international isolation has been followed by a cruel drought. Millions of lives are at risk. India has committed considerable food aid. The war in Ukraine does not make feeding Afghanistan’s population easier, obviously, but it’s only a very incidental aggravating factor. Afghanistan’s agony would be no less agonizing if Vladimir Putin had chosen peace in Ukraine rather than war.

4. High prices are not bad news for everybody.

Higher prices for food consumers mean higher incomes for food producers. In most of the world, consumers hugely outnumber producers. There is one region, however, where producers remain so numerous that higher prices can improve the livelihoods of millions: sub-Saharan Africa.

About two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africans farm for a living. When prices rise, farmers produce more and earn more. Sub-Saharan farmers could produce a lot more. African farmers could soon double or even triple their output of grains, livestock, and other products if they use more intense farming methods, the economic-consulting firm McKinsey estimates.

Higher prices could encourage African farmers to adopt more advanced seeds and other modern methods. They could prod governments to invest more in rail and roads in order to move crops to market, and to clarify property laws in order to support commercial farms that produce for the international marketplace. Sub-Saharan food output grew twice as fast from 2000 to 2018 as it did in the 1980–99 stretch. That boom was driven by higher food prices, especially in the peak years of 2006 to 2013, according to a 2021 study.

By Penny Starr

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has laid bare the world’s dependence on Russian President Vladimir Putin and its neighbor now under siege, including the fact that the two countries supply much of the grain needs around the globe and prices for grain are now the highest they have been in six decades.

This reliance has many traders worried that any further military force could trigger a massive scramble by food importers to replace supplies normally sourced from the Black Sea region,” Fox Business reported. “Chicago futures for grain closing 41 percent higher than the previous week at $12.09. That jump marks the biggest gain over six decades. On Monday, the price closed up for the 6th consecutive day.”

And prices for fertilizer are already up almost 100 percent from this time last year. According to DOW Jones data, prices for nitrogen-based Urea are up almost 99 percent and 68 percent higher for diammonium phosphate.

Fox Business interviewed Ryck Suydam, a farmer who said he paid $17,000 to fertilize his 300-acre farm last year and that to fertilize just half of his average this year will cost $34,000.

“Some farmers are sitting out,” Suydam said. “They’ll say ‘Never mind, I’m not going to fertilize my fields this year. I know before I even plant a crop I’m going to lose money. Why am I doing it?’ They’ll let the fields go fallow.”

“Suydam said that to solve the fertilizer crunch, the U.S. needs to increase production of natural gas, which makes its byproduct, nitrogen, more affordable and readily available,” Fox News reported.

“We’ve got a lot of natural gas in this country,” Suydam said. “Open the gates, the pipeline, you’re sure to get more natural gas flowing, bring that price down and more fertilizer [will] be available.”

BY Joe Fassler

By Terrence Doyle

More than a billion marine animals died in the heatwave that swept across the Western U.S. and Canada last month. The climate crisis doesn’t exist in some hypothetical future — it’s already here.

Tens of thousands of dead mussels lay along the coastline in Vancouver, British Columbia, boiled alive by the extreme heat wave that swept across the Pacific Northwest late last month. The Canadian city’s beaches transformed into mass gravesites for the bivalves, their shells forced open by the extreme temperatures, innards dried out or picked over by hungry scavengers. It is one of the most searing images yet of the ongoing climate crisis.

What makes this bizarre and depressing moment even more difficult to grapple with is the fact that mussels have evolved to withstand high temperatures — they hold water inside their shells to prevent from drying out, and live in beds, or clusters, which ordinarily help to protect the collective against the heat. But those evolutionary tools, developed over literally millions of years, were no match for temperatures that climbed as high as 121 degrees Fahrenheit in British Columbia and coincided with low tides, leaving the mussels exceptionally exposed.

It wasn’t just mussels that died off en masse in the region: From the Puget Sound to Vancouver Island, countless other bivalves, including oysters and clams, and other assorted ocean dwellers boiled to death amidst the extreme heat. According to researchers at the University of British Columbia, more than 1 billion marine animals died in the waters of the Salish Sea during the record-breaking heat wave. One Washington state-based shellfish farmer told the Tacoma News Tribune that they lost 50,000 oysters and 10,000 clams, a quarter of their total stock, worth about $60,000 at market. Oysters take anywhere from 12 to 18 months to reach maturity, so the die-offs will affect the business of oyster farmers — and what restaurants are able to offer diners — for years to come.

Where the heat wave didn’t kill oysters, it made the people who ate them sick. According to Washington state’s department of public health, the state is experiencing an historic outbreak of vibriosis, which is caused by eating raw or undercooked shellfish and causes diarrhea, abdominal cramps, vomiting, headaches, and a host of other unpleasant symptoms. Vibrio is naturally occurring in salt water environs, but it thrives at warm temperatures, and the low tides, combined with scorching hot days, created the perfect conditions for the bacteria to grow.

If you want to see what climate disaster looks like in real time — the fires, the mass die-offs, the pathogens, the effect on our food system (and our food system’s effect on it) and your plate — you don’t have to look any further than the Western U.S. and Canada.

In California, the record high temperatures could result in the death of all juvenile Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River, nudging the endangered fish to the brink of extinction. Chinook salmon are not able to survive in water temperatures above 56 degrees Fahrenheit. In a normal year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation would release water from Shasta Lake in order to keep the waters of the Sacramento cool enough for the young fish, but historic droughts in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta have necessitated that large amounts of water be released to farmers instead. This year, there’s just not enough water left to keep the salmon cool, and instead they might all die.

As the Chinook salmon swims toward the point of no return in northern California, much of the wildfireprone state is up in flames. Hundreds of thousands of acres in California are currently on fire, due to the confluence of an extremely dry winter and spring and a series of heatwaves. In Oregon, the Bootleg Fire, which has been burning since July 6, is in the process of incinerating 300,000 acres. And the same drought that transformed the Western U.S. into a tinderbox is forcing ranchers to shrink the size of their herds because there isn’t enough quality pasture land for animals to graze.

Add to the mix the wildfires destroying vineyards in Napa Valley, cherries in Oregon cooked on the branch by (yet again) record breaking temperatures, a new-ish cycle of droughts and floods affecting broad stretches of farmland in the Midwest, among other disasters, and it’s clear that climate change isn’t some terrifying eventuality for future generations to deal with — it’s happening right now, and it will continue to happen without extreme intervention, including big changes to the global food system (for example, cutting way back on meat and dairy production) to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

At the moment, climate disaster is most visible in the U.S. and Western Canada in the forms of mass die-offs, unprecedented conflagrations, and struggling farmers, and in Europe in the form of deadly flooding. But the climate crisis has more subtle and insidious effects, ones that tend to impact less industrialized countries, poor people, and people of color more acutely than anyone else. In the Republic of Palau in the Western Pacific, for example, rising sea levels are salinating its agricultural land, making it impossible to grow crops that aren’t salt-tolerant. And in the U.S., decades of racist housing policy, known as redlining, have left Black neighborhoods in many of the nation’s cities sweltering in the summer heat — as average temperatures in cities across the Eastern seaboard now average what they did in their far more southern neighbors just a decade ago — due to a lack of green spaces and an abundance of pavement and concrete. White neighborhoods, on the other hand, tend to be much cooler.

The more extreme effects of climate change may not be knocking at your front door just yet, but it’s inevitable that climate disaster will affect everyone, eventually. According to a report by the United Nations, climate change will redefine life on Earth going forward, even if humans are able to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. The report cites species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, and communities endangered by rising seas among the many complications that will arise in the coming decades.

For more than a century, scientists have understood that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide cause the Earth to warm, but an intractably powerful cohort of legislators and fossil fuel lobbyists continue to do their damndest to deny that this is true. Still, no combination of political pressure, bad policy making, or bald-face lying can change the fact that global temperatures continue to rise, oceans continue to warm (and acidify), sea levels continue to rise, ice sheets continue to shrink (further contributing to the rise of sea levels), glaciers continue to retreat, and extreme weather events (tropical storms, 100-year floods, wildfires, etc.) continue to wreak havoc across the globe.

For decades, we’ve wondered what climate change might look like, and when it might arrive. It looks like thousands of boiled alive mussels spread across a beach in Vancouver, and it’s here now.