The Best of 2022: Spilled Milk #58

All the best food moments of the year.

This is a continuation of my naughty and a nice list. The things I liked, and things I don’t. Yesterday we covered the naughty list, today it’s all things nice. Enjoy and happy holidays to all.

Every bit of oxygen we give to worthless trends, fake foods, unhealthy systems, scene stealers, and similar bullshit distracts us from the real food and makers worth supporting. I wish I had space to cover all of the myriad of inspiring moments, people, and foods that kept me sane this last year. Here are a few.

The IRC: That’s the Independent Restaurant Coalition, the group founded in March of 2022 that fixed PPP and got billions of dollars distributed to 100,000 businesses as part of the American Rescue Plan. This incredible organization continues the fight today, prioritizing the restaurants that need help the most, because while 300,000 businesses applied for aid, only 100,000 received any funds. The IRC was formed by chefs and independent restaurant owners across the country. Together they’ve built a grassroots movement to secure vital protections for the nation’s 500,000 independent restaurants and the more than 11 million restaurant and bar workers impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Please donate here and help us save restaurants and their employees or if you’re feeling extremely generous, consider bidding on this private dinner for 15 guests hosted by yours truly and my dear friend Gavin Kaysen, who recently published a cookbook you need to have. Proceeds will go to the IRC.

Brigaid

Brigaid: Brigaid supplies tailored food solutions to institutions around the country. They believe in a simple idea, that everyone deserves good food. Let’s say you are a senior center, or school district, or county jail group; Brigaid will work with you to make sure your community is fed wholesome delicious food, on your budget, working with you to ensure your culture is supported by your food system. They do the impossible. To quote their web site: “Many institutional food service programs, which feed a large portion of our population, are not set up to thrive. They lack the resources, culinary expertise, and support they need to serve thoughtfully prepared, nourishing food to their communities. In turn, hardworking staff members struggle to prepare meals within strict nutrition and budgetary guidelines; diners are often dissatisfied; food gets wasted; and problems like hunger and diet-related illnesses persist.”

Brigaid installs professional chefs inside institutions in order to build sustainable solutions that enable programs to achieve their goals. Doing this is transformative. Hunger is reduced, better nutrition is accessed. With students, better outcomes come with better food. Attendance is up, classroom performance is quantitatively increased, in fact there is no category typically measured for students that isn’t made better by improving the food system that students access. In prisons, we know that healthy food increases lower recidivism rates, provides job training that can be useful beyond prison walls, and helps with esteem and other mental health issues. In senior centers where diet-related illnesses are even more dangerous because of the nature of that special population, serving fresh nutritious food that follows rigorous guidelines lowers the risk of diet-related illnesses, like obesity and diabetes. 

As someone who has lobbied for over a decade for increased food budgets anywhere the public dollar intersects with a food program, it’s Brigaid that is filling the void by building real solutions while Congress spins its wheels. Brigaid founder Dan Giusti is someone I really idolize for so many reasons. Ten years ago he was the chef at NOMA. Then, rather than feeding the top tenth of one percent he left and founded Brigaid. This interview with him says more than I ever could.

Fed by Blue: Co-founded a few years ago by the indomitable trio of Jennifer Bushman, Jill Kaufman Johnson, and Katherine Bryar; Fed By Blue has an ambitious agenda they are tackling.

Covering more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, our waters play a significant role in the balance of our food and climate systems. When their existence is endangered, ours is too. Overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change are threatening the health of our waters and the foods that come from them. Blue food already brings healthy nutrients to 3 billion people. When responsibly caught or harvested, blue food also provides an abundance of restorative opportunities for environmental, economic, and global health. Responsibly produced blue food means improved wild fisheries management and fishing practices. It means innovation, cleaner practices, and using less resources to grow and harvest blue food. And it means maintaining and creating decent livelihoods for our water fishers, farmers, and harvesters. The power to shift the tides for the future of our water resources and food supply is in our hands. Responsibly sourced blue food can help move us toward a more sustainable and equitable food system, while providing better access to nutritious food, and scaling as the population grows.

Fed By Blue aims to reimagine and transform blue food systems through a demand for transparency, empowering people to make responsible blue food choices, improving education, and changing policies and practices.

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More than 3 billion people rely on blue food to get their vital nutrients and protein. When done responsibly, farming the oceans can provide six times more blue food than we do today to meet the needs of a growing population tomorrow. The livelihoods of 800 million people depend on blue food. Nearly half of the blue food workforce is female. Without healthy waters, the bottom would fall out of this vital global economy. Protecting our oceans and waterways can help improve biodiversity and boost fisheries production, protect coastal communities from storms and other negative effects from our existential climate crisis.

Fed By Blue, a nonprofit aims to do the following:

1. Increase the availability and transparency of responsibly sourced blue food to provide full exposure for blue food products - from water to the point of sale.

2. Broaden access by educating people as to why responsibly raised blue food is so valuable and nutritious, how to find and recognize sustainable sources, and how to demand change on a local level.

3. Improving food literacy by educating young people about the nutritional, economical, and environmental benefits of responsibly produced blue food.

4. Create restorative paths forward through policies that prioritize ocean conservation and responsible harvesting or rearing of blue food.

In a world overcrowded with a lack of doers, the team at Fed By Blue walks the walk every day to make our waters safer, more productive and helping to make our world a better place.

Actual Vegetables: Yup, real vegetables. Not fake meat or chemical supplements, all of which do have their place. We need all hands-on deck to solve our hornets’ nest of issues plaguing our food system. 2022 was the year that real vegetables, real farms, and real food seemed to take a much needed step up in the ranks. When Eleven Madison Park went ‘meatless’ the cognoscenti thought Daniel Humm a fool. He proved them wrong. According to the Mendel & Mendel Group, 37% of restaurants in America added more vegetable dishes to their menus, the highest number in any year since records have been kept. And at the White House Conference on Hunger Nutrition and Health last September, the Environmental Working Group’s policy paper on expanding vegetarian options at all federal food facilities was adopted as official Biden Administration policy.

Higher prices: I know you hate to hear it but for decades restaurants have kept menu prices for food down in the face of rising costs year after year for fear of losing customers. Finally, with little to lose, restaurateurs have been raising prices to increase what they bring to the bottom line. And they are doing it NOT to pull more profits from their businesses but to give employees paid medical leave, a living wage, and other key benefits. Bravo.

Ghost Kitchens: Want to eat well and not pay higher prices? Support ghost kitchens. Today’s GK might support four or five concepts in one facility without a consumer facing model other than delivery service. That’s a good thing and makes up for the positive trend of higher prices in sit down restaurants. Today’s vendor of 6, 12, and 18 packs of wings is tomorrow’s partner with a bespoke sushi chef looking to grow their own customer base. With ghost kitchens, the upside flows to the consumer AND the ownership can make money with fewer employees and lower overhead.

Low ABV Beverages: This ‘trend’ is now the largest movement in the beverage industry, from alcohol free spirits to low ABV beers, wines, and every combination you can think of. The category has almost no ceiling. The sober community loves it but that isn’t the largest market for the 0.0 or low ABV beverage makers. With everyone looking to be healthier, more and more ‘normies’ are foregoing the second cocktail on weekdays after work and still want a mixed drink or a glass of wine. Enter the world of de-alcoholized beverages—wine, spirits, beer--that has had the alcohol removed. The science is amazing, and the cost is falling making it available to all. Next up, bottles of vintage wines and sparkling’s, de-alcoholized and available for purchase at retailers.

We Are Seeing Everyone, Finally:  Is the work complete? Did it happen fast enough? Nope. But out of a nightmarish landscape a decade ago, from “best of” listicles in magazines, to the James Beard Foundation (JBF) Awards and every possible way to quantify that lies in between, we are recognizing a more diverse and equitable food world than ever before. This is a sensitive issue and a lightning rod for errant criticism, so I won’t be naming names or singling anyone out on the maker side. BUT look at how fast the old Bon Appetit group got shown the door and a new Editor in Chief put in charge who has radically changed the nature of how food is viewed, and through the lens of who is making it. Food & Wine’s Hunter Lewis has done as much as anyone to hasten inclusion of all types, same with the JBA and their CEO Clare Reichenbach who spent years remaking that organization to better reflect what we are cooking and what it means to be exceptional. And every magazine or website list of best new chefs and best restaurants that I saw read like a who’s who of new and diverse faces, cuisines and cultures. The net/net effect is that European food cooked by old white men is being moved to the back of the bus in an effort to give others a place in the front, and for today, that’s worth celebrating.

What about you? What were your best food moments of this year? Throw your thoughts into the comments please. I’d love to read them.