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Executive Chef David Anderson demonstrates how to separate the ham and loin in his hog butchery demo Bon Appétit Executive Chef David Anderson from the Stanford Graduate School of Business believes that an animal’s life is worth more than two pork tenderloins. After the recent Northern California Chefs’ Exchange focusing on butchery at Cisco – San Jose, in San Jose, CA, he had this to say about how we use animals in our cooking:  

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Peter Coclanis argued in the Wall Street Journal that “American food is much safer than you think.” He is right in that that system only (italics mine) kills eight people a day on average, and that they are the weak members of our herd: babies, the elderly, the sick. He seems to think some human suffering is an acceptable price of doing business. Too bad it’s one that the food industry doesn’t actually pay.

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Have you ever seen a farm that grows produce using minerals, nutrients, and water, but no soil? Bon Appétit Farm to Fork partner John Lawson of Hydro Harvest Farms is doing just that—and growing about six times more produce than the typical farm in the process, he says!

Last fall, a group of student-activists and I had started coordinating Oberlin’s first-ever Food Week, to be held in March, to raise awareness about problems in our current food system and create a space for different activists to network and come to new solutions. To kick off the week, the students asked Bon Appétit to host a Local Foods Banquet. Let me repeat: they wanted to have a local foods banquet. In Ohio. In March. And we did it!

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Bon Appétit chefs are used to cooking for business and academic royalty: CEOs, Nobel Prize-winning professors, and university presidents dine on our food daily. But when the company was invited to feed actual royalty — His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, fresh from his son’s wedding — along with Bon Appétit CEO Fedele Bauccio, a dozen other stars of the sustainable food movement, and 750 journalists and other high-profile guests, the menu planning and food sourcing reached new heights of intensity.

The occasion was a landmark all-day conference on the “Future of Food,” hosted by the Washington Post at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

The “Future of Food” conference convened by the Washington Post at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, provided much… well, food for thought. However, the 30 speakers, who included Charles, Prince of Wales, and Bon Appétit CEO Fedele Bauccio, weren’t serving up snacky soundbites, but multi-course meals made up of whole, high-fiber ingredients.

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Holly Winslow, resident district manager of University of San Francisco, and Crystal Chun Wong, general manager at Kirkland and Ellis in San Francisco, were glad to play hosted a group of 20 Girl Scouts from three different troops for a pizza party at USF. They didn’t even have to be “badgered” into it.The scouts were each in the process of completing the Girl Scout Gold Award on Food and Local Farming. The visit to Bon Appétit was part of the “research and personal enrichment” portion of the requirements.

In this new Bravo Beat series for the Bon Appétit blog, we’ll spotlight some of our star staff, starting with Hamidou Cisse, Bon Appétit sous chef at Lesley College in Cambridge, MA. Born in Dakar, Senegal, the soft-spoken, genial Hamidou came to the United States in 1992 from Germany.

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While Bon Appétit makes a big fuss on Low Carbon Diet Day to call our diners’ attention to the five foundations of a planet-friendlier diet, our chefs practice these principles every day. Whether it’s Monday or Wednesday, patrons can always find plenty of locally sourced, vegetarian options or dishes with meat such as chicken and pork, which come from lower methane-emitting animals than cows.

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The conditions that farmworkers face in the everyday course of trying to do their jobs are grueling, often dangerous, and sometimes even abusive. It’s the age-old “if a tree falls in the forest” riddle: if these problems are invisible to most Americans, do they really exist? The answer is yes, of course they do. And I am proud to have worked on a 65-page report about farmworker employment issues that documents them.