Bon Appétit Management Company

July’s Hydrate the Healthy Way campaign focuses on avoiding beverages with added sugar or other sweeteners. Here’s a seasonal, lighter take on an Indian classic that will quench your thirst without expanding your waistline.

Five tips for aspiring farmers on creating socially just farms, from Jim Cochran and Sandy Brown of California’s Swanton Berry farm, the “poster farm” of the fair-food movement.

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.

Helene York, Bon Appétit’s director of strategic initiatives, recently visited Alaska, where she was speaking at Global Food Alaska’s biennial summit of producers from all parts of the food supply chain. Being Helene, she turned the trip into a jam-packed opportunity to learn all she could about the Alaskan seafood industry.

Bon Appétit at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has been steadily increasing its purchases from local farmers ever since taking over the Penn account in 2009. But the busy chefs don’t always have the opportunity to venture outside of their kitchens and visit the producers. To provide chefs with a unique farmers’ perspective, as well as inspiration to purchase locally, Hill House Executive Chef Valerie McHugh has begun taking members of the Penn team on visits to local farms during school breaks.

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!

At Bon Appétit, we’ve let the powerful union of simplicity, taste, and nutrition guide our menus for a long time. So we were pleased to see that yesterday the U.S. Department of Agriculture replaced its complicated Food Guide Pyramid with a new, elegantly simple “My Plate” graphic. This new icon boils down what many consumers felt were complicated scientific messages into a clear snapshot of what your dinner plate should look like for good nutrition: more than half your plate should be filled with vegetables and fruit, and the other half with grains (mostly whole) and protein.

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.