Why we’re “fast, cheap and easy” and how we’re changing that

We attended the Brooklyn Food Conference on Saturday May 2nd in Brooklyn, NY along with approximately 3000 other people interested in food issues. We staffed a table at the event where we had an opportunity to talk about all of our programs  – Sustainable Table, The Meatrix, Eat Well Guide and Meatless Monday. By the end of the day my voice was scratchy from talking so much – and I realized that I hadn’t attended any of the workshops! Lucky for us, we ran into our friend Meredith Modzelewski who promised to blog about the event and the workshops she squeezed in.

This blurb is from Meredith’s post on Homegrown.org about one of the workshops she attended, one of the 70 workshops available during the day -

Next up, I attended “Our Sustainable Restaurants: A Roundtable of NYC Chefs,” led by Leonard Lopate of WNYC public radio. On the panel were Dan Barber; Peter Hoffman of Savoy and Back Forty; Bill Telepan of Telepan; David Shea of Applewood; and John Tucker of Rose Water. A very popular panel, the discussion ranged from the chef as instrumental in changing food attitudes to seed sharing, and even tackling the accusation that choosing to eat sustainably is an elitist idea. Barber and Shea explained how chefs, first and foremost, care about taste – and food grown sustainably and responsibly, especially locally, simply tastes better. The chefs agreed that sustainable food’s higher prices, which could be seen as elitism by some, is really just a reflection of the true cost of food; Americans have been accustomed to artificially cheap food for far too long and the higher prices are a correction. As one of them noted, many consumers are learning to say, “Food is where I want to spend my money – on what I put into my body, not what I hang off of it.”

My favorite verbal nugget of the session? Telepan quipped, “If we are what we eat, then we’re fast, cheap, and easy.”

You can read Meredith’s full post at Homegrown.org.