New Publication: Ingredients For a Sustainable World: The Chef’s Good Food Handbook

We have a new publication available, Ingredients For a Sustainable World: The Chef’s Good Food Handbook, released by our partner organization in China, the Good Food Fund, in collaboration with Yale Hospitality. Written by a chef and chef educator in the U.S. and China, the Handbook is intended to encourage chefs to undertake further innovation and to provide practical guidance and tools to do so. As COVID-19 exposes the connections among zoonotic disease, meat consumption, equity, and human encroachment on the natural world, we cannot ignore the urgent need to transform our diets and food system. Who better than chefs to embody and spread the message that plant-centered dining is the best way forward—for public health and food security; our imperiled climate and ecosystems’ and non-human animals, domesticated and wild?

The Handbook is a direct outcome of the Food Forward Forum, a unique sustainable food exchange program that took place in 2019. A joint initiative of the Good Food Fund in China and Yale Hospitality in the U.S., the Food Forward Forum was conceived as a way for top Chinese chefs and culinary leaders to learn how to make their menus greener and more plant-forward through hands-on collaboration with their peers, as well as academics, public health professionals, and university students.

We will be sharing this handbook widely on UN Sustainable Gastronomy Day on June 18. The UN defines sustainable gastronomy as cuisine that takes into account where the ingredients are from, how the food is grown, and how it gets to our markets and eventually to our plates.

In addition to the full handbook, we also have highlighted one of the modules titled “Chefs as Agents of Change” (Part III of the Handbook). The full handbook is also available in Chinese here.