This summer, my pal Sarah Smith at Institute for the Future took a ten-day transcontinental train trip to explore the future of food systems and wrote about it at National Geographic. In this piece, she profiles how the train’s chefs, who considered the experience a “renegade culinary adventure,” experimented with waste management, local sourcing, daily food practices, and decadence.
From National Geographic:
“Your waste doesn’t magically disappear,” Carvalho said. She described the one, small closet in the lounge car hallway where all of the trash bags were stuffed. We understood that we either needed to curb our rapid cup consumption, or else live among bags of trash. We also realized that once we got off the train, our waste was slowly filling up our planet’s “trash closet,” too.
Food waste was less of a problem. The chefs created consistently delightful and inventive foods and even picky eaters scraped their plates clean. Carvalho would stand under the glass dome of the observation deck and announce their creations to the crowd. They often creatively repurposed of the previous meal’s ingredients. Leftover figs were turned into fig basil jam. Roasted golden beets appeared in the next morning’s juice. Kohlrabi showed up in the frittata and bread was resurrected as pain perdu. With just two small refrigerators on board, the train created an imperative to manage food inventory in a way that most commercial kitchens do not.
“My Transcontinental Journey to Explore our Food System” (National Geographic)