'Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability'

Sometimes words become so promiscuous, so popular, that they feel more like shape-shifters rather than signifiers, which makes it crucial to pause and to ponder what they mean and to whom. Editors Carole Counihan and Susanne Højlund take on such a word in Chefs, Restaurants, and Culinary Sustainability. Published by the University of Arkansas Press, this book does not seek to define food sustainability in the singular. Instead, it charts and celebrates the many directions and dimensions that sustainability—as concept, as practice, as ideal—means to those with great influence within food systems: chefs.

It was a treat to have been invited to contribute a chapter to this important collection. “From New York's Silverbird to Santa Fe's Corn Dance Café: Sustaining Indigenous Restaurants” recovers the history of New York City’s first (and tragically only) Indigenous restaurants and introduces what I call Indigenous culinary sustainability.