Accustomed to living their professional lives in the background, chefs are increasingly embracing their ability to put health and sustainability at the centre of the plate. Nick Hughes reports.
“Twenty years ago no chefs were talking about food systems. Now we have a lecture on food systems by a chef.” – Tim Lang, Centre for Food Policy, City St George’s, University of London, May 2025.
The chef in question was Thomasina Miers, Masterchef winner, cookbook writer and Wahaca co-founder, who prior to Lang’s wry observation had offered a sprawling summary of the challenges facing our food system – from the dangers of diets high in ultra-processed foods to the damage to soil health caused by monocultures.
Miers delivered her ‘tour de force’ at this year’s City St George’s Food Policy Symposium which explored the thesis: ‘Professional cookery – the missing ingredient for food systems transformation.’ Along with every speaker on the day, Miers supported the notion that if not definitively the missing ingredient, professional cookery is certainly a missing ingredient in food systems transformation. Or at least it has been for too long.
Things are starting to change however. Miers is part of a new wave of chef proprietors putting sustainability at the heart of their personal brands. Others include Doug McMaster (Silo), Chantelle Nicholson (Apricity) and Tom Hunt (Poco), who also writes a weekly food waste column in The Guardian and co-facilitated a workshop on sustainable diets at the symposium.
Wahaca was one of the first restaurants to put carbon labels on its menus. More recently, it has worked to increase the proportion of plant-based dishes, leaning into seasonal produce and heirloom varieties and embracing indigenous Mexican cuisine which, as Miers explained, was mostly plant-based. It has also cut down on beef and committed to source regenerative beef from Grassroots Farming for those dishes that remain.
Miers explained how chefs at Wahaca are taught about where their ingredients come from and how they are grown. “If you’ve got trained cooks, if you educate them well, they can be clever with food and you can make something that tastes delicious, is also nutritious and does better things for farming and nature and people.”
Grassroots Farming co-founder James Evans has previously spoken about the value in having customers, including restauranteurs and chefs, visit Grassroots farms to learn about regenerative farming techniques and how they benefit ecosystems. “I don’t know whether we’ve been kept apart on purpose or for no reason, but I think what we’ve learned is by us understanding your industry, and hopefully you understanding our industry, there are huge strides that can be made,” he told the audience at a recent Footprint forum on regenerative agriculture.
Chefs have also been key in trying to nudge Wahaca customers away from its ever-popular guacamole because of the high environmental cost of growing avocadoes (often grown in monocultures overseas that rely heavily on irrigation). Wahaca now serves a chef-inspired Smoky Sonoran ‘Hummus’ with chickpeas, roasted cauliflower hearts (which are often discarded when preparing cauliflowers) carrots, guajillo and herbs, drizzled with chilli oil and served with tortilla chips.
Agents of change
Miers’s personal passion for sustainability is obvious when she speaks and it clearly permeates her professional life. But thanks to the democratisation of environmental data over recent years, chefs don’t need to work for a brand with sustainability in its DNA to be agents of food systems change.
In many catering settings, chefs can now see in real time how tweaks they make to a recipe will impact its carbon footprint. That makes them part of the central cast of characters for businesses wanting to offer customers tasty, nutritious, low-carbon menu options. “Chefs influence food trends, they shape menus,” Rebecca Tobi, senior business and investor engagement manager at The Food Foundation, told Footprint for a recent report on net-zero. “If you can get chefs really on board with thinking about how you use some of these new ingredients to make plant-rich dishes tasty and appealing, that’s a really powerful lever.”
Meaty curriculum
Numerous speakers at the symposium made the point that systemic change has to start at the bottom of the career ladder with chef training in schools and colleges. Vince Kelly has been a professional chef for 30 years and runs the Mayor of London’s Hospitality Skills Academy at Capital City College (formerly Westminster Kingsway College). He noted how the technical element of the culinary curriculum is still heavily meat-orientated due to its roots in classical French cuisine. “We marinate the chicken, we brine the pork, we smoke the fish; but then we take a carrot, we peel a third of the nutrients off of it, boil some water, tip the water down the drain, and then serve the carrot in a bit of butter and salt.”
Kelly has developed an initiative called ‘Healthy plate, healthy planet’ with the aim of getting chefs to think more deeply about sustainability and nutrition, and make dishes more plant-centric with vegetables as their star. He explained there is a hard-nosed commercial rationale behind the idea as well as a moral purpose. “Vegetables are cheaper. If we’re using lots more vegetables and pulses and beans in our dishes it doesn’t mean we don’t have to have meat, we still have meat there and the quality of the meat can be so much better. That’s where we have to strike the balance.”
Kelly also stressed the importance of front-of-house staff in supporting a shift to sustainable diets – “they’re the ones that are going to sell the vegetables for us in the first place; [….] it needs to be a full hospitality programme”.
Beyond the college environment, Juliane Caillouette-Noble, managing director at The Sustainable Restaurant Association, noted the importance of ongoing chef training and development within commercial kitchens. She namechecked BaxterStorey, CH&Co and Restaurant Associates among the businesses that are offering “really strong on the job training” with an emphasis on sustainability.
School shift
The seeds of a revolution are also being sown in schools. The charity Chefs in Schools has now put over 130 trained chefs into school kitchens, including some who have worked in Michelin star restaurants. Co-founder Nicole Pisani explained how the charity’s training programme focuses on areas like nutrition and seasonality, but also on the often overlooked subject of procurement and how to source good food within the constraints of a limited school budget. That sometimes means schools within a federation or local neighbourhood coming together and using their combined scale to source high quality, local ingredients at the best possible price. (Miers, who is a trustee of Chefs in Schools, had earlier noted how trained restaurant chefs working in schools also have an ability to pivot quickly and work with different ingredients when the price of a certain item spikes.)
Olukemi Atijosan, managing director of the school food consultancy Eagle Solutions and a member of the London Food Board, added that school chefs and cooks (the terms were used interchangeably throughout the day but it was generally agreed that chefs are those with control over menus and mostly have professional qualifications) can also be champions of food waste reduction, for example, by using cuts of meat including offal that are often discarded. Through her work in the community, Atijosan explained how she encourages secondary school chefs to mix liver with mince when they are cooking for year seven and eight children, particularly girls who are at risk of becoming anaemic when they start secondary school.
Returning to the theme of culinary training, Atijosan said it’s vital to incorporate “all the things that make up our food system” like nutrition and the impact of climate change. “Then [chefs] will feel confident to be able to stand up and educate and advocate for these things.”
Armed with such knowledge, and with the support of their employees, chefs really could turn out to be the food systems change-makers of the future.
