Just because food is grown locally doesn’t mean it’s climate-friendly. But for chefs looking to emphasize the latter, it still starts at the source.
This story was produced in collaboration with Civil Eats.
At the height of summer, chef Rob Rubba and his team at Oyster Oyster, a vegetable-first restaurant in Washington, D.C., are preparing for the dwindling of food in the coming winter. It’s a tedious but worthwhile process: drying mushrooms, vegetables, and herbs, making pickles and slaw, and preserving garlic blossoms and coriander seeds in airtight jars before these ingredients vanish with the end of the season.
This may seem like an antiquated concern for chefs in an era of global food distribution systems, but it’s an all-consuming preoccupation for Oyster Oyster, a restaurant named after two ingredients — a bivalve and a mushroom — known for their ecosystem benefits. This radically seasonal, regional restaurant sources its ingredients exclusively from the ocean, climate-adapted farms, and wild plants of the Mid-Atlantic.
“Toward the end of winter, it gets a little… scary and sparse,” admits Rubba. “Come February, we have this very short farm list. It’s just cellared roots and some kales. Making that creative takes a lot of mental energy.” That’s when Oyster Oyster draws heavily from its pantry of foraged wild plants and ingredients preserved from nearby climate-friendly farms. They lend the food “bright, salty, acidic flavor pops throughout the winter” that wouldn’t otherwise be available, and give his food a joyful exuberance that one critic described as “a garden of good eating.”
Rubba, who won the Outstanding Chef award from the James Beard Foundation in 2023, is one of many chefs reenvisioning the farm-to-table movement in the clarifying, urgent light of climate change. At a time when storms, fires, and droughts are lashing the planet with increasing severity, restaurants like Oyster Oyster source ingredients with a heightened due-diligence around their climate and environmental impacts. In doing so, they’re also recognizing that chefs can play a larger role in building food systems able to survive long into the future.
Oyster Oyster’s approach to regional sourcing comes from Rubba’s stark realization that many staples sold in grocery stores and used in most restaurants have wreaked havoc on the ecosystems and livelihoods of people in other countries. Many of the staple “commodities” imported from overseas come from regions once covered by rainforests and other critical ecosystems that stabilize the climate.
Take chocolate, for instance. The majority of the world’s cocoa is sourced from West Africa, often harvested by children on vast plantations linked to widespread deforestation. Sugar comes with its problems, too. Even when grown in the U.S., the burning of sugar cane emits large amounts of earth-warming carbon dioxide, while dusting communities with toxic ash. Also, these foods require fossil fuels to transport them across the ocean and then throughout the U.S. to warehouses, grocery stores, and restaurants. Rubba also avoids domestic foods that have a large environmental toll. This includes meat, a major driver of earth-warming methane pollution, accounting for 60 percent of food-related emissions.
With a bit of due diligence, Rubba has found local substitutes for all these ingredients. “We don’t use a lot of sweeteners in our food, but we source a really good maple syrup from Pennsylvania that is sometimes reduced down to a maple sugar,” he says.
He and his team use alternatives to other staples, too: They source vinegars from Keepwell Vinegar in Pennsylvania, which relies on sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, fruit, and sorghum from nearby farms to prepare vinegar from scratch. They get their salt from Henlopsen, a flaky sea salt from the Delaware coast. They source sunflower and canola oil from Pennsylvania farms. For spices, they work with foragers to gather and preserve Northern spicebush, a shrub native to the eastern U.S. with a delightfully versatile flavor, both fruity and peppery at once. They use a dash of this spice instead of pepper, mixing it with ginger and chiles for a hit of complexity and warmth.
And, just because food is raised locally doesn’t mean it’s grown with climate-friendly practices. “[The farmer] could be spraying with every insecticide, pesticide, fertilizer, and drive a big, stinky diesel truck into my city and sit outside idling for 20 minutes while he unloads all his plastic containers into my restaurant, right?” says Rubba.
This has prompted Rubba to develop deeper relationships with the farms in his network, including an interview process to understand how the food is produced before he buys from a particular farm. Although he sources organic produce, USDA organic certification isn’t his biggest requirement — he’s more interested in the actual farming methods. Certain farming practices and crop varieties can help farms adapt to the erratic, intensified weather patterns and disasters shaking the foundation of U.S. agriculture. Healthy soil can act like a sponge, easily absorbing water during intense flooding and retaining water during times of drought. Some approaches, like agroforestry, can directly fight climate change by drawing down planet-warming carbon.
Rubba visits all the farms that supply the restaurant, asking about their crop rotations, soil health practices, and how the farmworkers are treated. “I love to see the operation, how they do things, what it’s like, and who works there,” he says. “I don’t want to serve food that someone labored over and wasn’t paid correctly for.”
Other climate-conscious restaurants have adopted a similar approach of thinking deeply about the origins of the food they serve. At Carmo, a tropical restaurant and cultural space in New Orleans, building the knowledge and relationships necessary for ethical, regenerative sourcing has been a lifelong project for the restaurant’s co-owners and chefs, Dana and Christina do Carmo Honn. They’ve forged relationships with Gulf Coast shrimpers and Indigenous tribes in the Amazon to support traditional, ecological food systems. These relationships also give each ingredient a layered story rooted in culture, place, and geographies.
“We’re in it for the relationships,” says Dana Honn. “The whole idea of farm-to-table has always been so important, but what I realized is that we’re trying to do origins-to-table–we’re trying to tell the story of where our food came from.”
Chefs can be part of the next chapter of this story, not only by telling the history of a food but also by helping build a sustainable market for its future. This is part of the inspiration behind the Honn’s project Origins: Amazonia, the result of a decades-long relationship formed with Juruna Indigenous communities in the state of Pará, Brazil, whose livelihoods and traditional food systems were upended by a megadam. The project is an ambitious, multidimensional effort to tell the story of the violent destruction of biodiversity and Indigenous land, while also helping support a market for traditional Juruna foods like cassava, which allows the communities to cultivate them once more. By focusing on the richest source of biodiversity in the world — one that affects the entire planet, where deforestation has eradicated at least 20 percent of the rainforest — the Honns hope to help their customers understand what’s at stake there, and by extension, everywhere.
“If there are more people engaged in production of ancestral foods, they actually begin to consume those foods again,” says Honn about the Jurana communities. Many of their traditional plants, like manioc, are also highly adapted to the environment and climate, cultivated over thousands of years. Carmo has been supporting the renewal of these foodways, in part, through a dinner series partly sourced from the Juruna (along with fresh ingredients from the New Orleans area) that also functions as a fundraiser. The money is returned to the Jurana peoples to help restore the agroforestry systems that have long sustained them.
Honn has developed a similar approach to supporting a more sustainable market for Louisiana’s shrinking fishing industry, which has been eroding for decades. The local industry is struggling to compete with cheap imported seafood, which currently accounts for the majority of seafood sold in the U.S. Many New Orleans chefs find it easier to rely on cheaper, imported seafood, readily available through major restaurant distributors like Sysco or Restaurant Depot that source from around the globe. Yet the reliance on imported seafood — at the expense of local seafood — can come with steep consequences.
For instance, shrimp farms in other countries are routinely linked to labor abuses and the destruction of mangroves — a coastal ecosystem critical for adapting to climate change by building carbon-rich soil and buffering against sea-level rise. To address this, Honn has been working with a group of chefs, fishers, and other experts to build back Louisiana’s seafood economy, including shrimp, by developing a more sustainable, local supply chain. They’re developing a program called Full Catch, a set of protocols for harvesting, transporting, and distributing fish from the Gulf of Mexico, including cutting down on food waste by selling and marketing the whole fish.
“When you go to seafood processing houses, they just cut the filet off and throw the carcass in the bin. You have the collars and the cheeks and the pectoral fins and the ribs and everything else that could […] literally just be cooked and put on a plate,” Honn says. “We sell it every night at Carmo and run out of it every night. Really, people love it.”
One of the challenges of this sustainable approach to sourcing is that it can be unpredictable, without a year-round guarantee of ingredients.
Many farmers don’t grow a fixed amount of each crop every year; instead, they experiment and innovate with different crop plans, the varieties of crops grown, methods of building soil health and minimizing fertilizer use, and other variables. In other words, climate-friendly farming can be a bit messy and unpredictable — a system that is designed to be more responsive to climate disruptions and ecosystem fluctuations, building long-term stability, resilience, and high yields.
The restaurants that support these kinds of farms also tend to be highly adaptable, adjusting their menu to reflect the needs of farmers. They source according to the schedule of the crops growing nearby, the waning and waxing seasons. For some chefs, this means keeping in constant touch with farms to know when their crops will be ready, and then adjusting their menu accordingly — rather than relying on a predictable production schedule.
Isaiah Martinez, the chef and owner of Yardy Rum Bar, a Caribbean restaurant in Eugene, Oregon, says he keeps close tabs on local farms. “I’m asking them, ‘When are your peppers going to be in season? When are melons going to be in season? When are you going to have different cucumber varieties? When will you have stone fruit?’” He admits that he’s a bit competitive about this, too; he wants to be the first chef that farmers call when a new crop is ready to be delivered, so he builds strong relationships with them.
“I create a relationship where [farmers] feel like they have to tell me first,” he says. “They’re giving me the first handful of perfect peaches, and I’m putting it on my menu.” This approach is also good for farmers: The peach grows according to its own timeline, and the chef is enthusiastically waiting for it as soon as it is ready. He changes his menu usually every three to four weeks, while making smaller tweaks on a daily basis. “When carrots are not very good, we can do beets, and when beets are not very good, we can do collards.”
For peppers, herbs, lettuces, and gem beets, Martinez goes to Red Tail Organics, a certified organic vegetable farm along Oregon’s Mohawk River that focuses on the often overlooked edges of the farm. Red Tail plants hedgerows of elderberries, Oregon Grape trees, and Cascara trees, native plants that serve as a habitat for wildlife while helping sequester carbon in the soil. They’ve also planted Pacific willow, California incense-cedar, Western red cedar, Ash trees, and Alders along the river that cuts through the farm. Known as a riparian buffer, this prevents erosion, stabilizes the soil, and can absorb storm water, helping the farm adapt to more erratic weather.
Martinez also sources some ingredients from Hummingbird Wholesale, a local distributor in Oregon focused on building a market for regional organic farms that are sustainable in the truest sense of the word. “We have a big, audacious goal that organic becomes the norm in agriculture, as opposed to the 2.5 percent [of U.S. food sales] that it is currently,” says Stacy Kraker, the company’s director of marketing. Hummingbird does this by acting as the missing link between the area’s organic farms, retailers, and restaurants, building a regional supply chain that chefs that quickly tap into. In pursuing what it calls “distributor supported agriculture,” Hummingbird — and chefs like Martinez, who support it — are helping create a local foodshed that nourishes all the life that depends on it, from humans to soil microbes and pollinators.
Hummingbird’s sourcing team considers some of the regional climate stressors, such as prolonged periods of drought, when seeking out farmers. “Some of the farmers we work with are, in fact, dry-land farming, which means that they rely on rain to give them as much moisture as they’re ever going to use,” Kraker says. “So, they’re intentionally choosing to grow crops in the regions that can handle long periods without any rain.”
While Martinez deeply values building direct relationships with farmers, Hummingbird Wholesale allows him to confidently source from nearby organic farms for some ingredients, sparing him a bit of time and research in what can be a lengthy process.
A chef’s vigilant, knowledgeable sourcing can lead to cherishing certain ingredients — and using less of them. Oyster Oyster’s Rob Rubba thinks some foods are best reserved for special occasions, including his restaurant’s namesake bivalve.
His oysters come from Chesapeake Bay, which has lost nearly all of its once-abundant oyster population due to reckless harvesting techniques like dredging. Although Rubba buys from farmers dedicated to sustainably raising Bay oysters, he still sources them in moderation. Part of the idea is simply not taking too much from the earth, especially for ingredients that have historically been extracted like they are an infinite resource.
“I think we have to look at [these oysters] as a luxury,” he says. “It doesn’t mean that they should be limited out of a sense of elitism. I just think in how we consume them — we should just be a little more grateful for them when we do get them.”
Grey Moran is a staff reporter for Civil Eats. Their work has appeared in The Atlantic, Grist, Pacific Standard, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Intercept, and elsewhere. Grey writes narrative-based stories about public health, climate change, and environmental justice, especially with a lens on the people working toward solutions. They live in New Orleans.
