Fine Dining Can’t Go on Like This

 

"This essay is part of What to Eat on a Burning Planet, a series exploring bold ideas to secure our food supply.

Cast your eye across the menus of America’s most celebrated dining rooms, and among the scattering of earthy pastas, garden salads and esoteric proteins, nestled among labnehs and salsa machas, you’ll find them: the water guzzlers.

America is starting to confront the burning realities of climate change, but the seasonal, produce-driven cooking popularized on these shores decades ago remains wedded to thirsty crops such as almonds, pistachios, artichokes, figs, cherries, apples and tomatoes. From Alice Waters’s revered restaurant Chez Panisse and Thomas Keller’s the French Laundry to the Hollywood Boulevard favorite Kismet and Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, they are among the most popular ingredients for chefs advancing the frontiers of taste.

But California, with roughly half of the country’s land dedicated to growing produce, is in trouble. The state is in the midst of a water crisis that can’t be remedied by a few wet, snowy years; in some areas, years of overpumping have depleted aquifers and caused the earth to sink. This means we are hurtling toward a time when farmers may not be able to keep providing the bounty that chefs have come to rely on.

In the new age of chronic drought, chefs will need to adapt. But the transition to a less water-intensive diet need not spell the end of culinary invention. What is required is a reimagining of the types of foods that make for a nourishing and energetic culinary culture — and this is where California, with its sunny history of agriculture and hospitality, can play a leading role. The Golden State won’t have to do it alone. Australia, uncommonly parched and grappling with similar ecological challenges, has already shown how to create excitement about drought-tolerant foods.

Much of California’s mythos is tied to its status as a land of abundance. Over the past 50 years, a new generation of chefs (including Ms. Waters, Mr. Keller, Wolfgang Puck, Dominique Crenn and Nancy Silverton) pioneered a different approach to cooking and eating. The farm-to-table movement, locavorism and the transition to organic produce all owe a debt, in one way or another, to California chefs. And the culturally omnivorous cooking that today spills from the state’s most acclaimed kitchens — all those zhugs and pastrami-jeweled breakfast burritos — is a celebration of California’s bounty and of culinary borrowings.

California’s agricultural sector explicitly positions itself as the guardian of this maximalism. Californian farms feed not only Californians. They supply a good portion of the rest of the country and world, too. California is America’s top producer of almonds, artichokes, carrots, garlic, onions, lettuce, grapes, pistachios and peppers, among other crops. In total, the state’s farmers and ranchers received $55.9 billion for their activities in 2022.

Agriculture is also the thirstiest sector of the state’s economy, accounting for around 80 percent of water used for businesses and homes. And while a significant portion goes to crops such as alfalfa that are used to feed animals, many of the fruits, vegetable and tree nut crops that California farmers plant also require a lot of water. As you might have heard, almonds and pistachios are among the worst offenders, requiring an average of four feet in depth of water per acre of irrigated land. But they’re not alone; apricots, pears, plums and walnuts require more than three feet, on average.

Policies that regulate groundwater use have a significant role to play, but chefs have a unique cultural power to mold consumption habits, and they can help push farmers to switch to less thirsty crops. Restaurants have driven the postwar expansion of popular taste: The kiwis, kales, radishes and radicchios now commonplace in American supermarkets were once highly exotic and difficult to find, but they became popular in part thanks to chefs who opened the public’s eyes to the possibilities of a more adventurous produce basket. Farmers will always respond to the market, but demand follows fashion — and this is where chefs can exert influence.

Drought-tolerant cookery will include some foods that are already familiar: quinoa, squash, arugula. But others we must learn to love are less well known: red orach, a type of amaranth that’s a fine alternative to spinach; rattlesnake beans, a purplish pole bean; tepary beans, which grow in the deserts of the Southwest; mesquite flour, from the mesquite tree; and pigeon peas, a protein-packed legume. Use of these and other drought-tolerant ingredients is not a panacea. But we need a shift in dietary and lifestyle habits to reduce our collective dependence on water-intensive crops. Cuisine that makes smarter use of drought-tolerant produce can be part of this shift.

In California, Indigenous chefs are already concocting memorable dishes with native foods that are often drought resistant. At Wahpepah’s Kitchen in Oakland, the chef Crystal Wahpepah serves semidry sausages in a chokecherry sauce, a pepita green mole with tepary beans and an acorn crepe with warm berry sauce and maple cream. Cafe Ohlone in Berkeley, a venture devoted to the gastronomic traditions of the East Bay’s native Ohlone people, has served bay laurel rabbit mole, acorn soup and chia porridge with huckleberries and black walnuts. Some of these ingredients are wild, but many, such as tepary beans, chokecherries and black walnuts, are a small but growing focus for commercial production.

Beyond these few Native pioneers, however, Californian cuisine has yet to fully grasp the opportunity presented by drought-tolerant foods. This is in marked contrast to Australia, another high-income country with a powerful agricultural sector that is similarly dry and hot and at the mercy of climate change’s ravages.

There fine-dining chefs have embraced naturally drought-tolerant native ingredients so enthusiastically that these foods have become the foundation of a new culinary vernacular. On the website of Melbourne’s Attica, where the $235 tasting menu might include wattle seed cake or smoked emu with warrigal greens, the restaurant proudly declares, “We appreciate a rack of ribs — but ours come from crocs, not cows.” Native ingredients, once seen as quirky rather than the stuff of refined cooking or everyday eating, are breaking out of high-end restaurants and into home kitchens: The finger lime, midyim berry, quandong, bush tomato and Kakadu plum are at the point of becoming available to ordinary Australian consumers as household pantry items and plants for the home garden. A gastronomic revolution is creating space for a revolution in consumption.

Policy has played a role in guiding this evolution. Australia has had a national water initiative, coordinated across federal and state governments since 2004, and it has led farmers to cut back on water use. Strict water restrictions in residential communities, which are not uncommon across big cities like Sydney and Melbourne, have made the average citizen more conscientious about water conservation and drought mitigation. And since the 1990s, a series of pioneering court rulings and legislative interventions on Indigenous Australians’ land rights has led to a deeper cultural understanding of the politics of land use and the continent’s unique plant life. These factors together have created a dining public that seems uniquely receptive to the drought-tolerant native produce basket. It’s taken the determination and creativity of chefs to make the Australian gastronomic revolution real.

There’s no reason the chefs of America, and California in particular, can’t steer a similar shift in culinary preference. The days of abundant peaches, carrots and cherries — of growing thirsty crops in a dry land — may be coming to an end. But the days of plentiful rattlesnake beans, huckleberries and acorns are only just emerging. A drier future need not leave us less sated.

Aaron Timms is a cultural critic working on a book about modern food culture. He grew up in Sydney, Australia." [1]

1. Fine Dining Can’t Go on Like This: Guest Essay. Timms, Aaron.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 30, 2024.