The Health Curve

Feeding The World Without Destroying The Planet - with Chef Kelly Whitaker, James Beard Award-Winner

• Dr. Jason Arora • Season 1 • Episode 18

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How can we feed a growing world without destroying the planet? In this episode of The Health Curve Podcast, host Dr. Jason Arora speaks with Chef Kelly Whitaker, James Beard Award-winning culinary innovator, about the future of food, farming, and sustainability.

Kelly shares his journey from learning traditional food practices in Italy to launching a regenerative grain project spanning 800 acres. He explains how chefs are emerging as key players in transforming food systems—showing that sustainability can align with economic viability while strengthening local communities.

The conversation explores the rise of “net positive” restaurants, the shift from reducing harm to actively regenerating ecosystems, and how these ideas are scaling from small kitchens to national chains. Together, we discuss what this means for food culture, everyday cooking, and the global challenge of building resilient food systems for people and planet.

Speaker 1:

Jason Alvora. Welcome to the HealthCurve Podcast. I'm your host, jason Alvora. Today we're taking on a defining challenge of our time how do we feed the world sustainably? My guest is Chef Kelly Whittaker, a James Beard-nominated chef and food systems pioneer who's reimagining how we grow, source and prepare food, from regenerative agriculture and ancient grains to eliminating waste in the kitchen. Chef Kelly's work offers a blueprint for a food future that's good for both people and the planet. If you care about what we eat and how we'll all eat tomorrow, this episode is for you. Kelly Whittaker, it's a real pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me. A pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. You have a phenomenal, fantastic background. Can you share a bit about your journey from fine dining to food systems and why sustainability became central to your work?

Speaker 2:

Sure, at an early stage, when I had the bug to cook or the itch to cook, I started really simple.

Speaker 2:

I started with an Italian family, and that led me down a little bit of path to working in Italy, and it was early, though, that I knew that I was looking for something just more than just like how to learn how to cook.

Speaker 2:

I really thought about the notion of taking care of people and serving people, so I thought a lot about the stories of food, why things were done the way they were done, and that first introductory into Italy, when you're hanging out with the Italian grandmothers and they're pulling stuff from the backyard, that became something that I said well, that kind of makes a lot of sense to me.

Speaker 2:

And, coming from the US at the time, there was just kind of a little bit of a light bulb moment, where I got interested in organizations like Slow Food that really talk about local food systems. So that's where I kind of caught the bug, if you will, to bridge between my craft learning about how to run and operate restaurants which is a whole other thing. A lot of cooks don't do that and then on to like really seeking out chefs and grandmothers that were into impact and how do we impact our communities, how do we impact the land and and and everything and bring that and carry it through to the plate food is such a cultural thing, right, and we all need it.

Speaker 1:

In many places and for most of our time it's been a chance to slow down and connect and engage our senses with something which is sort of meditative in itself. Just so many benefits beyond just feeding ourselves. But when we start to think about the challenge of feeding the planet sustainably, that's where this really came into focus for me, where I thought, okay, there are food trends that come and go, but sustainability, that's a necessity here. So how do you look at that question? How do we feed the human population, the growing human population, sustainably? Given food is such an innate thing for us, it's so cultural. Are we going to try and change the way people prepare food or eat? How do you think about an approach that's scalable and nourishing at the same time?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a great question. I love that you said sustainability is a necessity, because this is the first step into tackling a bigger idea, because right now a lot of sustainability is viewed as a luxury and so, but now it's turning into a little bit more of a survival, if you will. And to your question of like, how do we do this? And I really think you know when you start to look at the idea of like, shopping at a farmer's market or buying more sustainable food, I think everyone has an idea of what that looks like. But I think it starts with people. I think it starts with understanding the ways that things were before, because early on, before sort of industrialization and this idea that we have to feed a bunch of people and this is the only way to do it, we had these sort of regional and localized food systems that worked for a very long time, and so I think it really is sort of breaking, and it food systems that work for a very long time, and so I think it really is sort of breaking and it is currently happening.

Speaker 2:

Now this is being broken up. People are thinking more about local food. Grocery stores are carrying food supply chain isn't just shipping things from across the water. That doesn't make the most sense anymore, whether it's for sustainability reasons or not. And you could argue that that makes sense for sustainability If you run an airline company, maybe it, or you're shipping things by plane. It's more sustainable to actually just grow them closer to home. So, yeah, so there's a lot of those things that are happening and I think that we're in this phase now of coming to that realization that this can be a little more efficient for time and for people, for planet.

Speaker 1:

So we've gone from hey, we can't feed everyone, so we've started to grow. We've taken the approach of these monocrops and monocultures and we just need to produce a lot of food. It doesn't matter how we get there, as long as it fills bellies. That's helped fuel lots of problems. We managed to feed everyone, but people don't eat the healthiest things. It's really damaged the integrity of the soil. It's very wasteful. It's contributing to climate change. So we are now more enlightened about these things. Where do we go from here? We've got to try and ensure people can eat healthier food, locally grown, naturally grown, so that it doesn't feel chronic disease, but at the same time, we've got to do that at scale. Where do we start?

Speaker 2:

Well, I can't speak for the entire world, but I can speak for my role as a chef, as a restaurant, as a leader in my community. A lot of times, what starts as a food trend becomes the thing that ends up in the house, if you will, and so me looking at my platform or looking at my restaurants, or having a conversation with our guests on a nightly basis. These things really do start to move the needle and I've seen it, and I've seen not only guests try to replicate things in their homes, but you obviously see large companies following the chef. They're looking at food trends as well. And if sustainability is cool and I like to say one of my projects, hey Kiddo, we say it's good and fun, because a lot of good restaurants aren't fun and a lot of fun.

Speaker 2:

Restaurants aren't good or sustainable.

Speaker 1:

I've got young kids, so I've experienced both.

Speaker 2:

There's this notion that the two can't coexist, and I think that's really these trends, these brands, and I hate to say it, but it does start with my role as a chef and a restaurateur. And you vote with your dollars. So if I'm supporting my local farmers and fishermen fisherwomen, and supporting them, there's a trickle effect.

Speaker 1:

Tell us a bit more about all these initiatives that you're involved in and that you lead that coalesce around this goal.

Speaker 2:

Sure, I mean, the biggest being grains. So when I was cooking in Los Angeles, I was really focused on the water. I wanted to work for chefs that were driving sustainability around our oceans. When I moved back to Colorado and there are no oceans, that became a little bit of a barrier. But I also thought about what is the ocean of the land, if you will?

Speaker 2:

And so about a decade ago, almost at this point, I approached some farmers in Southern Colorado who were on a regenerative farm and they had a cover crop of rye. And I approached them and I said, hey, would you mind planting our varieties of wheat that we can use in the restaurant in rotation, instead of just the rye that they were currently growing? And that really set off everything. And that started on 50 acres and we just finished our planting at 800 acres, all organic and regenerative. And we're doing this from the private sector, we're doing this from a neighborhood restaurant. This isn't big corporate. We've had this type of impact in the space of grains and now we just started a corn project as well, where we took three varieties of heirloom corn on 20 acres and I just hope to see that at 2,000 in the near future here.

Speaker 1:

And that takes me back to travels around the world, including Italy, where you go and you can see where everything, or most of what you're about to eat, is being grown in the garden in the back, and I just think that's the dream. I would love to be able to do that. People do it at home, of course, to some degree, but when it comes to the restaurant business, it doesn't tend to happen more. Why exactly is that? Why is this more of a niche thing than a more mainstream thing today?

Speaker 2:

Largely convenience. Maybe it's like the simplest we have access to everything we want, so we use it. Running a restaurant's hard the business you know. You hear about thin margins and high failure rate as well.

Speaker 2:

High failure rate, and so it seems like the easy route, it seems like the convenient route, but when you start thinking about these concepts around, what's better for the bottom line in a business than reducing waste? If you reduce waste, when I started teaching food waste in our restaurants, our food cost dropped 10% while supporting local farmers. So there's this notion that you know we just have to stop for a second and just take a step back and get out of the convenience factor just a little bit to see that a lot of these ideas and concepts are actually more sustainable for people and the planet.

Speaker 1:

Really, in all of that, how far is this going in terms of other chefs and restauranteurs?

Speaker 2:

Is that the right term? Yeah, restauranteurs.

Speaker 1:

Following your example in this and understanding the methodology and realizing. Actually this doesn't hurt me in any way. In fact, this helps me, improves the quality of what I offer, is more sustainable, improves my bottom line, et cetera. How far has this spread thus far?

Speaker 2:

I mean, I think it's gone all the way up to the sweet greens of the world at this point. So from neighborhood to sweet green. But we look at it a little bit differently. There is this idea that there are zero waste restaurants, right, and we've sort of taken this notion a lot further in what I call like net positive. So I think we're in a phase right now where the neighborhood restaurant is reducing harm. There's maybe sourcing better, maybe they're using a little less plastic. So we are in this era where we're starting to understand compostable like that.

Speaker 2:

But what we're trying to do and what we're trying to show groups and corporations, that net positive is just like a different it's. It's actually, instead of just you reducing harm, it is actually giving back. And so this is to the people that grow the food, its ingredients, like, if you think about an oyster that filters water, they've actually used this in New York to like try to clean out the water. There they're not harvesting but just putting large oysters in, because bivalves clean water. So this is an idea of a net positive ingredient.

Speaker 2:

The more oysters you consume, the cleaner the water in theory will be. The more oysters you consume, the cleaner the water in theory will be. So it's kind of this idea that so we look at net positive ingredients, we apply these ideas to our staff and so we're trying to take it a step further and I hope that if there are five net positive restaurants, if you will, or bars, or kitchens in a community, we do believe that there's a ripple effect, because the person who worked at the fine dining restaurant we've seen goes and opens a bakery and decides to use maybe a little bit of heirloom grain or maybe ferment something. So there is this notion that it can spread throughout the community and do a lot of good.

Speaker 1:

We'll get back to this conversation in just a moment, but if you're finding this episode helpful, here's a quick ask. Take a second to follow or subscribe to the Health Curve podcast wherever you're listening, and if someone else in your life would benefit from this episode or any of the others you've heard, please send it that way. All right, let's get back to it. Chefs are often seen as artists, and perfecting and advancing your art in itself is not easy, and it feels like, at first glance, that would occupy all of your mind and your energy. How do you blend culinary innovation with sustainability and ecological responsibility at the same time, like? How do you do like in the kit when you're in the kitchen? Yeah, what goes through your mind?

Speaker 2:

Well, first, I mean we make space for the people that are in the company at the Wolf's Taylor.

Speaker 2:

I always said that the first story might be mine, it might be my past, might be my travels, might be how I learned, but I wanted, always wanted, to make space for everyone else's ideas. I was like this is the only way we're going to get the success we're going to get. And I have a director of sustainability, mara King. She's brilliant, she's our fermenter, she's our food saver, she's I mean, she's brilliant, and I get to work with her every day, and so it's a collective thing to come into and say, okay, I can put my like chef ego aside, or and let make space, because our company operates off of that and, like I said, I think we've found a lot of success doing that. We some of our best ideas are the accidents. You know, we try a lot of things that are unconventional and then, when we see it work, we try to scale that idea so the science world that's an accident in the lab that leads to the invention of something like penicillin.

Speaker 1:

Right, it's often some of the best inventions come that way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I like to think that IDEST, like our company, is the research and development for our entire industry. It's what I tell our employees every day. We're not going to stop changing menus, we're not going to stop trying new things. We've won Michelin stars, we've won James Beards, and the next day we'll change everything. We just we're one of those that really believe the hospitality industry is a conduit for a lot of change in a lot of communities, and so, if we can crack the code, we hope to be a part of that conversation when we do.

Speaker 1:

I want to go back to grains, and I know you're doing some very interesting things in the grain space. Grains get a lot of bad press these days. Why are regional and ancient grains critical to a regenerative food system, and can you tell us a bit more about what you're doing in that space?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So when you think about a 500-acre regenerative farm and maybe, like the one we started growing on, you're rotating crops to build soil, you know, on a very basic level, you've got to let the land recover. A lot of modern wheats have really short root systems and what everyone's, I think, finding in the world right now when people are getting sick from bread and that it really does matter what the soil is before, so I really look below the soil to see what it is again we should be serving in our kitchen. So our work now, like I said, extends in five different areas of Colorado and we've actually taught this model in Shanghai to a group of restaurateurs and farmers that are growing in Western China. I got a first bag of flour from them a few months ago, and so it is something that we've seen work and start to work in other communities. So we are trying to sort of replicate that, if you will.

Speaker 2:

But I think regional grain economy is important. If you think about, maybe, a cover crop that might go to feed at the end of the day, if you're just using it for soil or you might most of the time it would just go to feed that might be 10 cents a pound. Beautiful heirloom grains could get 85 cents a pound. So we look at as a value for the farmer, we look at something that rotates really well and works within the farm and just kind of, if you think about that holistically, it just makes sense do all chefs understand agriculture in this way, because it feels like you understand the food supply chain really well.

Speaker 1:

I know also you are an entrepreneur and so you have to understand that from that perspective, but this allows you to understand how you can change the system based on your place in it. Is this normal amongst chefs that they understand this?

Speaker 2:

I don't think it's as normal. I think what I don't often talk about the other side of this, which is, do we really understand if you're a chef and you shop at a farmer's market, again, I don't think you understand that 90% of what Colorado grows is sugar beets and dank corn our little kitchens, if you will and we're thinking about our ingredients and our mise en place, and so we're in that and I think that chefs do understand that side of it, like I'm buying this really beautiful fish or I can get this ingredient. But I'm sure we understand the scale of the other side of the conversation and there are plenty of people in this space much smarter than me and you have foundational chefs like Alice Waters and Chef Dan Barber. They've really opened up the world to understanding local food systems. But I don't think our industry is as aware as the other side of how really big maybe the negative inputs are.

Speaker 1:

We've done a previous episode on how CPG companies can influence things in both directions. So they will do the research on what consumers want. They'll then talk to farmers about what they need and the business gets done. When you think about the food supply chain, you're a part of that as well, as a chef, as a restaurateur. Where else do you see the important changes needing to happen practically from a sustainability perspective? What else can be done at first before we can start changing the system? On a larger scale.

Speaker 2:

First thing, I mean you want to go up to a farmer and ask them, because a lot of farmers might just show up with beets or grow this, but really helping it work in relationship to the farmer and to the land. But I think again, breaking up the larger scale systems and being more regional, if you will. I sell flour in Colorado. I'm not afraid to ship that same flour to New York. But I think that these localized, little, more regional food systems really go a long ways into the next step of. And if you think about market disruption too, when Ukraine and we're going through this thing with grains and flour, the price of my grains didn't change to everyone, so there is some stability in communities for that as well.

Speaker 1:

Gotcha, your inspiration came from places like Italy right In your travels. Where else have you seen more sustainable approaches to feeding people and what inspiration have you taken from that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think we are a fast food nation, right, so convenience nation, most, yeah, so most communities are rooted in maybe a little bit more food tradition. It goes back further. So I learned from every community and and again, we're not necessarily wrong and there's a lot of things happening across the world in many communities where food has been completely disrupted.

Speaker 2:

But I tend to again kind of go back to the home a lot with some of these ideas I was sharing earlier. One of my first awards as a chef was a award in innovation and at the time I only had my first restaurant, which was Basta, and I opened this apartment complex in Boulder and I didn't think anybody would eat there. So you can only have one hood, so one vent, and it was either wood fire or gas. And I chose wood fire and at the time I won this innovation award. I had one wood fire oven and a grain stone mill and I was like that's innovation, that's forward thinking. And again I look for these communities, that sort of look back or have preserved something in there. The way they approach food or the simplicity of it often is a really beautiful way to exist.

Speaker 1:

Are there other examples of that?

Speaker 2:

that you no-transcript dish is actually aqua pazza, which is a neapolitan neapolitana, if you're in naples, but naples, italy, where, where my first job was, and I'm combining these ideas to have a conversation about this. But I both represent these sort of slow down techniques, but I've really seen it everywhere. I've seen a lot in Asia, a lot in Europe, all over. I was just lucky enough to go to the MAD conference in Copenhagen. You know that Rene Rezepi puts on at Noma and all the best food thinkers in the world are there, you know. But Copenhagen is one of those interesting communities that took a turn from industrial to now 80% bicycle and you can start to see how food and architecture start to change the city and how they work, how food and architecture start to change the city and how they work. So those communities over there are a great example of starting to be the example of a way to think about food and how to serve it.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. There are things about Europe I really miss. It's where I grew up. When you go to these conferences and when you network amongst your community of chefs, are there many like you who are trying to innovate in this way, like thinking about sustainability, like that's one of their top one to three things that they're that occupies their mind in terms of how they do their work, or is this still a niche part of your industry?

Speaker 2:

I think it's niche and I'm not saying that because I think I'm an outlier. There are incredible people working on food in this country. All over the United States, Every region has really amazing people that are changing and looking at how it's grown and how it's served. So I'm very not alone in this, but it's specifically niche. It's still somewhat niche.

Speaker 1:

Where do we need to go from here? Because people like you are doing amazing work work uncovering these new ways in which we can approach the sustainability issue as we look to feed more people in a more healthy way. What needs to happen next for us to be able to do this at scale, Even just if we're to start in the US? What needs to happen next?

Speaker 2:

Well, we need to again. The most negative side of probably climbing this whole conversation is we grow all of our food for animals and we have feedlots and these that you know. This is. This is the biggest shift is we're not growing food for people, necessarily, and we're not treating the land the way it's supposed to. So it's a big disruption and thinking about that and so, like I said, in colorado, we we have these bubbles and hopefully our stake in this is getting a little bit bigger and people, the farms that are growing regenerative and organic and working with the land, are getting more and more.

Speaker 2:

So I'm hoping that again we are driving the demand for this movement and that we'll continue to see that. But again it goes back to again just the story of food and where it's from too. So it's kind of hopping around, but it's hard for me to just look at farming and you know we do all this for people, right, Like we're in a planet and all these practices, everything I'm talking about, and so often people are like, oh, you're a chef, this makes so much sense and I'm like, well, no, I'm just a chef trying to protect the humans that live on the planet.

Speaker 2:

That's all this is so. I always try to bring it back to the human conversation, the human story.

Speaker 1:

And that's what the podcast is all about health through the lens of the human condition understanding. We're all facing these similar challenges together. If we want to improve human health, we need to think about this collectively. Right For the people that are listening, we think about home chefs, and when I go back from this amazing conference that we're at now in Aspen and the next meal I cook for my family, how should I start thinking about this at home, because that's probably going to be one of the ways in which we can have potentially more influence.

Speaker 2:

You know, that's always a good question, but I think one just maybe thinking about where the food is from is one. The other is if you find yourself overbuying every week in the grocery store, I mean it's unbelievable. There's this new home trash can called the Mill and it's hooked up to an app and I just got one because I wanted to test, like, what would this like be like in a restaurant? Right, and it's not producing compost, it's just breaking down food waste. But it measures it and you're, you start to go, wow, like I'm. I think about this and it's surprising how much ends up in the bin, you know. So I think just being a little more aware of, like you know, waste just how much waste there is in the yeah, you know.

Speaker 1:

So I think, just being a little more aware of, like you know, waste, just how much waste there is in that, yeah the people that are working on that.

Speaker 2:

You know. They say we only need 15 reduction. It would change the world just 15 yeah, just 15 less wasteful. If everyone was just, it's not 50 there's enough food to feed everyone in the world, but we don't, because most, a lot of it ends up in the band. So yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

I just look at my fridge and I think, no, we're not going to do the next food shop yet. We can be creative with what's left in the fridge and sometimes we just come up with new sort of mishmash meals, which my kids are often very complimentary about. But you know, there you go. But we sometimes love it and we just think, oh, I would never have put these three things together if this wasn't all I had left in the fridge.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and that helps like reduce your door dash bill too. Exactly the one night of eating the things out of the fridge. Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

What's the last takeaway you would give our listeners about this topic, even if it's not just about how they do things at home in the kitchen or at the grocery store? But what can people do more to help support this movement?

Speaker 2:

I just think it's so loaded because I'm on so many fronts. But I think supporting good food that means in the restaurant. Go to the restaurant where you know that they're supporting their local food community. Buy the thing that supports your local community. It just goes such a long ways to just replace some of the other stuff a little bit and support good food, support good restaurants.

Speaker 1:

And now for our listeners. You understand how far that goes. This affects the way the food is produced, the ripple effect to other communities and the quality of the food that ends up on your plate. Cost, waste, all these things. So, chef Kelly Whitaker, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been enlightening and I hope our listeners will take a lot away from this in the way that they approach food and sustainability. Thank you,