E219: Training Chefs for Food Advocacy Work

Does the term Policy Advocate conjure up the image of a chef? Today we're speaking with Katherine Miller, Founding Executive Director of the Chef Action Network, and author of the book "At The Table, The Chef's Guide to Advocacy". Katherine formerly served as the Vice President of Impact at the James Beard Foundation and serves as an adjunct professor at the Culinary Institute of America. She's worked for 20 years at the intersection of policy, politics, and social impact, and says chefs have an important role to play in this space.

Interview Summary

Chefs are more and more visible in this advocacy and policy space. I assume that they've been doing this for a long time, but you see more attention to it now, which is nice. Let's talk about sort of its fundamental concept of chefs being involved in the food system at this level. Why do you think chefs and other people in the restaurant industry are equipped to make the food system more just and sustainable?

I think that chefs are some of the greatest translators, right? Chefs, as we know them, are the people who cook us delicious meals or host us for events in our lives. But in reality they are taking the ingredients from the farmers and producers and fishermen and translating them to the plate to make them interesting and enjoyable for all of us, right? And the food system is incredibly complicated. It is deeply rooted. The root system overlaps and is incredibly complex. It's off-putting for people to think about how they might get involved in food policy or even understand the different controls on our food. Chefs can really help tell a better story, right? They can take the what's happening in the field and on the boats, and then they can put it on our plate, and they can help explain to us the stories behind all the food, how it's grown, the things that we should be interested in, the decisions that we should make differently. I think they're the ultimate translators and making the world a more delicious place.

That makes perfect sense! What inspired you to write your book, "At The Table"?

I've been working with the chef community for 10 years, first as a consultant and the founder of the Chef Action Network, and then working with the James Beard Foundation as the first vice president of advocacy and impact for the foundation. Then, after leaving the foundation, continued to work with organizations who are really interested in helping chefs step into policy arenas on things like healthy soils or food waste or medically-tailored meals. All those things are impacted by the policies that our state houses and our federal houses. And it's hard. The restaurant industry is enormous. There are 11 million or so restaurant employees. There are tens of thousands of people who are considered chefs or leaders in the kitchen, and we weren't going to reach them one Chef Bootcamp for Policy and Change at a time. You know, when I left the foundation in 2020 at the sort of tail end of the first year of COVID, we had over 1000 people on the waiting list to get into the Chef's Bootcamp for Policy and Change. We knew we were on to something, but we didn't really have the capacity to expand at scale. So, you know the great thing about a book is it can reach many chefs, culinary students, restaurant workers, farmers. And that's the other thing - I think there's a sort of duality to this idea of chef. It's really anybody who's a food system leader, anybody who is really interested in how the policies control our food system. I'm very excited to have a book out because I wanted this message and the examples and the tips and tools to reach the biggest audience that it could.

Boy, it's nice to hear there's so much interest among chefs and work of this type. I'm interested in whether this kind of thing is finding its way into culinary education. You have a position at the Culinary Institute of America, highly visible place. Is this the sort of thing that's showing up in discussions in culinary schools and classes and the training people receive?

More and more. I really credit Robert Egger for so many things in life, the great food system advocate and co-founder of DC Central Kitchen. But Robert was one of the first to write an op-ed that was like, culinary education should include advocacy, right? Because in culinary schools all over the country and all over the world, we teach people about flavor, we teach people about dish composition, we teach people about cleaning their station, and being a