My name is Chris Yang.
I'm the editor-in-chief of Lucky Peach magazine.
I wanted to give you guys a little bit of an update on something we talked about last
year.
Last year I was up on the stage because I had this crackpot scheme.
And what is mad if not a place for crazy idiots with crackpot schemes to present their ideas?
And that idea was something that my friend Peter and I had come up with that we wanted
to undermine a notion that's been spreading throughout the restaurant world, that eating
at restaurants, that cooking at restaurants, that being someone who works at a restaurant
is intrinsically bad for the environment.
So we zoomed in on one aspect, maybe the most important aspect of the environment, climate
change, and examined two restaurants.
We examined Prime Meats in Brooklyn, run by Frank Falcinelli and Frank Castranovo.
And we examined NOMA.
And we made these guys open up their businesses to us, made them show us what it takes to
put a meal on the table, and we determined exactly the effect that these restaurants
had on global warming, on climate change.
And what I came away with, the conclusion I came away with more than anything after
this study, was that the outlook is not so dire, that with a little bit of effort, restaurants
can not only be fine to eat at, fine for the environment, but can be leaders for the rest
of the world.
They can lead the way for environmental change, for environmental stewardship.
And NOMA demonstrated that immediately.
And we told Renee and Peter Kreiner that we had found that a majority of the power at
NOMA came from coal-powered plants.
They sent a couple of emails, they made a few phone calls, and they changed it with
a sustainable energy source and reduced their carbon emissions by 30% instantly.
30% is good, and 30% is enough to inspire me and a couple of other guys to start a nonprofit
called Zero Food Print, the idea being that we will take restaurants, beginning with a
small group, and ask them to open themselves up in the same way that Prime Meats and NOMA
did, to show us how their businesses are run, how their food is cooked, where their deliveries
come from, and then to take it one step further and commit to having no carbon footprint,
to being completely carbon neutral.
And so I know a lot of these terms I'm throwing around are kind of abstract.
The idea of climate change and global warming is kind of an abstract thing.
It's hard when you're sitting in a room, especially like this one where it's so fucking hot, to
notice one degree up or down, but we know that one degree up or down can make all the
difference in the world.
And when I say things like offsets, I know that it seems like an abstract idea that like
something somewhere way over there can affect how your restaurant is run and how your restaurant
can affect the environment.
But I'll give you one concrete example.
In the more rural parts of Africa, a lot of the cooking is still done over open fires
that are burned indoors.
Not only do these fires contribute to climate change, pollute the air, but they're also
a significant health risk to the people who are living inside, cooking with smoke everywhere,
trapped, breathing this in.
One way that we'll offset carbon emissions created by a restaurant is to replace those
open fires with clean-burning natural gas cook stoves.
So not only will it clean the air, but it'll remove
that health risk to these people.
So it'll improve the quality of the air and the quality of life of these people.
And so the first two restaurants, obviously, that are going to be part of this zero-food
print group are Noma and Prime Meats, or I'm sorry, not Prime Meats.
The Franks New Restaurant, which I'm announcing for them coming soon.
Let me put that clearly.
Beginning this year, beginning now, beginning today, with all of us sitting here, Noma will
no longer contribute to climate change.
And from day one of the Franks New Restaurant, neither will they.
The ideas and topics that we talk about at MAD are important to all of us.
What is cooking?
Guts.
These are things that we care about.
But to be totally honest, the reason why we come here over and over again to Copenhagen
is because we look up to the chefs that speak on the stage, and we look up to the ones that
organize this.
And I really believe that if the Renees and Franks and Daves and Alexes and Mosimoes pick
up the torch and light the way for us, the rest of us will follow.
So that's my sincere hope for Zero Food Print, that we can follow their lead.
