The Blue Plate: A Food Lover's Guide to Climate Chaos

James Beard Award Finalist 2025, "Food Issues and Advocacy" Category

Winner, Gold Award, IBPA Book Awards

Do you really know what’s for dinner? The Blue Plate is the perfect dinner companion for food lovers who also care about the planet.  

Ecologist Mark Easter offers a detailed picture of the impact the foods you love have on the earth. Organized by the ingredients of a typical dinner party, including seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and fruit pie with ice cream, each chapter examines the food through the lens of the climate crisis. Not a cookbook, but instead, gathered like guests around the table, you will find the stories of these foods: the soil that grew the lettuce, the farmers and ranchers and orchardists who steward the land, the dairy and farm workers and grocers who labor to bring it to the table. Each chapter reveals the causes and effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the social and environmental impact of out-of-season and far-from-home demand.

What can you do to eat more sustainably? Food lovers everywhere will be happy to know that the answer is not necessarily a plant-based diet. For each food group, Easter offers not recipes but low-carbon, in-season alternatives that make your favorite foods not only more sustainable but also more delicious.

The first step, however, is an understanding of how food is grown, produced, harvested, and shipped. In stories both personal and entertaining, the author offers a full understanding of what’s for dinner.

Foreword: From Nice Ingredients to Collective Economic Regeneration

My relationship to food systems has veered wildly, with many highs and lows, but ultimately the shift to regeneration has given my life hope and meaning.

I became a chef in an improbable way, to say the least. I was a line cook at a good restaurant and, on a lark, my wife and I made arrangements to sublet a Guatemalan snack cart. I prepared ingredients for a special kind of taco that we’d serve on a Thursday night—the cart was parked near the bars on Friday and Saturday—and we arranged to borrow it the next Thursday for $125.

This was the first of many instances of creating opportunities with limited resources. New media was just beginning, and this oddball food truck went viral (or the 2008 equivalent). There was a line before I set foot in the truck, and after a few fever-pitched Thursday nights, we made arrangements to move into a run-down Chinese restaurant a couple blocks away. Journalists would later refer to this as a “pop-up.”

Mission Street Food felt like the start of an indie-restaurant movement with a new theme menu, new co-chef, and a new charitable beneficiary every Thursday and Saturday. My wife joked that it was like planning a wedding twice a week. We had lines down the block and were able to keep managing all the chaos for weeks. The San Francisco Chronicle referred to it as “The Most Influential Restaurant of the Past Decade.”

While we were sending all the profits to a local food bank each week, and building community in the industry, I did not consider myself a food activist. We were having fun and were definitely sourcing more from the Asian market than the farmers market. Even as the restaurant evolved into a permanent pop-up called Mission Chinese Food, it was more about breaking down boundaries than raising the bar on the ingredients or focusing on social impact. After gaining traction in our Chinese restaurant within another Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, my co-founder, the great chef Danny Bowien, pushed us to open a location in Manhattan. We had only $55,000 saved up and signed a lease on a Thai takeout window attached to a plywood beer garden. Miraculously, Mission Chinese was named Restaurant of the Year by the New York Times for Szechuan-influenced dishes like Kung Pao Pastrami. But while the food was mashing up techniques across cuisines and price points and making a statement about class and cultural capital, it was just as disconnected from agriculture as most of the food economy.

That year, while Danny was working a hundred hours a week and becoming a celebrity chef, my wife and I celebrated the birth of our daughter, Aviva. Becoming parents really shifted our priorities and we dedicated ourselves to steering our industry toward climate solutions. We began to research both the scale of the climate impacts and the immense opportunity for the food system. A lot of the prevailing sentiment was around the opportunities from reducing waste and making plant-forward choices. But even those big shifts felt like merely delaying the inevitable.

So when we learned about regenerative agriculture, I knew immediately that it was the most important story in food. For starters, it was optimistic. But whereas the idea of ecosystem restoration seemed positive, I gained new clarity—massive amounts of emissions could be removed from the atmosphere and then actually restored as healthy soil! This changed everything. And unlike most climate solutions, nobody had to give up things they enjoy. We just needed to shift the growing practices. And bonus: improved nutrition and flavor. It seemed too good to be true!

We began to make connections and lay the groundwork for opening a restaurant to champion regenerative agriculture. The Perennial opened in 2015 with sourdough bread made with Kernza, a new perennial grain developed by The Land Institute. We also boasted a whole animal butchery program with beef from the innovative Marin Carbon Project compost pilot sites. Soil tests from the pastures analyzed by scientists at UC Berkeley showed that after only a few years, the carbon pulled from the atmosphere into the soil on just one-tenth of the ranch counteracted the burning of an extraordinary amount of gasoline! These kinds of ingredients represented literally world-saving potential if farms across the globe could shift from extractive to regenerative agriculture.

But even when a customer would listen to my spiel and get inspired, there was no way to take action. There was no supply of regenerative ingredients. And even though we paid great farmers a good price, it had no bearing on the next farm—in fact, it didn’t even really help the regenerative farmer implement the next practice. Any real change was at someone else’s discretion, if they cared enough, or had enough money. But often, getting the next farmer to practice on the next acre meant six-figure loans, so I began to doubt whether a chef paying an extra dollar was even making an impact. People having good intentions does not equate to action.

My optimism really tanked when I learned that even the whole organic movement, which has clear price premiums and broad market penetration, was still just 1 percent of the total acres farmed after fifty-plus years. In 2019 we closed The Perennial. We’d been named Bon Appetit’s Most Sustainable Restaurant in America, but we’d also sunk our life savings and several years into a project that failed to truly make change.

 

They say hindsight is twenty-twenty, and of course it was now clear why we’d failed: Buying a nice ingredient didn’t change how crops were grown on any acres. We’d accidentally established the pop-up movement, but despite our years of effort, chefs and customers hadn’t jumped onto the regenerative bandwagon. Or if they did, it was just an idea, not a paradigm shift. Regenerative agriculture seemed to me like the biggest win-win available to society, and yet customers and farmers didn’t have a way to team up and change acres.

But later that year, we began discussions with the California Department of Food and Agriculture and other state agencies about a new mechanism that could actually make transformative change possible. It’s appropriate that this book is being published by Patagonia, because they’ve had clarity for decades and are themselves reinventing capitalism. Just as Mark and many other researchers have been creating scientific frameworks to unlock change in the field, Patagonia’s 1% for the Planet program has been economically advancing environmental solutions for years. Research from Project Drawdown also finds that, globally, if society used just 1 percent of GDP per year on climate solutions, instead of slightly more than 0 percent, we’d not only reach net zero, but we’d lower temperatures by 2050.

My nonprofit, Zero Foodprint, is operationalizing that kind of regenerative economy by offering a focused solution that directly connects the next dollar to the adoption of regenerative practices on the next acre. For example, businesses ranging from a Michelin three-star restaurant to all five Subway sandwiches locations in Boulder, Colorado, to wine companies, caterers, and even compost companies are sending 1 percent of their sales to regenerative practices. We collect what’s typically a few cents from each purchase and then use the funds to team up with farms and ranches, economically, to switch from chemical fertilizer to compost, or to plant cover crops or perennials, or just to help a regenerative farmer extend their practices to more acres. This shift—from occasionally buying a regenerative ingredient to actively supporting regenerative farming—is the key.

This Table to Farm movement also makes customers feel great because every purchase is part of a local climate solution. And most businesses choose to make it optional, so any customer can opt out, though only about one out of a thousand actually do. Since 2020, we’ve already helped sixty-five farms and ranches implement projects that have sequestered as much carbon as not burning about four million gallons of gas. And we’re just getting started.

My voyage of discovery was characterized by opportunism and strategic use of resources, and it has led me to collaborations with other like-minded leaders like Mark Easter, Dorn Cox, John Wick, Patagonia, Dr. Bronner’s, and dozens of changemakers and regenerative farmers and ranchers, who are all finding ways to regenerate and create systems for regeneration.

Just to be as clear as possible: You can be part of the solution! And natural climate solutions create compounding, local benefits. In other words, society saving the planet can be as straightforward as each person just saving one little piece of Earth at a time.

Hopefully our stories can be part of your voyage of discovery.

Welcome to the movement!

– Anthony Myint

Anthony Myint is a chef turned climate activist. He is the executive director at Zero Foodprint, a nonprofit leading collaborations with state agencies and regional governments to scale regenerative agriculture. In 2020, ZFP was named Humanitarian of the Year by the James Beard Foundation, and in 2019, Myint earned the Basque Culinary World Prize. He is also the co-founder of Mission Street Food, Mission Chinese Food, The Perennial, and Commonwealth restaurants.