Green Tomato: Future Chefs Serve as Stewards of the Environment at the CIA
29 April 2011
On Earth Day and every day, Culinary Institute of America students go green in many ways.
Aspiring chefs at all three of The Culinary Institute of America's (CIA) domestic campuses in New York, California and Texas learn more than just how to cook. The CIA is also teaching them the importance of chefs as stewards of the environment—both in and out of the kitchen. This is becoming increasingly important as sustainability is prominently featured in restaurants across the country, and the National Restaurant Association cites local sourcing and sustainability as five of the top seven restaurant trends for 2011.
Each year the Hyde Park, N.Y., campus buys $750,000 worth of produce, dairy, eggs, honey and meat from 30 Hudson Valley producers. In the Napa Valley, the CIA's Greystone campus sources much of its food locally—in many cases the food is grown by the students as part of the Greystone Green Thumbs, who manage the student-run garden.
Other ways that "going green" has become part of the campus climate at the CIA include:
- Converting one of its public restaurants, St. Andrew's Café, to be almost entirely locally sourced. As part of the conversion, the CIA added new curricula that include techniques such as canning and preserving to help students understand how sourcing locally can be sustainable any time of the year—even in the Northeast.
- With 41 kitchens and bakeshops on the Hyde Park campus, there is a lot to clean. The CIA switched from using traditional detergents to a new electrolyzing cleaning system that turns salted tap water into chemical-free cleaning solutions. As a result, the college is able to keep a significant amount of chemical detergents from going down the drain.
- Turning used cooking oil into biodiesel to fuel two campus vans and a utility vehicle at the Greystone campus. In addition to helping the environment, fuel from recycled oil costs only 88 cents a gallon to make, saving the CIA more than $64 per tankful. The exhaust also makes the air smell like fresh doughnuts!
- By "precycling" and encouraging students and staff to use their own beverage containers, the Hyde Park campus eliminated the waste of up to 18,000 paper cups and lids every week. The student and staff dining rooms also use napkins that are made of recycled paper and reusable, instead of disposable, to-go containers.
Supporting the environment has become second nature to the next generation of chefs and industry leaders who study at the CIA. The college has been a leader in environmental endeavors, by sourcing food locally, promoting sustainable agriculture, managing resources and employing eco-friendly design. To learn more about these efforts, visit the CIA's Green Campus page at www.ciachef.edu/about/green.
Photo: Techniques such as canning and preserving at St. Andrew's Café, a real-life kitchen lab and public restaurant at the Hyde Park campus, help CIA students understand how sourcing locally can be sustainable any time of year.
Additional Info
- CAFÉ Talks Podcast Lesson Plan: 1