 When Lucky Peach and Renee and the mad team first started talking about guts and who we would have come out to speak, a lot of names got thrown out and a lot of ideas about what it meant to show guts or to talk about guts. But one thing that was readily apparent and quickly apparent was that we wanted to demonstrate guts in action. And it wasn't enough to hear people talk about it and get them to come up here and tell their stories. We wanted to show that we could be brave and we could do something as well. So in that spirit, we embarked on a project involving a couple of restaurants who bravely decided to bear themselves, bear their insides, show how their restaurants worked, when they had nothing to gain in doing so. And so I wanted to invite Renee from NOMA and Frank Castronova and Frank Falcinelli from Frankie's in New York to come up and join us for this next presentation. Make yourself comfortable. Make yourself comfortable, it's gonna be a long ride here. So grab a seat and I'll log, there's so many logs. I also wanted to invite a friend of mine and a smarter man than myself who helped a great deal with this project, Peter Fried. Prove your honor, we'll tell everybody. I just don't feel right about it. Right on, it's hard not to follow the crowd, but sometimes that path is just a dead end. I knew I was right. Yeah, I'm with you. Me too. Remember, listen to yourself. Because I know what's best for me. And knowing is half the battle. G.I. Joe. Okay, so this little G.I. Joe video is to demonstrate sort of the theme of this discussion and that is that knowing things is the first step in being able to make a change. And Jason, who was our previous speaker, did a really wonderful job of putting things in a macro context. And Peter assures me that people in Europe understand climate change better than people in America. So we don't have to show you polar bears stranded on ice caps or anything like that. That you're all well aware of the problem and then you believe in it. But maybe you don't quite understand what the connection is to the food world. And this first chart is a representation of the sources of greenhouse gases in the world. 30% of the greenhouse gases in the world are a product of the food system. Beyond that, every day food is the most direct interaction we have as people with the environment. There are lots of us who work in computers and never see the light of day, but even so, we still eat every day. And so we have this connection. And so food really is our link to the rest of the world. We were speaking with Renee the other day about Noma and the ingredients they're using and he was telling us about what a hard winter it had been in Copenhagen and how ingredients had been so strange and out of sync with what they usually are. And so in that sense, everybody here who works in the kitchen is directly connected to climate change again. We're already feeling the effects of the cycles and seasons changing. So there is a direct impact on the work you're doing in the kitchen. And because that direct impact is so obvious and so real, it also means that we can make a direct impact on fixing things. So with all of this in mind, I had started thinking about this right after the last mad and I called up Dave Chang in a panic and was kind of like, Dave, you don't understand, we have to fix the climate. Like you've got to change all the pork buns to broccoli buns. Everything has to be changed. Like it's got to be like grino fucco. Like everything's totally different. And he was like, okay, crazy person. You need to calm down and Dave likes to do this thing. He'll look at me and he'll say, if you were in the shit in the kitchen right now, if you were in the weeds, your orders were stacked up like what would you do, crazy person? And you know, you would stop and you would get organized and assess where you are and figure out what needed to be done. And so, you know, I was still sort of in a panic telling him like, but we have to do something, you know, and Dave said to me that he was, he was afraid that this problem was maybe too big for the restaurant world, that this wasn't the responsibility of restaurants to fix and that if we delve too deep into this, it might turn out that eating at restaurants is the worst thing you can do for the environment. Which was a valid fear. And I don't know that at that moment, he or I could have said with any certainty whatsoever whether or not that was true. And so the first step was embarking on this project and knowing whether or not restaurants are the worst thing in the world for the environment. Don't tell anyone that. And so I called up Peter and I said, what are we gonna do about this? I want to look at restaurants and understand whether or not when I go out to eat, I'm doing something terrible. And you can tell about what we did. Sure. So as Chris was saying, you know, I've been doing this for 10 years, 12 years, something like that, looking at the emissions from different activities that humans undertake. And so when he came to me, we were having lunch one day in San Francisco, he said, look, I'm really concerned about the environmental impacts of this industry that I'm in, how can we assess it? I said, look, there's some different ways that we can think about it. But one thing that seems like a really straightforward place to start is something called the life cycle assessment, which for the couple of scientists that are floating around, you've maybe heard of it. The idea is exactly what we've described. You look at the entire life of a product of a thing, whether it's the iPhone in your pocket or an egg on a plate. And you say, what are the impacts on the environment of that particular item? And let's just think about the egg for a minute, you know? Okay, you've got an egg and that egg has been prepared in some way and it took some energy to prepare it and it's sitting there in front of you. And before that, someone had to deliver it to the restaurant where it was prepared. And before that, someone had it collected in a henhouse and that henhouse had to be heated. And oh, that chicken that laid that egg had to be fed and that grain had to be grown. The grain had to be fertilized. The fertilizer had to be produced in a factory in China. The nitrogen had to be harvested. So, you know, it just, it can keep going as far back as possible. And so, one of the things that we'll get into a little bit later is how you draw the boundaries. But we tried, in the most realistic way, to say, okay, let's think about some things that would be meaningful to this audience and things about food and how could we really think about the impacts of the food that you were eating? And so, what we did is we called up a couple of restaurant tours that we knew and asked them if they would open up everything to us, show us how the restaurant operated on a day-to-day basis. Every single ingredient that went into a meal, you know, where their deliveries came from, the size of the trucks that delivered the things. In Noma's case, sometimes there was a guy on a bike or a boat. But in this, like I felt really felt the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here at MAD and with guts. And these guys in a time when everything says to a restaurant tour, everything says to a chef, you should worry about where you are on a list. Where are you, who's the best restaurant? Who's, you know, what is the best place to get this? Or whatever. These guys were concerned with how can we do things better as opposed to how can we be the best guy on the top of a list? And so, like, before we get into this, I really just have to commend them for what they did and for showing us. And I mean, they didn't know Peter at all. They're total strangers and they just give him a lot of crispy rolls and everything. And we really did ask them a lot of questions. A lot of questions. And gas bills and water bills, laundry bills. And so Peter will talk a little bit about what we did look at with each of these restaurants. So, you know, again, like I was saying before, there's a lot of different things that you could consider. We are not an academic institution, so we're not diving into the individual calories and that sort of thing. But what we were really trying to do was be as comprehensive as possible within the scope of time that we had, within the scope of being absolutely insane people and coming back to ask things of these folks. And I do a lot of this work. I really have to say that there are people that fight you when you ask for information and there are people that just give it freely. And I'm very pleased to say that it was a situation where really anything that we asked for, we got. And we did ask for a lot. So, just again, thank you before moving on. These are the things up on the screen that we looked at in sort of the highest level of detail. And this was the biggest contributors to a meal that you might eat in one of these restaurants. And we also looked at a meal at home because one of the things that was important or interesting to Chris was, okay, if restaurants are maybe the worst thing, and this was the fear that everybody had going into this, if it's the worst possible thing, well, how much worse is it than cooking a steak at your house? So, we wanted to look at the two restaurants and also cooking a steak on a Friday night at home for your family. We looked at deliveries, so getting the food from wherever it was produced to the restaurant. We looked at electricity and gas or the energy use. We looked at waste and the breakdown of waste. So, a lot of people have been talking today about different greenhouse gases and how some of them are more potent than others. When waste breaks down in a landfill or other facility like that, it produces methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas and something that we're quite concerned about from a global warming perspective. We looked at the ingredients themselves, so everything that goes into the meal and how that was produced and the impacts of that production. And then finally, in the case of NOMA, we also looked at the foraging. So, so much of the menu comes from the natural world. There's not much really associated with that particular activity, except for going out to get it. And I think there are some interesting conclusions about that. I would say, generally speaking, what all of this was about in my mind is... And Chris showed the G.I. Joe video before because the idea there is knowing is half the battle. And in my mind, when I came into this project, it was not to be judgmental of anybody. It was not to investigate anybody. The idea was that we want to be able to give you as much information as possible so that you can make informed decisions. When you're making decisions about ingredients or where to source your electricity or whatever it happens to be, you know what you're doing. If you want to serve a side of beef to one person, you know that there's some impacts associated with that. And I think ultimately at the end of the day, that's really what this is about is trying to increase the knowledge that people have as they're making decisions in the operation of restaurants. So these are the raw numbers that resulted from our study. Peter, you can... These guys have not seen these numbers. Oh yeah, this is important. This is like a big reveal. I'll stand up to see them. None of them have seen these numbers before. So there's a little bit of bravery in coming up here too. I feel a little brave coming up here and showing them the numbers, to be honest with you. No, so a home meal, a steak for two people, potatoes, radish and parsley salad, some kind of peach crisp I concocted. It was delicious, it was delicious. 7.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent gas. So 7.5 kilograms of greenhouse gases as a result of me cooking a meal at home. A steak, a crème brûlée, and a salad at Frankie's was 8.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent and the full 20, what? 23, I think. 404 meal at NOMA is 24.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Just for like a quick reference, that's about the equivalent of three gallons of gas burned and then one gallon and one gallon of gas burned for a meal. So this is just a raw number and the most important thing to take away from this is not the values of the numbers, but this is a very complicated and complex issue and it's not just boiled down to these absolute values, but having these absolute values shows that you can take a complicated subject like greenhouse gases and global warming and what the hell we're gonna do about it and get something to work from. This chart, let's talk a little bit about how all of this breaks down. These looking on a relative scale, the impacts of the different components of a meal, it was very interesting to us and honestly I had not done this type of analysis in a restaurant before so we didn't know what we were getting into either. It was very interesting to me that in every case between 30 and 40% of the emissions come from what we call the overheads. So everything that isn't the food. Running your restaurant, putting gas into your stoves, shipping things, in the case of the home meal, driving to the grocery store to pick stuff up was really a big deal. In the case of NOMA, as you can see foraging was a big deal, we'll talk about that in a little bit. And I think one of the things that becomes very interesting is that these are really the low hanging fruit. We would never presume to talk to anybody in this room really about what should be going into the food. Those are your own decisions that you have to make. It's about the restaurant itself. But these are things that you can work with. So changing the types of light bulbs, changing the source of electricity. Now I was very fortunate to get a chance to look at NOMA's facilities recently and they've actually already done a number of the easiest things to do. So they've got the most efficient light bulbs in there already. So the low hanging fruit has already been picked. But still there's a lot of opportunity for them I think. And one of the things that they've decided to do maybe as a result of the work that we've been doing is switch from the local power grid to strictly renewable electricity which really makes a big difference. Which we'll show. Which we'll show some numbers on that. Another interesting thing from this number is that you look at it, the percentage that's contributed by ingredients themselves is pretty much the same in all three cases. It's 60 to 70%. The difference that you can make as a restaurant isn't in, you know, you don't have to become a raw food restaurant to become efficient. It's all in sort of the overhead things. And I do wanna touch on that foraging number and speak to the complexity of this whole issue because you see it's 7% of the emissions that NOMA were attributed to foraging. And you look at that and you think, well, God, we should just cut out foraging and then that will be 7% less, right? But that gets at the complexity of this thing because foraging reduces their dependence on, you know, whatever other agricultural systems. These are things that are found in the natural world. There are other benefits to foraging. And so as a restaurant, and this is what we're trying to say is like we have no, we're not gonna presume to tell anybody what to do, but this is like you have that number now and you can make an informed decision about what the values of the restaurant are first. The value is first to show what local ingredients are and to show how you can be independent from large industrial food systems. And that's probably worth 7% emissions. This is to demonstrate how quickly a change in overhead can happen. And so one of the most fantastic results of this experiment was that NOMA got to see their electrical use. And, you know, Renee found out and the crew at NOMA found out that 40% of the energy produced in Denmark is still by coal power. This is the fact that they didn't know until we started looking at things. And immediately, you know, Renee likes to say with a push of a button with that knowledge you can make a difference and NOMA did, you know, they committed to making the switch to a sustainable energy source. In doing so, they reduced their carbon emissions by 30%, just by NOMA. So another really interesting thing, and this shouldn't be surprising, given sort of the scale of the meals that NOMA serves, is that there's a lot more stuff that goes into those meals. So when we looked at the ingredients, we got these ingredient lists. So the meal that Chris cooked at home was something like 17 ingredients. The meal that Frankie's prepared was 18 ingredients. And I got an ingredient list from the guys at NOMA, it was 433 ingredients in five. So, you know, we're dealing at a slightly different, a slightly different scale, right? And so one of the things that we spend a lot of time thinking about is how can we normalize that? How can we think about that in a way that might make sense? And we thought, okay, let's look at just the average emissions per ingredient. So, you know, we'll take out the numbers and the overall quantities and start looking on a relative basis. And as it turns out, NOMA is actually quite good. Those forage ingredients, like Chris was saying, while foraging the driving to go get those forage goods is a contributor to the overall footprint, the emissions from those goods bring the average emissions down compared to a lot of other things. There's no meat on the menu that we were looking at. It's only fish, it's vegetables. And that's an important point is that there is no meat on, no beef on that NOMA menu. Beef and animal products in general are very significant contributors. And so what we knew going into this was that we had to sort of level the playing field a little bit and that's why we chose a steak at Frankie's and a steak at home. And this next one is just to sort of demonstrate what meat is in relative terms. These are all the ingredients at the Frankie's meal and the home meal. And you can see how much steak contributes as opposed to the other ingredients. Let's move ahead. This is one more little thing that I thought Dave Chang would especially appreciate having to do with efficiency. At home I made a peach crisp with whipped cream and I got really lazy. And I didn't want to whisk it or use a mixer so I got a siphon out and I used two nitrous cartridges to make whipped cream. So here's how much carbon would have been produced by whisking it, zero. Here's how much would have been produced if I used an electric mixer. And we didn't even count this next one in the overall assessment because it was a little unfair. But as you can see, the total emissions of my home meal was 7.5 kilograms. Those two nitrous canisters are 8.7 by themselves. So you guys might remember that Jason put up in his presentation those very scary different gases that contribute to global warming. Nitrous oxide is 320 times as more potent than carbon dioxide. So when we started doing that, it was... Yeah, so if you're doing Whippets and taking shortcuts. Cut the Whippets out. You should think twice. This is just one more analogy I wanted to use to sort of put the NOMA meal into context. And you see a number that's three times the home meal or a Frankie's meal and you think it's so wasteful. But nobody is making the decision to, no one's sitting at home thinking, should I go to NOMA tonight or should I cook at home? I don't think... And so it's a bit like saying going to the Louvre and seeing the Mona Lisa is an inefficient way of seeing a beautiful woman. You know, there's a higher purpose and that applies to Frankie's and to everything we do in restaurants in general. It's not just about putting food in our mouths and filling our gullet. So that's what she's doing up there. This is a bit about the conclusions we got from Frankie's. And what I was most excited about, as Peter mentioned, I really wanted to see how bad a meal at a popular New York restaurant that I would maybe go to instead of cooking at home or maybe I would choose to cook at home instead of going out. How close it could be to being as good for the environment as eating at home or maybe better than eating at home. And so Frankie's is one kilogram of carbon dioxide away. That's so close. It's within striking distance of being able to say, you know, with a little nipping and tucking here or whatever, like, if you eat at our restaurant tonight, it's better for the environment than eating at home. With a little work, we can just do away with home cooking forever. Yeah, I know. People can still cook at home. And as chefs and cooks, isn't that really your goal? Just to do away with home cooking forever? No, but the point is, I mean, really, they're so close to being able to say that. And that's such a refreshing result from this study. And Peter, you can talk a little bit. We just wanted to take a minute and say, okay, you know, showing a restaurant like Frankie's, how close they are, let's think about that next step forward. You know, when you look at the total emissions from a restaurant, if you take that 8.5 number that we had before and you extrapolated out to an entire year, it's actually not an insurmountable goal. And so one of the things that we wanted to think about was, what are some, you know, how could we get to zero or even beyond zero in terms of carbon emissions? We've got this light bulb representing energy efficiency, very, you know, sort of easy things to do within the restaurant itself. We've got the solar panel representing renewable electricity, just like they've done at NOMA, and you saw the scale of the change that that made there. We've got this little graphic that Chris put together, the pig bag, as he calls it. This is representing what we would call a carbon offset project, which is a concept that may be familiar to some of you. It's work that I'm involved in. And what that's really about is undertaking an activity which reduces emissions someplace else other than you are and using that to improve the overall sort of greenhouse gas emission perspective for the entire world. There are certain things that you're gonna do at your restaurant that you can't change. You know, you're gonna have to put some gas into those stoves. It doesn't matter how efficient those stoves are, they're still gonna be gas going into it. There must be some way to mitigate it. And so this particular idea is you're capturing methane that is produced in the production of pork for, you know, consumption somewhere in the world, whether it's Vietnam or China or right down the road. And you can use that to make energy. And so in helping to support projects in that way, you can reduce the overall greenhouse gas emissions and really sort of offset the impact that you might be having for the things that you can't change at the restaurant. And in that way, you can get to, you know, zero emissions or lower than zero emissions. So this is all to say that there's work that can be done and just having some numbers in hand is what will allow us to do these things. You know, in the immediate future, maybe it's changing light bulbs in a restaurant to, you know, fluorescent bulbs. Maybe it's switching energy as NOMA has done. You know, Anthony Mint from Mission Chinese Food who's addicted to starting nonprofits. And I have talked about this and we think, you know, in an ideal model world, restaurants who are, who want to make a difference would commit to this and join together and spread pig bags around the world. They would create their own carbon offset project and tie it to food and make it feel like a direct connection to the issue. And, you know, be able to tell their customers, seriously, if you cook at home, you're fucking the world over. You should come into my restaurant. So it's, again, this is nothing to do I hope with like lecturing restaurants about what should be done. It's about, I didn't know anything. I was afraid of what I might find out. I asked Peter to help me find out that information so I could share it with you guys and let you decide, you know, what you want to do, what kind of restaurant you want to be and already in volunteering to be part of this, it's a demonstration of the kind of restaurants you are. So, again, I thank you guys for participating in this. Thank you. Yeah, so, you know, if you guys have questions, I'm sort of dying to know how you guys are feeling after this interrogation. I think that information is extremely powerful for everyone to make conscious choices. Yeah, I mean, let's be honest, I knew that we were going into a dangerous game for a restaurant, like you said, 400 and some ingredients. I knew that we were gonna be more and it could look bad on restaurants that do this. But I wanted to do it. I thought it was important. I thought I wanted to know. I wanted to know what's going on. And we haven't done much to change things. I just pressed a button which was sent on an email saying we're switching a new power company. And look what that did. Small things we've started already. And I think that was so easy. And I'm happy that this happened. I mean, restaurants are gonna be here no matter what. So, let's see if we can do something that's a little better. I think in our case, we're happy to know because we took steps when we opened with a consolidated gas buying and electric buying and committing to induction cooking and responsible garbage disposal. And we didn't, you know, being in New York and being in the fray of it, you don't never know because you always hear about the landfill or the crooked gas company. But I'm absolutely pleased to know that. It's a good example. I mean, these are environmentally conscious people in restaurants, but none of them have opened with like a mission of being the greenest restaurant in the world. Neither of you said, you know what our kick is gonna be? We're gonna be like the green restaurant. And it feels to me, I don't know how it feels to you, but it feels after this that it's a manageable problem. It's a thing that like it's nice to know that it's not with outside the realm of it. It's nice to know we can market ourselves like that now. Thank you, Christian. Thank you very much for that. So I'm available for consultancy if anybody wants. No, but I thank you guys again. And I hope you guys all appreciate what they have done in doing this. Pleasure. Thank you. Let's buy some candy. Hold on, fellas. Nice one. Listen to your friend Terrell. He's got the right idea. Yeah, you never catch an NBA player in a candy bar for a game. A candy bar might give you a quick boost of energy, but after 20 minutes, you'll feel run down. So let's eat smart. Now we know. And knowing is half the battle. G.I. Joe.