Anthony Myint has been one of the leading restauranteurs using regenerative agricultural products in their food. He recently won the Basque Culinary World Prize for his efforts, and his activism—now more on the policy front—hasn't slowed down.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to Carbon Removal Newsroom. I’m Ross Kenyon, lead strategist with the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Anthony Myint, chef, restaurateur, activist, co-founder of Mission Chinese Food, The Perennial. And now The Perennial has turned, it kind of evolved into a nonprofit called The Perennial Farming Initiative. And Anthony just won the Basque Culinary World Prize, which is a gigantic deal. Thanks for being here with us, Anthony, and congratulations.
Anthony Myint: Thanks, Russ. Thanks for everything you guys are doing, too.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, our pleasure. Well, Anthony, can you tell us a bit about the Bass Culinary World Prize? What is it? How is it selected? What are they rewarding you for? And what do they expect of you moving forward?
Anthony Myint: So it’s a prize initiated by the Basque government, which, you know, for those of you not familiar, the Basque region in Spain probably is home to like several of the best chefs in the world. And so the government created this prize to kind of recognize the transformative power of gastronomy. That’s like, I think the term that they use or the phrasing. And so it’s rewarding chefs who are doing great work outside the kitchen. And so I think it’s only been around for a couple of years. And so it’s relatively new.
And the jury of the chefs who decide are, you know, among the best chefs in the world. Mossimo Bottura, you know, Dominique Gren, Juan Roca, Andoni Arduriz, you know, a bunch more, but like really big names, like a lot of Michelin stars and a lot of people kind of on the top 100 restaurants in the world list.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a very big deal. And what does the prize carry with it? And I know there’s some sort of monetary grant. Are you applying that towards your work and trying to transform food systems and restaurants into being more regenerative in nature?
Anthony Myint: Yeah, for sure. So the prize is 100,000 euros, which we haven’t received yet, but hopefully in the next few months or year. But the prize is allowed to be distributed to a nonprofit or two of the winners choosing. We’ve been doing nonprofit work for the past few years to get restaurants to become part of the solution to climate change. That’s going to fold right in. We can talk about it later, but we’re working on a program with the state of California that I think is really promising. Hopefully, that money will help really expand our outreach efforts and get more restaurants involved with this movement.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great and so important and a topic that I wish we covered more and perhaps we just should be more diligent about because about a year ago, we went to a couple events that were hosted at your restaurant, The Perennial in San Francisco, which uses quite a few products, food products that are grown or produced in regenerative fashion. So there’s lots of grass-fed beef. I drank beer that was made out of kernza, which is a perennial grass as opposed to the annuals that are used right now typically. I thought it was a very cool experience.
Definitely unique. I’m not sure that there was many people doing what you were doing. So it struck me as innovative when I was there. And this seems like something that you’re trying to lead and get other restaurants to do. Have you seen much change in your time since you’ve started trying to encourage restaurants to become regenerative?
Anthony Myint: Well, our background actually in restaurants starts like way before that with Mission Chinese, which is kind of just a weird party Chinese restaurant, for lack of a better description. We’ve always had a charitable agenda there. And so we’ve like helped the local food bank raise over a million meals. And so we never kind of had this food systems orientation. And then, I guess, seven years ago, we had a daughter and started thinking more about food and climate change. And really learned about regenerative agriculture and the potential for healthy soil to kind of be a major part of the solution.
And so we opened the perennial with the hopes of spreading that message and really walking the walk. And so, as you mentioned, we had a whole animal butchery program from this carbon ranch that was like a pilot or is a pilot, like one of the first pilot ranches in the marine carbon project. And we were You know, baking artisanal sourdough made with Kernza. And, you know, part of the goal was like, let’s make this stuff the Tesla of food and get people excited and to pay a premium for these things and to spur adoption.
And I guess what we realized after some time, you know, more or less on a daily basis, people would ask us like, this is amazing. Like, so what can I do? And really we started to realize that it was hard for people to source that way. Like there’s no supply of those goods or even just like common sustainable goods like food that’s grown organically. You know, someone told me at one point organic represents less than 2% of food. Acres of farmland in the U. S. are around the world. And in California, it’s 3%.
And so it started to feel like, geez, if we just keep kind of pushing demand, you know, at best, this kind of work would ever result in like a two, you know, kind of a similar amount of adoption as organic. And that’s just not the kind of pace that, you know, global warming needs to be addressed at. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So it sounds like you started with a simpler private sector approach of having a restaurant that was direct to consumer. And then as time has gone on, you sort of changed to a more policy orientation. Is that is that fair to say?
Anthony Myint: Yeah. I mean, whether it’s policy or kind of like systems change through the private sector, but sort of like realizing that just walking the walk and hoping people would also start following suit, it just felt like way too slow.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And beyond the procurement problems, which does sound like a headache and quite bespoke and doesn’t sound easy. So I can understand the hassle there. And I think I don’t know. Sometimes I have a lot of faith in consumers being able to voice their opinions and vote with their dollar and all of that. But then there’s plenty of decisions I make in my personal life that are quite lazy and I don’t care. And I feel like I care more than the average person. So if I care more than the average person and still am not very good at it, I could see why that might cause some impatience with that approach.
Anthony Myint: Yeah. And it’s not even really about patience. But so the perennial was established as a B Corp. And so... As we were doing that, it struck me that one of the defining qualities of a B Corp is simply that it is allowed to devote a portion of profits towards social good or something like that. That’s just pretty poignant. That a corp, like a regular corporation, which is almost all the business in the US, is not even allowed to devote money to social good. You know, otherwise they would get sued by shareholders or what have you.
And so like, you know, it’s really clear that it becomes hard for like the normal business to really create a lot of systems change because they’re working within pretty finite parameters of like profitability. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that fiduciary responsibility angle is a challenging one to get around. And I know shareholders can be persnickety about that and it’s their legal right to do so. But yeah, I understand that’s tough. So then I know you’ve been working quite a lot at the California state level on soil health and soil carbon issues. Has that been more, I don’t want to say satisfying, but do you feel like you’ve made some good progress there?
Anthony Myint: California is really amazing to me because it’s the world’s fifth largest economy. It’s pledged to go carbon neutral by 2045. That doesn’t mean just energy and stuff. It’s economy-wide. I think it was just joined by New York also. It feels like there’s real change happening. California has had, as your listeners know, a cap and trade market for a while, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. On the soil carbon front, to my knowledge, it’s the only State that’s like really got subsidies for carbon farming basically. And so for years it’s had a healthy soils program, you know, which has a range of funding from like seven and a half to five million or so.
And then this year the incoming governor, Gavin Newsom, increased it to 28 million. So that’s pretty exciting. But nevertheless, that 28 million represents only like I think we probably believe that it represents maybe half of the solution set or whatever, and so that it only gets like 2% of the funding from the most progressive State should just be a signal that we all need to focus on it more. But what’s exciting with California is that as part of their ambitions to be carbon neutral, they were open to exploring sort of like a private sector, public sector collaboration.
So we’re working on a program that will launch in January called Restore California. And, you know, it’s basically a way to create additional funding for the same kind of carbon farming work as the Healthy Soils Program.
Ross Kenyon: Interesting. I think I’ve seen other states start to emulate the Healthy Soils Initiative of California. I think I saw New Mexico recently had done something similar and there must be others in the works too. Have you noticed any others?
Anthony Myint: Yeah, I’m like on a Google group or some thread where people are really tracking it and I think there’s like Healthy Soils legislation of some form or other in like 21 states. But I don’t know that they’re necessarily as like You know, basically financial subsidies for conservation and carbon farming practices driven. Like I think there’s financial components, but I think the Healthy Soils Program is like, you know, pretty explicit. Like it’s, you know, a comment assessment is like part of that application process and it’s like pretty explicitly linked to carbon reduction.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that’s good to know. I need to look more into some of the details of these various, yeah, tracking. I mean, that’s sort of the difficulty of federalism, right? With 50 states, it’s hard to keep up with all the developments that are happening at those state levels. But California definitely has a reputation and it’s theirs to lose at this point. They’ve long been considered a leader in this space. So it isn’t surprising and lucky for you that you have been there for a long time and are working with them to help get this working correctly.
So you see this transformation then not really happening as much at the restaurant level, but you see it more on the production side of the supply chain?
Anthony Myint: Well, I mean, so from our lessons at the Perennial, it’s hard to source well and it’s hard to expect people to reinvent their business models, especially when most consumers are a little bit disconnected from farming. And so it’s kind of hard to even communicate these somewhat nuanced benefits. And food and climate in general is a little bit abstract for a lot of people. And so the I don’t necessarily see it as like at the production level. I think the end goal is to change land management for public benefit. But I think we’re sort of envisioning restaurants here as a pathway for consumers to fund that transition.
In the same way that kind of in the transition from fossil fuels and coal and different things to renewable energy, communities have created community choice aggregation, I guess, where an individual may not be able to put a solar panel on their roof, but they can very easily pay like $10 more per month on a utilities bill. And so I think we’re trying to kind of envision a system where in order to transition from nonrenewable farming to renewable farming, consumers can pay a few cents per meal at a restaurant.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So yeah, there’s multiple prongs that you have going trying to achieve some of these results. Well, that sounds good. I hope you’re wildly successful at this. I didn’t have a chance to eat at Mission Chinese Food, sadly, but you think you’ll stay around in the restaurant business or are you switching a more permanent nonprofit sort of role?
Anthony Myint: Well, at the moment, I’m at Mission Chinese two days a week and I love it there. It’s kind of like a So it’s fun. And I don’t think I’ll ever totally be out of it, especially because I live like a block from the restaurant. So anytime something goes wrong, I’m definitely going to be the first one that gets called. But as this work with the state moves forward, and especially since there seems to be an opportunity in other states to create similar programs, I think definitely my focus and excitement is on trying to scale restaurants becoming part of a renewable food system.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. Yeah. Well, I definitely need to go there next time I’m in San Francisco and I’ll make a point of doing so. And I would like to see restaurants leading in this capacity. Also recognize there’s probably a fair amount of policy work that needs to be done for this to even work, at least at those levels. That number you gave about organic acreage. I get it. I get it. That hits me hard. It’s a disappointing figure. I sort of would have imagined it greater than that. So I could see why you’ve gone the route that you have.
Anthony Myint: In terms of policy work, the interesting thing with this program is that it’s a voluntary program. So it’s not like legislation. So really, any city, any state could create a similar program. And Really what it’s doing is just kind of trying to give consumers a way to effectively vote with their dollar, as you kind of alluded to earlier. Like at the moment, you could imagine if you’re sourcing well from a farm or something, you know, the dollar that you spend gets the farmer an extra, you know, 10 cents. Maybe if you weren’t buying it, they would have sold it to someone else for 90 cents or something.
But at a restaurant, that dollar spent, you know, through cost of goods, like translates into like a $3 or $4 menu item. And then after like tax and tip, it’s like five or six dollars maybe or whatever. And so like that six dollars from the consumer is really only getting a farmer like 10 cents. And so this is kind of a way where like 10 cents from a consumer goes directly towards 10 cents, you know, going to the farmer. And so that kind of like just creating a more direct pathway for that change to happen.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I remember when I saw that start to take off, I saw that you got blasted by like conservative talk radio, which baffled me because the program is opt-in. Yet I saw bad press about it and I was very confused by it. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I don’t know what’s so controversial about it being opt-in. That should please conservatives just fine.
Anthony Myint: Yeah, I mean, like an alternate way to look at it would be imagine if like there was a fuel additive right now and you could just like put a couple drops of it per gallon and it would cost like five cents per gallon, but somehow it could make burning gasoline have no emissions. And in fact, it actually like took emissions out of the atmosphere. You know, if that existed, like Exxon would be like Funding that or the public would gladly like pay five cents per gallon to like solve the problem.
But I feel like the food system and soil and farmland everywhere is actually offering that opportunity to the world. But we’re not really like we’re not seizing that opportunity.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m still not exactly sure why that is. But we’re so deep in that carbon removal, regenerative ag bubble that it’s sort of hard to see. But it does seem very intuitive to you and I, at least.
Anthony Myint: So, I mean, hopefully, you know, the state of California and other states can represent basically like tonnes of demand, you know, whether it’s on Nori or other soil carbon markets in the future.
Ross Kenyon: Well, Anthony, thanks for being on the show. If someone wanted to keep up with what you’re doing, where should they look?
Anthony Myint: A lot of our work is at perennialfarming.org. Okay. Okay.
Ross Kenyon: Cool. Or they can pop into Mission Chinese Food on one of the two days that you’re working or they can cause a scene and then you can be summoned there.
Anthony Myint: Exactly. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So one of the two listeners, whatever you feel like. Well, thanks so much and congratulations again, Anthony.
Anthony Myint: Thanks. Talk to you soon.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. If you like the show, please share it with your friends. Please rate and review us on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. It helps a lot to get the word out about regenerative agriculture, soil health, carbon farming, all the things that we like that you know by this point. Please help us spread the word and help the show grow. So thank you so much for listening.
