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Food Ethics: Traceability in the Restaurant

Jake Monaghan
University of Rhode Island, jake.r.monaghan@gmail.com
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Food Ethics: Traceability in the Restaurant
Jake Monaghan
Faculty Advisor: Dr. William Krieger
University of Rhode Island

Food Ethics: Traceability in the Restaurant 1
1. Introduction
The subject of food ethics, one that belongs to the field of practical or applied
ethics, has recently enjoyed a surge of interest from philosophers. Issues concerning
animal rights and welfare, environmental degradation, consumption, human
exploitation, hunger, and sustainability, among others, all fall under the scope of or are
finely enmeshed with food ethics. Although a 2011 study from the United Nation
estimates that a full third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted, food
waste has received much less attention than many of these others1. Sustained ethical
consideration about restaurants and the various actions that comprise the day-to-day
operations in them is even scarcer. Because food waste is prevalentbut entirely
avoidableit is a serious ethical problem; further, since restaurants have a substantial
role in the food system, and are themselves very guilty of much food waste, the manner
in which chefs and restaurateurs comport themselves to their work is quite an
important issue in food ethics. It is an unfortunate oversight on the part of scholars
working in food ethics to have failed to address this.
This paper seeks to begin to address this gap in the literature. Very much of the
work published on food ethics is done from the point of view of a consumer ethic. This is
helpful to a point, because we expect the marketplace to respond to consumer choices.
Of course, any person who has given the food system more than a cursory glance is
immediately and painfully aware of how rife with wrongdoings it is. For pragmatic
1This isnt to say that waste is ignored (it is, of course, closely related to hunger and sustainability
problems); only that it has received less individual, isolated attention.
reasons, then, work needs to be done which focuses on the professional ethic. Although
there is little chance that the CEOs of Hershey or Mars will stop purchasing cocoa beans
harvested with the slave labor of children in response to ethicists writing about the
suffering and exploitation involved in the process, it is a mistakefor obvious reasons
to put all of the blame or approbation on the chocolate consumer.2 Those focusing on
consumer ethics dont actually fail to blame the producers, but their work focuses on
the consumer; the result is that ethical discourse focuses on what the individual
consumer is doing, and the producer largely gets a free pass.
If this is doubted, take the recent essay contest by The New York Times for
example: Calling All Carnivores. Tell Us Why Its Ethical to Eat Meat: A Contest, which
reminds the reader later in the article: This is a very specific contest. Dont tell us why
you like meat, why organic trumps local or why your food is yours to choose. Just tell us
why its ethical to eat meat.3 The question in food ethics that is receiving attention
from one the most popular newspapers is entirely focused on whether the individual
consumer ought to eat meat. This, to be blunt, strikes me as ridiculous, because it
ignores the origin of wrongdoing: the owners of the farms and those that do the
mistreating. Of course, that this wasnt the focus of the question posed to readers of
The New York Times is telling. It suggests that the editorial board assumes that this isnt
a hotly contested (or interesting) question. But why not? As I have mentioned above, I
think this is the result of the preoccupations of scholars working in food ethics. Recent
trends in the food industry suggest that consumers are slowly being persuaded to
2 If this isnt obvious, see Schwarz (2010)

3 Kaminer (2012)
change their behavior, and buy better foods, despite their often costing more. If
consumers can be moved to change purchasing behavior by factors outside of the
market, then we should expect nothing less of the producers. Like for the consumers,
however, sustained ethical discourse concerning the producers in the food industry is a
prerequisite for change.
To that end, the focus of this paper is the responsibilities the producer (as
opposed to the consumer) has to avoid generating waste in restaurants. The 2011 study
from the UN cited above distinguishes between food loss and waste, depending on the
point in the food supply chain where the food becomes unfit for human consumption.
The studys distinction, whether appropriate or not, suggests that determining ethical
responsibility of food waste is difficult. I argue that chefs, as producers, are ethically
culpable. The producer in the restaurant is of a unique kind: because restaurant food
purchasing typically differs from consumers in quantity only, they are also a type of
consumer. Each restaurant is different in very many ways: sometimes they are chef
owned, sometimes owned by a single entrepreneur or a group of investors with varying
levels of knowledge about the culinary world. I intend for this paper to be helpful for
any culinary professional considering ethical issues in their work, but I will refer to the
chef when talking about the culinary professional. This is for the sake of simplicity.
Thesis outlined
The thesis of this paper is threefold: (1) restaurants and the work of
chefs are worthy of sustained ethical considerations, (2) there are two ethically distinct
(but related) forms of waste in restaurants, one of which contributes to the other, and
(3) an expansion of Christian Coffs traceabilityrobust traceabilitycan be
implemented to discover and ameliorate waste in the restaurant, the result of which is
an ethically superior, higher quality restaurant that is more profitable. That chefs can
reduce unethical behavior while simultaneously raising profits makes food waste an
especially egregious offense.
First, the nature of the restaurant business makes it highly relevant to the food
ethicist. To talk about the nature of the restaurant is not to make claims about how all
restaurants are. Rather, it is to make claims about how all restaurants need to be in
order to become successful, profitable, and maintain the longevity of the business. To
do this, restaurants must fill up and turn over their tables often. The profit margin on a
dish is typically around thirty percent of the cost: so serving 100 thirty-dollar meals in an
evening will bring in about $1000 in profit. This isnt a small amount of money, but it
serves to illustrate just how many times the same actions must be repeated to make a
restaurant successful, which means that the actions of the chef cannot be considered in
isolation. When we begin to think about chefs throwing away not just one ugly carrot,
but also hundreds or thousands a year, the magnitude of the situation becomes clear.
Second, there are two types of waste that the chef or culinary professional will
encounter on the job. The first kind of waste occurs when the chef fails to bring a dish to
its fullest potential. In other words, bad cooking leads to this first type of waste, which I
am calling Chefs waste: the potential for a wonderful mealthe captivating flavors
and aromas, the attentive but unobtrusive service, the fond memories of the food and
conversationall are lost, wasted, when the chef doesnt execute his job. The second
kind of waste, which we may call Resource waste, happens when resources
(particularly food) are discarded that would have been consumable had it been handled
differently (e.g. served fresh to avoid the need for refrigerated transportation, served
sooner to avoid spoiling, portioned smaller, etc.)
Chefs waste may seem insignificant compared to Resource waste, but it is in fact
a major contributor to Resource waste. I will show in the examples to come how a
reduction in Chefs waste leads to a reduction in Resource waste; how a reduction in
Chefs waste improves the quality of the food served; and finally how a reduction in
Resource waste improves the ethical standing of the chef and restaurateur, and of
course, profitability.
Thirdly, to illuminate the presence of ethical failures in the restaurant,
particularly waste, robust traceability will be applied to potential cases in restaurants.
Christian Coffs suggestion of applying ethical traceability in the food sector is the basis
from which robust traceability is developed. Traceability is the act of or ability to trace a
foodstuff to its origin, and the ability to evaluate the ethical status of something based
on the trace it leaves of its production history. The production history includes all of the
relevant details concerning a things ethical status. Because acting ethically is often a
battle of finding the relevant information, traceability is an important tool for any agent.
The problem
Simply put, the problem that concerns me here is waste in restaurants. Despite
the large amount of interest shown in food ethics, few philosophers are spending time
thinking about restaurants and the sizable role they play in food habits throughout the
industrialized world. Questions about how we ought to treat animals and the
environment come before questions about how we ought to manage our restaurants,
but the latter are equally as important: vegetarian or not, eating in restaurants is the
norm for many. I am here focused on waste, but the role restaurants play in ethical
issues does not stop here: there is among others obesity epidemic, over fishing of
certain species, and negligent work habits in the food service industry hurting
consumers (food poisoning and allergic reactions to food are the most common
examples).
Being able to walk into a restaurant and choose a meal from a menu of dishes is
a luxury, regardless of the restaurant's quality. Because of this, they emphasize the
differences in the lives and possessions of people everywhere: a fast food restaurant
would seem like a paradise to the citizen of a poor nation; the fast food restaurant pales
in comparison to a Michelin-starred restaurant. Given that the nature of a restaurant is
that it is a luxury, but also operated by professionals, the waste in restaurants is
qualitatively as well as quantitatively different than food waste at home. The chef has
ample opportunity and training to avoid waste, but also throws away more food than
the average individual.
Many positions in applied ethics begin with an intuition, and I will do the same
here. The modern kitchen hierarchy, called a brigade, is the result of chefs working to
avoid food waste, and increase efficiency. Very many popular dishes are the result of
the ingenuity of chefs looking to utilize scraps or leftovers.4 Implicit in the way food is
prepared in restaurants today, then, is a sense that wasting food ought to be avoided.
This is for economic reasons at least, if not more, than ethical considerations of the
chef. It is worthwhile, then, to consider briefly an argument from philosopher Henry
David Thoreau.
A phenomenological argument against waste
Concerned with the negative impact that the superfluous or various luxuries
were having on his life, Thoreau famously went to the woods. Living on Walden Pond,
he thought often about the proper or right way to live, which he rightly notes is in an
important way related to how one feeds oneself: his embrace of voluntary poverty
meant Thoreau's diet consisted mainly of beans that he sowed and bread that he baked.
In addition to this, he offered an argument against the eating of meat that appealed to
one's feelings when handling raw meat. Based on the uncleanliness that Thoreau
experienced when handling it, he almost entirely removed meat from his diet, calling
this aversion the result of instinct rather than experience5. This argument is clearly not
proof that eating meat is wrong, but it is a fascinating place to begin that discussion.
While enrolled in an American Philosophy course in which we read Walden, I was
confronted with similar feelings while at work in the restaurant. Struck by the large
quantities of resources that go into washing dishes, powering all of the cooking
equipment, and the portioning and storing of food, I wondered if I had been doing
4 This is true of almost all popular foods. Croutons and French toast, for instance, were created to
deal with stale bread; mushroom stock or broth is a tasty way to utilize mushroom stems, etc.
5 Thoreau, 1997
something terribly wrong during my years as a dish-washer and cook. Thoreau was
repulsed by the sight of raw flesh, and concluded that eating meat was immoral, and
that he must stop--were my feelings about what we as cooks were doing an indication
of some underlying ethical problem? The strength of Thoreaus argument comes from
its simplicity (If it is icky, dont eat it!), and the fact that most of us do find raw meat
icky. Similarly, most people are shocked and dismayed to hear food waste statistics like
those cited above. My coworkers and I agreed on our intuition that waste in general,
and food waste in particular, is wrong. In fact, the word waste entails the something
was discarded carelessly or unnecessarily; so waste seems to entail a moral wrongdoing
in our everyday attribution of the word to an action. With this intuition as a starting
point, it will be possible to unpack the issue of food waste, and develop practical ethical
guidance for the restaurant chef.
2. Why Chefs Deserve Ethical Scrutiny
The first part of my thesis, as mentioned, holds that the actions of chef warrant
ethical consideration. This is an important point to make, because those working in food
ethics largely overlook their actions. In the section on traceability I provide specific
examples of literature that surprisingly overlook the issues that crop up in restaurants,
but for now, two brief arguments suggest that the work of the chef may be more
ethically difficult than it seems at first glance. First, it seems that some food waste is
unavoidable, and second, no matter how small the individual act of food waste is, they
add up to a considerable amount in a surprisingly short amount of time.

The Dilemma of Portion Control
Most restaurants utilize some type of portion control for consistency and to be
able to calculate the cost of an individual dish. It also serves to keep the cost of an
individual dish at a profitable level. The ways in which portion control is executed varies
from kitchen to kitchen, and is based on the food being portioned. A popular choice in
most kitchens is small plastic bags, which range in size to accommodate chicken wings,
lunchmeats, shaved steak, calamari, etc. Because portion control requires labor and
materials, it costs money. So chefs and restaurateurs are posed with the question of
whether and what to focus their portion control effort and dollars on.
Within this seemingly mundane problem for the chef lays an ethical dilemma.
Either the chef controls portions or not. If not, then the chef will ultimately waste food.6
If so, then resources such as plastic (and everything that goes into its production) will be
wasted. So, it seems, some type of waste, either food or some other resource, is
inevitable. In a world where some go hungry, how we handle our food, especially in a
context where food preparation is particularly resource intensive, is not something to
gloss over.
"Everything costs money, beb."
One of the very first lessons I got as a new dishwasher and soon-to-be prep cook
was from a strange chef that ran the line on the weekends. He called everyone "beb"
6This is an empirical observation based on my own experience. It is certainly possible that chefs
could do away with resource demanding means of portion control without wasting food, but I would
be surprised to see this happen in most restaurants.
(short for babe), so that's what we called him (when he wasn't around). The Beb said to
me, as he would to everyone that was hired after me, "Everything costs money, beb. If
each employee wastes one dollar per shift, that's six dollars a week, and about 300
dollars a year. . ." When we start adding up all of the employees in the restaurant, and
consider that each one probably wastes more than a dollar, it isnt hard to see how that
number adds up fast. The explanation usually trailed off here, and any time the Beb
caught an employee doing something wasteful (like using too much dish soap, or not
scraping the bottom of a dressing container with a rubber spatula), he would remind us
"everything costs money, beb."
Some chefs have stories about other chefs throwing knives at them in anger, or
lewd acts being performed in the walk-in. While mine may not be as entertaining, it
serves to illustrate the point that restaurants become successful only when maintaining
a relatively high volume of output, and because of this, small amounts of waste here
and there add up. The Bebs focus was financial, but that line of reasoning can be
extended to food and any other resource used in the kitchen. One plastic portion bag
for an order of calamari may seem harmless, but when we consider that a typical meal
for four at a restaurant could consume four or five plastic bags, it becomes clear how
large that number can become in a short amount of time. The ethical point here is that
considered in isolation, questions about how the food makes it to your table in a
restaurant seem insignificant; considered on a larger scale, questions about how one
chef, or one restaurant, serves its guests are worthy of ethical consideration.
3. On Waste
Before entering the discussion about the two types of waste in restaurants, it
will be helpful first to discuss waste more generally. As I mentioned above, using the
term waste seems to entail a value judgment. In An Ontology of Trash Greg Kennedy
makes a similar point: So long as we continue to distinguish between positive and
negative, we will always face waste. For all wastes result from the inveterate human
habit of evaluation.7 It is clear that considering something waste is the result of human
judgment or evaluation, but what does this really mean? Is waste merely the result of
certain values we hold, or is there something underlying our individual values that can
make an action wasteful?
Kennedy takes the former position after a short explanation of the etymology of
waste. As he explains it, waste comes from the Latin vastus. This means unoccupied or
desolate, and is similar to the Latin word for empty or vain (vanus) and the Sanskrit
word for wanting or deficient. The notions of unoccupied, desolate, empty, vain,
wanting, and deficient mostly point to value judgments made by the beholder of waste.
Following this, Kennedy concludes: When our actions confirm the value we project, we
do not waste.8
This definition of waste has the benefit of clearly explaining our relationship to
ritualized feasting. In times of scarcity, people are finely attuned to the demands or
necessities of everyday life. In response, people have developed various ritualized
7 Kennedy, 2007 (p.2)

8 Ibid (p. 5)
attempts at surpassing necessity.9 The occasional over-indulgent feast that comes with
a harvest in poor farming communities, for instance, offers one an escape from the
harsh realities of hardships like not having enough food. By conceiving of waste purely
in terms of the values we hold, Kennedy is able to distinguish positive from negative
instances of waste, the feast being positive. Despite this, I think Kennedy misses an
aspect of waste that is independent of the particular or relative value judgments one
might make.
If we take a second look at the notions in the etymology of waste, words like
unoccupied, empty, or wanting, stand out as potentially independent of overt value
judgments. Unoccupied, empty, and wanting can all be understood as empirical
observations. If a chef determines that a meal about ready to leave the kitchen is not up
to his or her strict standards, and discards it in favor of making a new one for the
customer, there is an obvious way in which calling that waste is a value judgment. Yet, it
is not obvious that this is only a value judgment. We can say empirically, without making
the value judgment that discarding edible food is wrong, that where a foodstuff once
had the potential to sustain someone, it no longer does. A room in a home can be
wasted by being empty or unoccupied, and similarly a meal can be wasted by being
thrown away instead of eaten. This is even clearer in cases where throwing a meal away
leads directly to a wanting, but in restaurants fully stocked with food, wasting some
never leads directly to wanting.
9 Ibid (p. 11)

To further cast doubt on the idea that the notion of waste results purely from
particular value judgments, consider the case when an individual has conflicting values.
This happens quite frequently in the restaurant. In the above example of a chef
throwing away a meal that, for whatever reason, isnt up to the standards of the
restaurant, there is a conflict of values. The chef has obligations to the customer to fulfill
his or her expectations, and an obligation to the owners of the restaurant to maximize
profits. So the conflict of value comes down to profit versus reputation or integrity. To
use a current example, the blog Gateway Gourmet, which writes about the culinary
world, ran a blog-post titled Ethics in the Kitchen. The post was mainly a list of
imperatives, and the fourth was Dont be afraid to waste (time, money, or food). The
reason is that serving poor quality food undermines the business in the long term.
Despite the author advocating that the chef should throw away substandard food, he
nonetheless considers it waste. This is an example of one valuing the reputation and
success of ones business, and recognizing that an act in accordance with those values is
still wasteful. The idea that waste comes only from actions failing to align with our
values ultimately fails.
There are two distinct types of waste that occur in restaurants, Chefs waste, and
Resource waste (hereafter CW and RW, respectively). As mentioned, CW happens when
the chef fails to bring a dish or meal to its fullest potential. First, it should be noted that I
do not mean by this that there is some preexisting standard of perfection for each thing
that a chef makes. Even if there isnt an ultimate standard, everyone knows when a
familiar dish comes out awful. There are endless examples of this, as there are endless
ways to mess up a meal. The chef might neglect to defrost a steak before grilling it, or
over salt a soup, or use instant gravy instead of thickening the meat drippings in the
pan. Whether a meal is bad because the chef made a mistake or cut corners, the result
is CW.
The idea of CW is perhaps a little abstract, due to the waste not always being
material. The non-material waste becomes clear, however, when we consider what
consumers typically get out of the restaurant experience. For starters, it is obvious that
eating in restaurants is about more than just sustenance. In fact, almost everyones
eating habits in the industrialized world are dictated overwhelmingly by considerations
apart from sustenance. After all, how many of us are eating as Thoreau did?
Elizabeth Telfer takes this question up briefly in the introduction to her book
Food for Thought, Philosophy and Food: Why do people want to eat out? The short
answer is for pleasure: the pleasure of the food, of the surroundings and of the
company. She continues expanding on the various pleasures of food later in the book
by way of arguing against a long standing tradition in Western philosophy, dating back
at least to Plato, which throws doubt on eating and drinking as sources of pleasure.
Telfer considers two strands of this tradition, the quantitative, which holds that eating
provides less pleasure than other pleasurable activities, and the qualitative, which holds
that eating provides inferior pleasures to other activities.10 After arguing against both
strands of the tradition, Telfer discusses a number of ways in which meals can be more
10Telfer, 2002 (p. 24); There are a number of other discussions of traditions in western thought that
downplay the good that can come from eating and other consumption. See also Schudson 1998,
Campbell 1998, and Korthals 2004.
than just sustenance. They can be religious observances, a religious or moral statement,
a celebration, an act of solidarity or bonding, a gift, an exercise of style or luxury, and a
work of art.11 While Telfer discusses the ways in which a meal transcends mere
sustenance generally, each of the ways that she mentions are recognized by chefs and
actualized in restaurants (though certainly not each way at the same time, or by every
chef).
Celebrity chef Mario Batali discusses the extra-food considerations that go into
the experience of a great restaurant in a cookbook named after one of his restaurants,
The Babbo Cookbook. Batali says The experience of dining, as opposed to simply eating,
has as much to do with your surroundings, the company, and numerous other factors
that you may or may not even register on a conscious level as with the food on your
plate.12 When all of the potential good that can come from ones relationship with food
is considered, it becomes easier to see how there can be non-material waste when a
chef serves bad food in his restaurant. The feeling of disappointment one has after a
bad meal (especially at a gourmet or expensive restaurant) is testament to this.
The waste in CW is not limited to the non-material, and in fact the material
waste is ultimately more important, ethically speaking. The non-material and material
wastes in CW are distinct, but not entirely separable. For the chef, one of the main
causes of CW is cutting corners by using prepared foods in this kitchen. This results in
both material and non-material CW. Soups, stocks (typically bases or pastes, to which
the chef adds water), and croutons, for instance, are among the most common prepared
11 Telfer, 2002 (p. 38)

12 Batali, 2002
foods that one will find in the restaurant kitchen. These prepared foods are never as
tasty as ones made from scratch, and so it is easy to see the source of non-material CW
in these examples. Unless one has worked in a restaurant, it is a little bit more difficult
to see how using prepared foods in the restaurant contributes significantly to material
waste.
I could offer a long-winded explanation of how this is so, but fortunately, some
famous food experts have already done a fine job. Alton Browns explanation in one of
his cookbooks of why home cooks tend to shy away from making sauces is as true for
the home cook as it is for the typical chef in my experience, and the same kind of
reasoning can be applied to other prepared foods that many chefs use. He says:
By and large, most home cooks dont do sauceTraditional sauces are indeed
scaryas all dinosaursare. Theyre scary because they are not of our time.
They are of a time when toqued Frenchmen walked the earth, backed by armies
of fourteen-year old apprentices who probably didnt live to see fortyThe
kitchens the culinary T-Rexes occupied bear no resemblance to the rooms we
cook in, nor did the groceries that filled them. These guys worked with whole
everything: they didnt buy a steak, they bought a side of beef. They didnt buy a
fish filet, they bough the fish. They purchased cartloads of produceThis meant
a lot of leftovers: meat scraps and bones and fish heads, carrot tops, mushroom
stemsBeing clever and innovative, the ancient chefs didnt want to waste these
items. They made sauces, and everyone was happy.13
This passage begins a section of sauce recipes, and so it is easy to see why Brown picked
sauces as the focus of this passage. But it could have just as easily been written about
other things that chefs make: stale bread is perfect for croutons, French toast, bread
budding, and breadcrumbs; organs become offal; shells from shellfish like lobster or
13 Brown, 2006 (p. 213, emphasis added)

crab make strongly favored broths or stocks, and the list goes on. Batali makes a similar
point in his cookbook: In agricultural societiesnothing goes to waste. The ears, face,
and nose become testa; the hooves become zampone; the intestines hold salumi made
from all the loose scraps; the brains go into ravioli; the leather goes to a tannery, and
the tail goes into soup. In this way, great recipes are born out of necessity.14
From what Brown and Batali say, it isnt difficult to see how bringing in prepared
foods leads to RW, when many of the prepared foods would otherwise haven been
made from scraps around the kitchen. What happens with these scraps, then, if the chef
does use prepared foods like stocks from bases, frozen soups, or food service croutons?
Most of the scraps go into the trash, but some of them are avoided from the beginning,
because chefs now tend to buy individual steaks, fish filets, and even pre-sliced
vegetables. Waste isnt decreased in this way, however; it only changes what is being
wasted. This leads to an increase in grocery prices and RW, and a decrease in profits and
quality.
Wastes that result from the food industry in general and restaurants in particular
are not limited to non-material pleasures or foodstuffs only. This is why RW is resource
waste, and not food waste. According to a study done at the request of the UN:
[R]oughly one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted

globally, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year. This inevitably also
means that huge amounts of the resources used in food production are used in
gets lost or wasted are also emissions in vain.
As mentioned above, the notion vain is similar to and involved in the etymology of
14 Batali, 2002 (p. 210)

waste. Following the findings of the study mentioned above, and the etymology of
waste, it is safe to conclude that where food is wasted, the resources that went into its
production, transportation, and final preparation are wasted too. If we waste a third of
our food annually, then we also waste a third of our food related resources annually. In
a globalized food system where the groceries one buys are hardly affected by
geography, climate, or recent weather, if we could put a single number to the resources
wasted in the food system (due to food waste), it would likely be just as shocking as
hearing that 1.3 billion tons of food go to waste each year.
Whereas CW is ultimately the violation of a certain professional ethic, RW
constitutes the violation of a general ethic. What this means is that only the chef has an
obligation to bring out various pleasures from the dining experiencethis obligation
does not extend to the home cookbut everyone has some obligation to not waste. In
this way, the chef that violates aspects of the professional ethics, by acting in a way that
leads to CW, also violates the general ethic.15 Thus, while CW may seem at first to be an
insignificant or trivial ethical violation, the relationship of CW to RW in the restaurant
kitchen suggests otherwise.
For a final point of clarification on the types of waste, it is important to see how
material CW is distinct from RW. In one sense, material chefs waste is resource waste.
When the chef throws away the box and bag that the foodservice croutons came in, as
well as the weeks stale bread, resources are wasted. The fuel, for instance that made
15I avoid here the task of making the general argument that waste ought to be avoided because it
seems uncontroversial, and to make this argument thoroughly would be beyond the scope of what I
want to accomplish in this paper.
the plastic bag, powered the industrial kitchen equipment, shipped the product from
the manufacturer, to distributor, and eventually chef, is wasted, as it all could have been
avoided had the chef used some of the stale bread and other ingredients on hand. This
type of waste, while it is in fact RW, is still distinct. It is distinct because the action that
leads to the waste is done by a certain kind of agent: a professional chef with certain
professional obligations. So while everyone can waste resources, only the chef can make
CW. And again, CW is unethical, as it is a violation of the chefs professional ethic, and it
leads to or is itself RW, which we all share an obligation to avoid.
4. On Traceability
Traceability has been implemented at an increasing rate throughout the food
system. In a second book on the subject, Coff et al discusses thoroughly its application in
the Danish bacon, UK wheat-bread, and Greek olive oil supply chains.16 Most are
familiar with food manufacturers utilizing traceability to attract customers, whether it is
the place of origin and fair trade sticker advertised on coffee, or orange juice brands
building ad campaigns around the location in which the oranges are farmed. This has
become more of a legal obligation for companies as well, as it is instrumental in finding
the source of problems like food contamination. There is no denying that the
implementation of traceability in the food sector has been successful. However, this is
true of only part of the food sector.
16 Coff et al, 2008

Traceability for the Consumer
Christian Coff, in his book The Taste for Ethics: an Ethic of Food Consumption, offers
a detailed analysis of food ethics as it relates to the production history of the foods that
we consume. Coff distinguishes four kinds of knowledge (intellectual, sensuous,
emotional, and narrative), and examines the how the different kinds of knowledge are
utilized in our relationship with food. Criticizing how pervasive the use of intellectual
knowledge is in food matters, his position is ultimately that we ought to be using
narrative knowledge which allows particular foods to be evaluated according to their
production history. As the name suggests, the consumer is supposed to evaluate a
products story (or history), which contains the details necessary to make an ethical
judgment.17
Unfortunately, there are limitations to this approach. Coff explains, foodstuffs
cannot function as signs but only as traces that let us know that there has been a
production history in which there must be an ethical dimension.18 This makes sense:
we cant know by looking at a steak, whether on a plate in a restaurant or wrapped in
Styrofoam and plastic at the grocery store, very much about it or its production history.
Beyond the shape, color of the flesh, and how delicately the fat is marbled throughout,
there is not very much information to be had just by inspection. When the harvesting
and the butchering are far removed from our eating, it is difficult to find the information
necessary to make ethical choices. Thus, the separation of a foods production history
from its preparation, service, and consumption, is an ethical problem.
17 Coff, 2006
18 Ibid (p. 103)
Production of our foods, in case there was any doubt, is almost completely
separated from its consumption. This is just as true in restaurants as it is in homes. I
havent worked in a restaurant that makes its own desserts. Many appetizers come
bagged, boxed, and frozen. Frequently, restaurants order their meats by the cut, and
they are shipped individually wrapped. Despite the fact that I live and work in Rhode
Island, most of the fish that I have cooked has arrived at the restaurant fileted, skinned
and frozen. Even during the summer, when I pick up fresh shellfish at a local distributor
on my way into work, we still serve from Sole filets shipped from Alaska for our fish &
chips. There certainly are restaurants for which some or all of these things arent true,
but these restaurants are likely in the minority.
To explain and deal with this issue, Coff borrows Peter Kemps distinction between
the short-range ethics that are possible without a separation of production and
consumption, and the long-range ethics that are necessary with it. While Kemp holds
that we ought to treat these long-range relationships as if they were face-to-face, Coff
denies the plausibility of doing this, but takes a similar position: "If consumers are to put
their ethics into practice, we must take the opposite direction. Instead of extending the
short-range ethics to the absent, the absent must be made present in glimpses. This is
the thesis on which the rest of this book is written."19 His suggestion, then, is using
traceabilitythe trace of a foodstuffs production history understood as a narrativeto
make our food consumption choices. Because it is aimed at helping individuals make
better choices, Coffs conception of traceability is really traceability for the consumer.
19 Ibid (p. 100)

Robust Traceability
There are things that happen in the kitchen that consumers dont see that add to the
ethical history of the food. By adding another step in the process from farm to plate, a
foodstuffs history is further obscured. And as discussed above, there are many
unethical things that chefs can do in the restaurant. Because it is focused only at the
consumer, Coffs traceability is of limited use.20 Coff, like many philosophers working in
food ethics, seems to have a blind spot to restaurants. Neither of Coffs books that I cite
discuss restaurants any length. Korthals and Telfer, both with books on food ethics,
neglect to discuss restaurants at any length.21 A Routledge anthology, Food Ethics, which
is part of a series on Professional Ethics, neglects thorough discussion of restaurants as
well, despite the amount of professionals in the food industry that work in
restaurants.22
As Korthals says of the consumer, I do not wish to absolve the consumer.
Consumers too must liberate themselves from the bondage that holds them in relation
to food production.23 The chef, likewise, should not be absolved. Like the consumer,
the chef is a small part of an incredibly complex food system. The global food system is
obviously larger and more complex than a restaurant, but it makes sense to view the
restaurant roughly as a microcosm of the global food system. Like the consumer, the
20 This isnt exactly a problem with Coffs notion of traceability, because it is useful to those that it
was intended to be useful to, but it is a limit nonetheless.
21 Korthals 2004, and Telfer 2002; to be fair, at least Telfer mentions restaurants enough for them to
warrant a spot in the index.

22 Mepham, 2002
23 Korthals, 2004 (p.180)
chef can get lost in many of the same difficult questions: what food should I buy, and
how much? where or from who should I buy it? how should I prepare this food and how
much should I prepare? These types of questions are ethically important for the
consumer and the chef alike. However, there are certain obligations that come with
buying and preparing food professionally, so these questions might be even more
important when considered from the point of view of the chef. Unfortunately, as I have
argued, the chef doesnt get much attention from the ethicist.
The problem isnt exactly with the notion of traceability, but with its application thus
far. A more robust notion of traceability that considers not only the issues of the
consumer, but also of the chef, will be instrumental in bringing about the same changes
in the restaurant on the same scale as other areas of the food production sector. Again,
this isnt to say that Coffs practical suggestion to think about traceability in the food
sector is wrong; but rather that his focus was not sufficiently wide in scope. The
relationship of agri-business to supermarket to consumer encompasses the majority of
the food industry, but to omit restaurants from consideration in food ethics is a mistake,
and the result is a notion of traceability that is of seriously limited use for the chef. As
mentioned, there is a qualitative as well as quantitative difference in the food wasted by
chefs and consumers; these differences suggest that questions regarding the chef are
more ethically significant.
Rather than only the consumer utilizing traceability to evaluate a foodstuff, the chef
too can utilize it to evaluate various aspects of the restaurant that do not serve as signs,
but as traces. The idea that the actions of a chef are better considered in total than
individually is important for and allows the application of traceability. Just like the
consumer cant know everything necessary to make an informed, ethical choice, the
chef cant make an appropriate ethical evaluation of his products just by looking at or
considering one instance of it.
Robust traceability has the advantage over traceability for the consumer, then,
because it is useful for the professional as well as the consumer. Additionally, it uses the
examination of a trace (as opposed to a sign) to reach ethical conclusions without
relying entirely on production history, so it doesnt require the underlying
epistemological position that Coff maintains, which says that narrative knowledge is
superior to intellectual knowledge with respect to food ethics. Coff was right to utilize a
narrative approach to evaluating foods, but I think this part can be reserved without at
the same time making those epistemological commitments.
In the rest of this section I will examine several key parts of any restaurant, and
consider how traceability can be used as a tool for evaluation. Coffs traceability will be
helpful up to a point, and what I call robust traceability will answer the remaining issues
by considering the ethical aspects of dealing with food that crop up in the professional
kitchen. The method of application is similar to Coffs, in that aspects of the restaurant
will be evaluated as traces (rather than signs), but different in that there is less focus on
the aspect of traceability that literally traces foodstuffs from plate to farm. Because the
chef is a consumer as well as a producer of food, the considerations of traceability for
the consumer are subsumed by robust traceability.

Food as trace
There are obviously a wide variety of different things that one can buy in
restaurants, so in order to substantiate how the concept of robust traceability can be
applied, and its strengths over simple traceability, the cases must be chosen carefully. I
will look at something ubiquitous in restaurants: coffee. This example entails the ethical
problems faced by consumers (which is Coffs focus) because chefs and restaurateurs
are consumers in a way very similar to individuals; but it also entails ethical problems
that consumers do not face. For instance, the individual consumer has very little ethical
obligations regarding the food that they buy beyond choosing the good one, but the
restaurant, employing professionals who are fulfilling obligations to customers, would
seem to have ethical obligations (meeting sanitation requirements, and fulfilling their
end of the transaction by serving a product as it was described on the menu, at the very
least).24
The rules that chefs learn are designed to make the most of what is available to
cook and eat; hence not following certain rules can make a meal objectively bad25. Due
to these various rules of good cooking, we can say that there can be a privation of
good in our consumption of foods. When a culinary professional breaks one of these
rules and the result is a low quality product, he or she has committed a wrongdoing that
is analogous to a mechanic installing used parts and charging for new.
To use one of our examples, the cheap coffee that many restaurants serve might
24 In addition to Coffs work, see Schwarz 2010 for detailed discussions of the ethics of consumer
choices.
25 Trying to roast a turkey that hasnt yet been defrosted will never result in a good meal, regardless
of ones particular taste.

be perfectly agreeable, even enjoyable, to the drinker. However, we can say that due to
harvesting methods, perhaps a portion of the beans that were used to make that coffee
were not ripe. Hand picking beans ensures that this doesn't happen, but this clearly
would not be profitable for a bargain coffee company. While hand picking coffee beans
guarantees that only ripe beans are used for brewing, it raises other, more serious
ethical questions about working conditions. Exploitation is a problem in many areas of
the food industry, particularly in cocoa farming.26 At this point, traceability for
consumers suffices in helping the chef choose a product to serve in the restaurant. This
initial choice (which might include seeking products which are forthcoming about the
area in which the product was grown and harvested, and avoid exploitation by paying
farmers a fair wage) encompasses all of the same decisions made by the individual
consumer. Beyond the choice of product, however, the similarities between individual
consumer and chef stop.
How one stores, handles, and prepares the productin this case coffeeis
crucial for its ultimate quality, both ethical and gustatory. For individual consumers,
these two qualities are largely separate, but this isnt so for chefs. When I am at home
and I brew a bad cup of coffee, I usually drink it anyway. When I am at work, on the
other hand, and something I make tastes bad, the customer sends it back for another
one, until I get it right. This wastes time, money, and whatever the product happens to
be. In cases where restaurants have bad reputations, and customers have low
expectations, the coffee likely will not be sent back, and so no waste results. The poor
26 Schwarz, 2011
quality is still unethical in some sense if it is the work of a professional. To see why, we
can consider Aristotles function argument, which states that things have a virtue or
function, and so are good to the extent that they meet or fulfill that function. A common
example is a knife, whose function is to cut, and so whose virtue is sharpness. The
culinary professional then, has many functions, but the most general might be said to
be, prepare food well. So in the event that something horrible is served, but not wasted,
we can still plausibly say that the act of the culinary professional knowingly serving
something low quality is unethical, or bad.
Concerning the flavor of the coffee (and for the chef its moral status), the very
popular drop method for brewing coffee involves the coffee sitting, for an extended
amount of time, on a hot plate. Reheating coffee after brewing it breaks down the flavor
of the coffee, resulting in an overly bitter cup of coffee. This means that, regardless of
how the coffee actually tastes to you, the chances are good that some fundamental
mistakes were made in the processes that culminated in your drinking the coffee.
Considerations apart from things like "I think lightly roasted coffee tastes the best", that
deal with tangible aspects of the quality of a foodstuff, such as its harvesting,
transportation, and preparation, suggest that more often than not, something that we
eat or drink could have been bettermore flavorful. To excel at ones craft, as a chef is
to take something simple, like coffee, and elevate it by executing each step perfectly,
thereby elevating its gustatory, and ethical quality. Even when thinking about one
particular foodstuff, traceability for the consumer is only the beginning for the chef;
considerations about how one ought to act beyond the choice of product are needed,
and provided by robust traceability.
Dish as trace
In addition to the food itself, the dish functions as a trace of its production history,
and all of the decisions that went into it. The dish includes its description on the
menu, the food that comprises it, and its presentation when it arrives at the table.
Considerations regarding the food that comprises a dish are covered above, and so this
part will focus on questions apart from a foods production history. This isnt to say that
the focus isnt on food, but rather that the focus is not on what the farmer does to the
food, but what the chef and other employees do.
As well as determining, in large part, how an establishment will fare, the individual
dishes are responsible for much of a restaurants moral status. Because the actions that
make up the process by which a dish is recreated are repeated many times throughout a
night, in proportion to the dishs popularity, the actions cannot be evaluated in
isolation. Thus, we ought to look at the dish as a trace that represents all of the
particular recreations thereof during its time on a menu, as well as the choices that
went into it. These choices include, among other things, the ingredients, the decision of
when to serve it, how much to charge, which section of the menu it will be placed, and
the portion size.
Of the choices that go into a dish, one of the most important is deciding the portion
size. Too big and there is little room for profit, and more chance for waste; too small and
the guests are unhappy. The chef has an obligation to make profitable dishes, to ensure
the restaurants longevity, and he also has an obligation to please the guests by meeting
expectations of quality and value. Most ethically relevant, the chef has an obligation to
avoid food waste that is stronger than the one the individual cooking at home has.
Despite some people feeling that we should finish what is on our plate before leaving
the dinner table, there seems to be no relevant difference between throwing away what
we havent finished, and merely adding it to our waistlines. So, when the individual
makes too much food at home, there is little in the way of wrongdoing when there is
some left over food. The chef, on the other hand, serving the same set of dishes over
and over, in an environment where portion control is necessary to good bookkeeping
and making a profit, must be mindful of this, and adjust accordingly. Because there are
many more meals produced in a given day by a restaurant kitchen, the chef has the
opportunity to save very small amounts of food, and serve them to later guests. To be
succinct: it doesnt matter if the individual puts four or five ounces of mashed potatoes
on their plate for dinner, even if they cant finish the last ounce; the extra ounce in a
restaurant, on the other hand, that serves 200-300 or more meals in a night, can mean
the difference of fifty portions of mashed potato. We can substitute nearly anything a
restaurant might serve for the mashed potatoes in this example, and it will still hold
true.
In terms of the ingredients in a dish, beyond the issue discussed in the previous
section, the chef has also to consider whether an ingredient or component of a dish
should be house made, or bought prepared. Prepared foods, also known as
foodservice in restaurants, are available in such variety that it would be possible for a
restaurant to buy everything prepared, and then simply warm, assemble, and serve. This
does happen with dishes in many restaurants, but even when a chef is doing more than
just heating and assembling, prepared foods can still play a large role in what chefs
serve. Few restaurants make their own meatballs, hamburger patties, or French fries,
for instance. This leads to both CW and RW, because handmade meatballs and
hamburger patties are obviously higher quality and also because they can be made
daily, meaning that they dont need plastic bags and cardboard boxes for storage, nor
do they take up space in a freezer. Further, if every restaurant made their foods from
scratch, an entire step in the process from farm to plate can be removed. This isnt an
insignificant step either, as rather than hand power making the components of the dish,
machines are. Refrigerated trucks then ship the products long distances, where they sit
in large freezers at the restaurant. Removing the foodservice components from a dish
helps to remove an entirely unnecessary, and relatively resource intensive, step in our
food consumption.
Beyond the question of foodservice or house made, we have another about the
ingredients that make up a dish to think about. There are important ethical decisions to
be made regarding the components of a dish that go beyond each components
production history: the chefs professional duties require honesty when describing a
dish on the menu, and a level of proficiency in cooking it. To speak concretely, consider
bacon: there are important ethical considerations associated with the treatment of pigs
in concentrated animal feeding operations, but there are also considerations associated
with the reason why the chef chose to add bacon to this dish.
Bacon is a particularly strong example, I think, because chefs, line cooks, and home
cooks alike misuse it on a daily basis. All of the kitchens that I have worked in cook and
serve large quantities of bacon, and it is ubiquitous in the menus that I have served.
Comedian Jim Gaffigan jokes that bacon bits are the magic pixie dust of food, and Iron
Chef Michael Simon is outspoken about his belief that every dish is better with bacon,
prominently displaying his affection via pork related tattoos. So bacon is popular,
perhaps even overused, but does it follow that it is in fact, misused?
To answer this question, some culinary history is helpful. Chef Auguste Escoffier was
born in France in 1846, and would go on to revolutionize (or at the very least codify)
French cuisine. Widely held as one of the most influential chefs, he was, in another
chefs words, the greatest and most radical chef of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The modern kitchen hierarchy comes from Escoffiers brigade
system, and he popularized service a la Russe (serving meals in courses, rather than all
at once). Without running the risk of an overstatement, Blumenthal says, We eat as we
eat because of Auguste.27
To add to these legacies, Escoffiers cookbook, Le Guide Culinaire has become one of
the most common reference books for chefs. Escoffier begins Le Guide with a section on
sauces, which are one of the defining characteristics of French cuisine. Some derivative
of a French mother sauce can be found in very many French dishes, not unlike bacon
and American menus. Escoffier, describing the dynamic role played by sauces and stocks
27 Escoffier, 2011 (Foreword)

in French cookery, explained how one particular sauce, Espagnole, came to dominate
the culinary landscape at one point:
It was gradually perfected but its use very quickly overtook the purpose for which it
had been created and it is no exaggeration to say that during the latter part of the
nineteenth century, the use of Espagnole became excessive. To this misuse can be
attributed the appearance of an indifferent cookery, bereft of any well-defined
flavor and where the entire range of tastes become lost in one single insipid level.
Escoffier seemed to hold that it was the chefs responsibility to please the guest and
maintain self imposed standards ones cooking: although chefs might be happy enough
ladling bland Espagnole over every meal, the professional chef can and should do better.
Similarly, no matter how delicious bacon might be, it simply should not be in
some of the dishes it is. In fact, in my experience, a cook often wraps something in
bacon to hide its inferior quality: you might find scallops or filet mignon wrapped in
bacon at the Outback or Applebees, but probably not at any of the Michelin starred
restaurants (especially the ones serving Kobe beef, or freshly shucked scallops). When
writing the menu, or coming up with specials, chefs and restaurateurs ought to ask
themselves: does this sandwich (or whatever the dish is) need the extra fat and
smokiness that the bacon provides, or is it just there because menu items sound better
with bacon in the description, or because my meat or seafood is low quality? If an
ingredient is there to cover up, then it is clearly unethical as it dishonest, and violates
the responsibilities to the customer. Beyond a violation of a professional ethic, misusing
ingredients, whether bacon or sauce Espagnole, is wrong because it is wasteful, insofar
as it is superfluous to the dish.

Menu as trace
The food that restaurants buy, as well as the dishes they serve, can be evaluated
with the notion of robust traceability. Like food and the dish, the restaurants menu
doesnt obviously display all of the ethically relevant information. The menu has the
capability of conveying much more information to the consumer than foodstuffs alone,
and the chef should take advantage of this. But beyond the information that the menu
can give the consumer, the menu can also serve as a trace for the chef. The size,
placement of certain foodstuffs on the menu, and whether or not it is dynamic and
seasonal, all can affect the ethical status of a restaurant operation. The menu alone
does not give this information; rather, its implications, or some idea of how the menu
influences the actions of a chef does. In this way, the menu qualifies as a trace.
The size of a menu is important not only for shaping the customers feelings
about the restaurant, but also shaping the workflow in the kitchen. Overly large menus
often overwhelm customers and stifle conversation (it is hard to talk with your face
hidden behind a menu), but they also often bog down the chefs in the kitchen. It is
quicker and easier to cook many of the same items, but not surprisingly, it is difficult for
any cook to juggle many different types of food at once. This is true not only of the line
cook, but also of the prep cook. Huge menus frequently are the cause of chefs using pre
made, low quality, and ultimately wasteful products.
If, for example, the only salad on the menu is the Caesar salad, it is very easy for
the chef to make his or her own croutons and dressing. However, with each salad added
to the menu, the prep cooks list gets longer. Most chefs arent willing to order each
ingredient in each salad (including the ingredients in the dressing), and make them all
from scratch. The result is that the chef buys prepared foods: the dressing is usually
bottled (and mediocre tasting at best), the croutons bagged, the fruit peeled, sectioned,
and in a plastic tub, and etc. Smaller menus allow chefs to focus, and cook more of their
own food. It also makes service quicker and smoother. The result is almost invariably
better food and higher profits, and ethically commendable work.
The issue of where something is placed on the menu is not about its physical
placement on the menu, but its placement in the service. Most New England chefs want
to have lobster on their menu. Serving lobster can be ethically problematic, however.
Potentially threatened populations make eating lobster an important issue in food
ethics. A strange belief that lobsters do not feel pain is widespread among the people
that I have cooked with, and most have scoffed at the notion of killing a lobster before
cooking it.28 Also, much of the lobster is wasted when steamed or boiled and served
whole. Few people pick through the lobster for the leg and body meat, going only for
the easy to access tail and claw meat. The shells and hard to dig out lobster meat are
discarded, when they could have been utilized if the chef cooked and broke down the
lobster in the kitchen. These issues make serving lobster ethically treacherous.
To put this point succinctly, consider two different ways of serving lobster, which
would be served at different courses of the meal: steamed lobster and lobster
28I call this belief strange because there is certainly no proof that lobsters do not feel pain. Where
there is some possibility that what we are cooking does feel pain, it seems uncontroversial to suggest
that we shouldnt boil it alive.
cheesecake. Most people are familiar with steamed lobster; lobster cheesecake is a
trendy dish often served as an appetizer, which consists of a creamy cheese mixture and
chunks of lobster baked in filo dough. To really make the dish impressive, top it with
lobster velout and a piece of lobster meat. In the case of steamed lobster, one feeds
one person, and as mentioned, a good bit is wasted. If a lobster costs the restaurant ten
dollars, then they need to sell it for about thirty dollars to ensure a reasonable profit. In
the case of the lobster cheesecake, all of the meat from the lobster can be picked and
used; the shells can be used to make a lobster stock, which can be thickened into
velout, and one lobster can create two to four portions or more, depending on the
lobster. That same ten-dollar lobster can go further, thus reducing food costs and
increasing profits. More importantly, it significantly reduces the amount of lobster we
are wasting, without forcing the chef or consumer to go without the lobster they love,
all by serving lobster for an appetizer instead of an entre.
As a final consideration of the menu as trace, it is important to ask whether the
menu is dynamic and seasonal, or rigid and unresponsive? Continuing with lobster as an
example, the season typically dictates how much a restaurant will sell. Restaurants in
tourist destinations will always sell more during the busiest season for tourists. The
ethical problem occurs during the slower months, when the menu doesnt change to
respond to the time. I have worked at a restaurant that serves lobster, and has a busy
tourist season. During the winter, however, with no beach goers stopping in on their
way by, lobster doesnt sell as well. Rather than not ordering lobster and taking it off of
the menu, the chef ordered less. The demand was so low that it was a nightly task
during the winter to check the lobsters, and if one looked like it might die before
morning, we cooked it, tore off the claws and tail, and put it in a bucket with other claws
and tails in the freezer. Every week or so, the bucket would be emptied and the meat
would be incorporated into our lobster salad rolls. Unfortunately, much of the lobster is
wasted in this way (as discussed above), and the chef occasionally forgot to check the
lobsters, so it wasnt uncommon for one to die in the walk-in refrigerator. Because
shellfish spoils quickly when it dies, these lobsters have to be thrown away entirely.
By changing the menu to be responsive to business and the season, problems
like this can be avoided. If, for example, the lobster cheesecake wanes in popularity, the
chef can switch to house made lobster bisque, or experiment with the many other
shellfish available. A dynamic menu allows the chef to utilize food scraps, leftovers, and
take advantage of deals or interesting new products from their purveyor or food
supplier. The result is less waste and a superior menu, ethically and culinarily speaking.
5. Objections
To conclude, and further substantiate my position, I will field some potential
objections: some might be uncomfortable with a paper purporting to deal with waste,
but that does not mention sustainability; chefs and restaurateurs with large menus and
pantries filled with foodservice items are likely to be averse to my suggestions, and
some that are particularly troubled with the level of inequality in the world may reject
outright the possibility of an ethically good restaurant.

But what about sustainability?
Generally, the first thoughts when confronted with waste of any kind are
questions of sustainability. We often use the idea of sustainability in our ethical
positions, even when we are not explicitly aware that we are making ethical claims.
Take, for instance, something many probably heard from their parents while young
children: You better finish thatthere are starving kids in Africa! Implicit in that
admonition is the idea that people are starving in the world because there isnt enough
food to go around. Part of my thesis is that food waste is morally wrong, and
unacceptable in a business whose sole service is to cook and serve food; however, this is
due to reasons mostly not having to do directly with sustainability.
I avoid grounding my case in notions of sustainability for two reasons. The first is
that when one holds waste to be wrong because what is being wasted is not plentiful, as
soon as it becomes plentiful, wasting it is no longer wrong. Calling waste wrong in this
way is narrow and rather unsubstantial. The second is that the issue of sustainability is
perhaps being overstated: there is still non-farmed arable land in parts of the world
(particularly where hunger problems are the most serious29), and furthermore, average
farming yields are a function of technology.
Chefs waste, which leads to more general resource waste, as such violates of
both a professional and a general ethic. The fact that there are ways in which waste is
unethical, without making recourse to sustainability, suggests that although an
important issue, it is not the most appealing foundation for an ethic of food. If there are
29 UNECA, 2009
reasons against being gluttonous, excessive, and wasteful that does not have to do with
running out of something, these are clearly the more ethically relevant reasons.
As for the second reason, the debate over the status of modern consumption
with regard to sustainability can be witnessed in two philosophical articles, Garret
Hardins The Tragedy of the Commons and Mark Sagoffs Do We Consume Too Much?
Hardin claims that the world and its resources are finite, and concludes that growing
consumption must lead inevitably to coercion, while Sagoff claims that our ability to
substitute one resource for another, as well as growing technology and efficiency,
undermines concerns that the worlds finitude will lead to coercion. Sagoff notes that
we can currently feed a population of 10 billion people, and claims that resource
reserves are a function of technology.30 This piece was published fifteen years ago, and
in that time there has been no shortage in advances in food technology. Meat can now
be grown in the lab; 3D printing is currently being used to print human organs (if you
can print a heart, you can print a sandwich!); and GMOs as well as research in indoor
farming suggest that there are plenty of technologies that can increase levels of food
production. These types of technologies will help increase yields in developed,
industrialized nations, but they arent at all necessary for increasing yields where food is
needed the most. According to a 2009 report from the United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa,
Comparing the yields of common cereal crops with the world averages shows
the huge potential gains that Africa can reap by introducing measures to reach
30 Sagoff, 1997
the world average (figure 4.1). Africas yield is 55 per cent of the world average
in the case of rice, 34 per cent in the case of maize, and 69 per cent in the case of
sorghum.31
It is clear from this that significant gains can be made in parts of the world merely by
introducing technology that is currently available. Finally, consider again that about 1.3
billion tons of food is lost or wasted annually. Better technology and food handling
techniques can ensure that more food from the farm actually makes it to the plate.
Sustainability very well may be an issue we should be worried about, but it doesnt
seem like a problem that cant be avoided, nor does it seem like the issue ethicists
should be most concerned with in food or consumption ethics.
The myth of the regular
The thesis that I defend suggests that many restaurants should make significant
changes. A common reason given by restaurant owners for their unwillingness to
change is that it will upset the customers and drive away business. Whether it is a recipe
for a dressing, a portion size or specific menu item, an entire menu, or the dcor,
owners, chefs, and managers are often not willing to change. This isnt a problem at
successful restaurants; but even those that havent been employed at restaurants that
are barely in business (I have worked at two) can see how widespread this problem is. In
fact, judging by the success of certain television programs, watching incompetent
restaurateurs battle celebrity chefs over making changings to their failing restaurant is
31 UNECA, 2009
very popular. This reason for the general aversion to change can be called the myth of
the regular. While there are exceptions, the kind of aversion to change that I am talking
about, in my experience, comes after a period of success for a restaurant, and after an
unwillingness to update the products and services. Regardless of what prompts this
aversion to change, it is not a good one, and is bad for business. I will offer two
considerations to support this.
The first point against the myth of the regular is a point about the nature of
restaurant customers, so to speak. Simply put, they often get bored, move away, or die.
Restaurants cannot possibly be successful in the long term without a relatively constant
stream of new customers. Consider your own restaurant choices: how many of them do
you frequent on a regular basis? And for how long have you been a regular there?
Most people like variety, and regularly go to new restaurants. Consider also that, for
one reason or another, most people move throughout their life, and do not stay a
regular at any one restaurant forever. Few restaurants develop large groups of regular
customers that can sustain a business.
The last possibility that I mention, that of customers dying, might seem
unnecessary. I include it, however, for good reason. In the case that a (non-branded)
restaurant does succeed for longer than five to ten years, the possibility of developing a
strong group of regulars is a real one, although it still will not carry a business alone. In
the case of the first restaurant that I worked at, the group of regulars was so committed
that they were the source of the vast majority of our business. The waitresses knew
most of the customers by name, and the cooks knew most of the customers by their
ordering quirks (well-done-baked-stuffed-scrod lady, for instance, came alone every
Tuesday, and sent her meal back every single time, without fail, for over a year straight).
The owner, wanting to pass the business to his son, was faced with the problem that can
be best described with a brief story.
Like many of our regulars, one couple had been frequenting the restaurant for
well over a decade, and during my time there, they came in nearly every Sunday evening
for dinner and a drink. They both ordered the small portion of broiled scrod, he had a
pint of Bass, and she had water. After cooking their meals every Sunday for quite some
time, it became a part of the Sunday shift that I expected. One day, however, they didnt
show up. After about a month, the husband came in one Sunday afternoon alone.
Cooking only one broiled scrod was strangely sad for me, even though I didnt even have
any idea what the couple looked like, let alone any personal connection to them. In this
way the group of regulars slowly diminished in size during my time cooking there; the
owner is currently trying to sell his restaurant. This story is even more noteworthy due
to the restaurants particular situation: it had been open for so long that the mortgage
had been paid off. Despite not having one of a restaurants biggest expenses, the group
of regulars was still unable to support the business.
Ultimately, the important point is that for a number of reasons, restaurants
cannot rely on a group of regulars to keep them profitable. Because of this, chefs must
be aware that while consistency is a virtue and characteristic of successful restaurants, a
willingness to change is also a key to success for those that arent wildly successful from
day one.
For the second consideration, there is evidence to show that even if one could
count on regulars to support a business, customers are receptive to the influence of the
restaurants they eat at. In Shaping Culinary Taste: the Influence of Commercial
Operators, Maureen Brookes explains the extent to which professionals in the industry
influence consumers decisions. While customers are the ones that make the choices
and lead restaurant production, there are important ways in which the restaurant
industry shapes the demand as well. In Brookes words: there may be a continuum of
possibilities on the demand led vs. supply driven argument.32In other words, it isnt
clear that the restaurant industry is entirely demand led or supply driven, and it is likely
some middle ground in between. By examining the marketing literature, Brookes offers
two general examples of how strongly influenced customers can be by the food service
industry: branded restaurant concepts, and celebrity chefs restaurants.
Branded restaurant concepts are incredibly popular today, and part of this
success is due to the fact that there is less purchase risk for the consumer. For instance,
even if one isnt thrilled about eating fast food for dinner while on a road trip, a
mediocre meal is still better than winding up at a run down restaurant/bar where even
the waitress advises against ordering the meatloaf. Brookes also points out that
branded restaurants, like cars or clothing, promote brand loyalty; in order to maintain
this loyalty, the brand needs to evolve, however, to keep up with the consumers desire
for consistency and something new.33
32 Brookes, 2004 (111)

33 Ibid (p. 123)
Celebrity chefs influence eating habits through televisions shows, and also in the
same way that branded restaurants do when they open restaurants of their own.
According to Brookes, within the marketing literature, celebrity chefs are often
considered product rather than consumer oriented.34 A particularly good example of a
product-oriented restaurant that does not cater exclusively to its customers is Thomas
Keller's Ad Hoc in Yountville, California. It is close to his first three Michelin-starred
restaurant, The French Laundry. In a passage called "The Accidental Restaurant", Keller
explains Ad Hocs genesis. Originally envisioned as a burger restaurant, his restaurant
group didn't have the time to create the perfect burger joint. Because they were paying
for the space, it needed to be bringing in business. So Keller "thought of the simplest
restaurant possible, one founded on a style of cooking we do for ourselves everyday, if
not twice a day, at all our restaurants: preparing the family (staff) meal." The decor was
quickly put together, and the kitchen serves one family style item which changes daily
(no choices!), "and we called it what is was: Ad Hoc," The restaurant became so popular
that Keller decided to keep it open, making it a permanent part of his restaurant
group.35
Ad Hoc is a contemporary example of a restaurant that grants total control to
the culinary authority of the chefs. The ability to cook large batches of one meal ensures
efficiency of time and resources, and especially profit. This model, for reasons ethical
and financial, should be emulated widely. It might be objected that Keller's status as
America's most celebrated chef is the driving force of Ad Hoc's success, and thus those
34 Ibid (p. 113)

35 Keller, 2009 (p. 102)
chefs that do not have six Michelin stars can't expect to follow its example. This
objection might hold if Keller was the actual chef in the kitchen there at any time, which
he was not. A further reason to doubt this objection is provided by a different celebrity
chef, Gordon Ramsay. Despite his thirteen Michelin stars, he was unable to succeed with
his restaurant Amaryllis in Glasgow. So while being a celebrity chef gives one some
unique advantages, it doesnt ensure the fate of a restaurant in either direction. Keller's
Ad Hoc offers support for the claim that restaurants and chefs are not entirely at the
mercy of the taste or preferences of its customers; rather, they can cook very efficiently
without fear of upsetting the regulars, or offering too narrow a selection.
Restaurants are for hedonists!
Some philosophers, Henry David Thoreau and Peter Singer for example, have
held that we ought to avoid luxuries for one reason or another36. Many other
philosophers, and some religions, have looked down upon food, as a source of vice,
rather than something to be enjoyed. A number of different views, then, might suggest
that the good life does not include eating in restaurants. So in a world with such serious
inequalities, can we ethically justify restaurants?
Thoreau, as mentioned, advocated for a kind of voluntary poverty, and drank
only water, among other dietary restrictions. A position so strongly against luxuries of
any kind would hardly allow for one to eat in restaurants. His philosophy of food is also
36I mention these two philosophers not because either of them explicitly holds that owning or
spending money at a restaurant is wrong, but because they offer the clearest examples of ethical
positions that entail that one should avoid luxury or the superfluous.
decidedly against operating a restaurant as a good way to earn a living and spend a life.
Thoreau remarks of the farmer: The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a
livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself...This is the reason he
is poor; and for a similar reason we are all poor in respect to a thousand savage
comforts, though surrounded by luxuries.37 A farmer is not the same as a restaurateur,
but restaurants are undeniably complex, and in many respects the process of cooking a
meal becomes much more complex, whether the restaurant is serving a menu or a
banquet.
Michael Schudson, in an essay titled Delectable Materialism: Second Thoughts on
Consumer Culture, identifies five separate strands of thought, which contribute to
contemporary criticisms. Most criticism of consumer culture shares a few basic
assumptions, he says.38 Among them is a belief that we can separate necessary from
artificial needs, and thus live the simple life. An aversion of the superfluous allows
plenty of time for contemplating and seeking worthy things like justice, or beauty,
claims those that hold that the simple life is a prerequisite for the good life.
This assumption, that we can separate necessary from artificial needs, is swiftly
undermined by Schudson, and illuminating for the question of the moral status of
restaurants.39 Biology alone cannot solve the task of separating the necessary from
artificial needs: Human biological functions, like eating, are culturally coded and
37 Thoreau, 1997 (p. 67)

38 Schudson, 1998 (p. 251)
39 For another argument against the notion that consuming is bad or immoral, see Campbell 1998
socially organizedone must retain a certain reserve about eating so as to acknowledge
that the activity is one of eating a meal, not one of simply consuming food.40
The view of the good diet as the simple diet, then, rests on a problematic view of
the good life as achieved only by ascetic simplicity. Taking this point forward, it can be
stated more broadly: the point of eating is never merely sustenance. The activity is very
often one of eating a meal, but the morally salient aspects of our relationship with food
go far beyond its consumption. Even in Thoreau, for example, we can find evidence that
his relationship with food was not purely a utilitarian one.41
Dining out is much more than mere gustatory pleasure. This point, of course, is
largely a rehashing of points made earlier. Telfer offers an extensive list of the value of
eating food beyond sustenance, while Mario Batali and Alton Brown explain how great
recipes and good food are born out of necessity and thrift. Pierre Bordeaux famously
argues that food consumption is an expression of social class, and this work has received
a good bit of scholarly attention and reinterpretation.42 The point is there are myriad
ways to argue against the objection that restaurants are too luxurious in the face of so
many going hungry.
It is also the case that some people eat at restaurants to save the time or the
hassle of making their own food, and if the chef is mindful of his waste, a meal made in
a restaurant can ultimately be more efficient than one made at home, and certainly not
all restaurants serve luxurious or superfluous foods (nor must the ones that do). Bell
40 Ibid (p. 251)

41 See his chapter The bean-field in Walden.
42 See Bordeaux (1984), Sloan (2004), and Seymour (2004)
discusses something similar, distinguishing between dining out and eating out
where customers have different expectations depending on whether they are after a
meal or a dining experience.43 Restaurants are an integral part of the food sector in
industrialized societies, and with a little attention, can operate without posing
significant ethical problems.
I have argued that chefs and restaurants deserve more ethical scrutiny than the
field currently affords them; that chefs waste is distinct from and leads to resource
waste; and that robust traceability is capable of illuminating food related ethical
problems faced by chefs and consumers. Restaurants waste a considerable amount of
food (about 50 tons a year each44), and the chef as a food professional or producer,
rather than only a consumer, faces a strong obligation to avoid wasting food. This
obligation is strengthened by the extent to which ethically superior cooking is inline with
cooking that yields higher profits. The extent to which food is wasted, and the
complexities of determining culpability for food waste suggest that questions in
professional food ethics are quite important, but also quite interesting, for the chef and
ethicist alike.
43 Bell, 2004
44 Bureau of Sanitation, LA
Works Cited
Batali, M. (2002). The Babbo cookbook. New York: Clarkson Potter.
Bell, David. (2004). "Taste and Space: eating out in the city today." Culinary taste:
consumer behaviour in the international restaurant sector. Amsterdam: Elsevier
Butterworth Heinemann.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Brookes, M. (2004). Shaping culinary taste: the influence of commercial operators (We
are what we eat, or what we are persuaded to eat?). Culinary taste: consumer
behaviour in the international restaurant sector. Amsterdam: Elsevier
Bureau of Sanitation, Department of Public Works, City of Los Angeles. Restaurant Food
Waste Recycling. Los Angeles, CA.
Campbell, Colin. "Consuming goods and the good of consuming." Ethics of consumption:
the good life, justice, and global stewardship. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield,
1998. 139-152. Print.
Coff, C. (2006). The taste for ethics an ethic of food consumption. Dordrecht: Springer.
Coff, C., Barling, D., Korthals, M., & Nielsen, T. (2008). Ethical traceability and
communicating food. Dordrecht: Springer.
Escoffier, A., & Cracknell, H. L. (2011). Escoffier (2nd ed.). Oxford: Butterworth-
Heinemann.
Ethics in the Kitchen | GatewayGourmet Blog. (2011, March 23). GatewayGourmet's

Culinary Schools and Baking Program Resources. Retrieved May 4, 2012, from
http://www.gatewaygourmet.com/blog/culinary-career/ethics-in-the-kitchen/
Food and Agricultural Organization of The United Nations and Swedish Institute for Food
and Biotechnology. (2011) Global food losses and food waste. Rome, Italy.
Cederberg, C., Gustavsson, J., Meybeck, A., Sonesson, U., Otterdijk, R. v.
Kaminer, A. (2012, March 20). Calling all carnivores; tell us why it is ethical to eat meat.
The New York Times. Retrieved April 24, 2012, from
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/magazine/tell-us-why-its-ethical-to-eat-
meat-a-contest.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1333717256-
PjMCUgysvh/T4JEQ2HuhDg
Keller, T., Cruz, D., Heller, S., Ruhlman, M., & Vogler, A. (2009). Ad Hoc at home. New
York: Artisan Books.
Korthals, M. (2004). Before dinner: philosophy and ethics of food. Heidelberg: Springer.
Mepham, T. B. (2002). Food ethics. New York: Routledge.
Sagoff, M. (1997). Do We Consume Too Much? The Atlantic Monthly, 279, 80-95.
Schudson, Michael. (1998). "Delectable Materialism: Second thoughts on consumer

culture." Ethics of consumption: the good life, justice, and global stewardship.
Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 249-266. Print.
Schwartz, D. T. (2010). Consuming choices: ethics in a global consumer age. Lanham,

Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Seymour, D. (2004). The social construction of taste. Culinary taste consumer behaviour
in the international restaurant sector (pp. 1-22). Amsterdam: Elsevier
Sloan, Donald. "The Postmodern Palate: dining out in the individualized era." Culinary
taste consumer behaviour in the international restaurant sector. Amsterdam:
Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann, 2004. 23-42. Print.
Telfer, E. (2002). Food for thought philosophy and food (Taylor & Francis e-Library ed.).
London: Routledge.
Thoreau, H. D. (1997). Walden. Boston: Beacon Press.

UNECA. (2009). Economic report on Africa 2009: developing African agriculture through
regional value chains (pp. 117-139). Challenges to Agricultural Development in
Africa. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.
Further Reading
Finklestein, J. (2004). Chic cuisine: the impact of fashion on food. Culinary taste
consumer behaviour in the international restaurant sector (pp. 77-92).
Amsterdam: Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann.
Harper, C. L., & LeBeau, B. F. (2003). Food, society, and environment. Upper Saddle
River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Hawkins, G. (2006). The ethics of waste: how we relate to rubbish. Lanham [Md.:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
LeMay, B. W. (1988). Science, ethics, and food: papers and proceedings of a colloquium.
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Maloni, M., & Brown, M. (2006). Corporate social responsibility in the supply chain: an
application in the food industry. Journal of Business Ethics, 68(1), 35-52.
Michaelis, L. (2000). Ethics of consumption. Oxford : Oxford Centre For The

Environment, Ethics & Society.

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Food Ethics: Traceability in the Restaurant

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Faculty Advisor: Dr. William Krieger

University of Rhode Island

animal rights and welfare, environmental degradation, consumption, human

operations in them is even scarcer. Because food waste is prevalentbut entirely

avoidableit is a serious ethical problem; further, since restaurants have a substantial

in which chefs and restaurateurs comport themselves to their work is quite an

important issue in food ethics. It is an unfortunate oversight on the part of scholars

working in food ethics to have failed to address this.

helpful to a point, because we expect the marketplace to respond to consumer choices.

suffering and exploitation involved in the process, it is a mistakefor obvious reasons

consumer is doing, and the producer largely gets a free pass.

consumer ought to eat meat. This, to be blunt, strikes me as ridiculous, because it

2 If this isnt obvious, see Schwarz (2010)

consumers can be moved to change purchasing behavior by factors outside of the

prerequisite for change.

owned, sometimes owned by a single entrepreneur or a group of investors with varying

(3) an expansion of Christian Coffs traceabilityrobust traceabilitycan be

especially egregious offense.

sooner to avoid spoiling, portioned smaller, etc.)

reduction in Chefs waste leads to a reduction in Resource waste; how a reduction in

Thirdly, to illuminate the presence of ethical failures in the restaurant,

particularly waste, robust traceability will be applied to potential cases in restaurants.

in comparison to a Michelin-starred restaurant. Given that the nature of a restaurant is

that it is a luxury, but also operated by professionals, the waste in restaurants is

the average individual.

chef. It is worthwhile, then, to consider briefly an argument from philosopher Henry

A phenomenological argument against waste

While enrolled in an American Philosophy course in which we read Walden, I was

was discarded carelessly or unnecessarily; so waste seems to entail a moral wrongdoing

guidance for the restaurant chef.

2. Why Chefs Deserve Ethical Scrutiny

add up to a considerable amount in a surprisingly short amount of time.

The Dilemma of Portion Control

context where food preparation is particularly resource intensive, is not something to

"Everything costs money, beb."

"everything costs money, beb."

makes a similar point: So long as we continue to distinguish between positive and

make an action wasteful?

necessities of everyday life. In response, people have developed various ritualized

7 Kennedy, 2007 (p.2)

unoccupied, empty, or wanting, stand out as potentially independent of overt value

judgments. Unoccupied, empty, and wanting can all be understood as empirical

never leads directly to wanting.

9 Ibid (p. 11)

values ultimately fails.

Resource waste (hereafter CW and RW, respectively). As mentioned, CW happens when

eating habits in the industrialized world are dictated overwhelmingly by considerations

a celebration, an act of solidarity or bonding, a gift, an exercise of style or luxury, and a

bad meal (especially at a gourmet or expensive restaurant) is testament to this.

11 Telfer, 2002 (p. 38)

13 Brown, 2006 (p. 213, emphasis added)

[R]oughly one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted

14 Batali, 2002 (p. 210)

hearing that 1.3 billion tons of food go to waste each year.