Chris Ying and Peter Freed

Chris Ying and Peter Freed

Writer and an emissions specialist, USA


Knowing Is Half the Battle

The food industry accounts for thirty percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, yet we still don’t seem to hear enough about the ways restaurants figure into the problem. For MAD3: Guts, Lucky Peach editor-in-chief Chris Ying and carbon emissions specialist Peter Freed embarked on a project to examine the workings of two very different restaurants, on two different continents. Their goal was to explore how the restaurant world might more actively fight climate change.

Noma, in Copenhagen, and Frankies 457, in Brooklyn, New York, agreed to share with Freed every single piece of information about their operations, so that he could calculate the carbon footprint of each restaurant. Over the course of several months, the restaurateurs provided Freed with a sea of documents, including laundry receipts, exhaustive ingredient lists, descriptions of foraging trips, and even the sizes of their delivery trucks.

The findings, which you can see in the video above, reinforce Ying’s claim that knowing is half the battle. Watch.

 

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