An Empowered PLATE
Take a seat at the table in chef Camilla Marcus’ regenerative kitchen.
by ZOE ROSENBERG photographs by BEN ROSSER
/ COMMUNITY SPR UT
from the way food is grown and our treatment of the land. Marcus has hope in the movement. The fact that younger generations are demanding climate solutions, that fashion and beauty brands like Stella McCartney and Davines are using regenerative practices and being highlighted in the press for it, tells her that the door is wide open for food to be the next frontier. Marcus points out that the organic designation was fairly unheard of more than a decade ago, but now it’s essential for many shoppers. “What people are coming around to realizing, and I think it will only accelerate, is that organic is a piece of a regenerative system,” she says. “One step in the right direction is moving away from chemicals and pesticides, but that’s such a small fraction of the work that needs to be done.” Lucky for us, we have folks like Marcus to lead the groundswell.
someone who wants to effect change and doesn’t know where to start. “To me, that’s the hope of what ‘My Regenerative Kitchen’ can do,” Marcus says. “It can be that collective call to action to say, ‘In your home, your daily life, your simple food choices, and how you cook, you are tremendously powerful and actually essential to this being the new way forward.’” Take her recipes for vegetable- scrap fritters that reduce food waste by using leftovers and odd-one-out produce, or avocado margaritas, which repurpose the pit, frozen, into a drink chiller. Or her simple but evocative suggestion: Begin composting by giving a bin pride of place on your countertop — you’ll see the waste and may even challenge yourself to make less of it. “Most consumers feel that the best thing they can do for the future of our planet is buy an electric car,” Marcus says. But she believes the choices we
make in our kitchens are the most powerful ways people can create change. We eat and drink three times a day, she says, which gives us ample opportunity to make better choices. But the brunt of changemaking should not be on the consumer. While there’s industrial agriculture to contend with, Marcus says the media isn’t doing its part to highlight the innovation of regenerative food. “They’re still talking about fundraising going into cellular, lab-created food,” she says. “For every decade, there’s this wave of packaged, man-made food that promised the world and never delivered,” like the meal-replacement brand Soylent, which captured headlines for years after its 2013 launch. To repair the earth, it will take a return to low-intervention farming practices, not new creations that siphon funds and attention from the root problem: our disconnection
According to Camilla Marcus, to move forward, we must move backward. Marcus, 39, is a chef, the founder of pantry staples brand west~bourne, and author of “My Regenerative Kitchen,” a new cookbook and unofficial manifesto on the importance of returning to Earth’s cycles. Marcus is a staunch supporter of regenerative farming. The Los Angeles native, who still calls L.A. home, grew up in a family that held the same values she does today: eating plant-based meals, composting, and shopping at farmers’ markets for their bounty, variety, and ability to put people in touch with the rhythms of the seasons. “A carrot isn’t meant to be eaten year- round,” she tells The Rooted Journal. “It’s not meant to be cut into a little stick, waterlogged in a plastic bag, and served for your kids’ lunch. It’s so far from where we’ve come.”
Follow @CAMILLA.MARCUS on Instagram.
She wrote the cookbook to build off the lessons imparted by the 2006 climate-change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and chef Dan Barber’s 2014 book, “The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food.” These works created greater awareness around climate and soil issues but, she says, are dense with facts and statistics that could alienate
ND WHERE WE’VE COME — an agrarian society in touch with the soil’s needs — is where Marcus advocates we return to. Her work is meant to help us on that journey, whether it’s with the carbon-neutral oils and regenerative, organic pantry staples that west~bourne sources or the dozens of vegetarian recipes in “My Regenerative Kitchen.”
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