Menus of Change® Initiative for the Culinary Institute of America and Harvard School fo Public Health
The Culinary Institute of America and the Harvard School of Public Health asked us to create a program on sustainable food. All they had was a name: Menus of Change®.
With that opportunity, we created an unprecedented initiative for foodservice industry executives that integrated sustainability, nutrition and culinary strategy. Menus of Change® also helped make the Plant Forward culinary strategy we created in 2009 a focal point for culinary innovation.
Our work included developing a strategy and training program to help drive change in the foodservice industry and lead a cross-professional collaboration to develop a set of principles for Menu Design and Operations to guide a transformation in the American foodservice industry. We also assembled and led a industry leadership council chaired by Arlin Wasserman and composed of food service operators, food industry executives, chefs, investors and food systems change agents, including those working to affect the public school food industry and leaders of school food service programs in some of America's largest cities. Changing Tastes also helped to form and lead an allied Science Council composed of researchers working on public health and nutrition, agriculture, food systems and business from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, UC Davis and other universities.
As a part of this project, Changing Tastes has developed a set of 19 integrated metrics for measuring yearover- year progress at the intersection of nutrition and health outcomes; environmental impact of food production and progress towards protecting diverse land use, species and biodiversity; improved labor and social conditions in food production; and change in financial performance and risk to food businesses. That became the basis for the Culinary Institute of America and Harvard School of Public Health to begin assigning a set of annual grades to the culinary profession and hospitality industry on their progress in changing how America eats.
