When you walk into any of Dominique Crenn’s San Francisco eateries, do not expect to find any pork or chicken.
The three-Michelin-starred chef has announced that her restaurants – Atelier Crenn, Petit Crenn, Bar Crenn and the forthcoming Boutique Crenn – will no longer serve land-based meat.
“Meat is insanely complicated – both within the food system and the environment as a whole – and, honestly, it felt easier to just remove it from the menus all together,” the chef said in a statement.
“Local and sustainable fish and vegetables are just as, if not more, versatile – and delicious.”
Crenn said some of her restaurants have been meat-free for years.
“What people haven’t talked about is [since] I opened Petit Crenn in 2015, it’s been fully vegetarian and pescatarian, we didn’t have any meat there,” Crenn told CNN Travel. “But I never advertised it. And then Atelier has been meat free for the last two years.”
The chef said while she is not a pescatarian or vegetarian, she hopes to “effect real environmental change” through her dining group.
“I know the impact of the way that we fix meat nowadays is not good. It’s killing us, it’s killing the planet,” she said.
“I’m trying to make the best decision for my surroundings and the planet and myself. But I’m not forcing anybody to do that.
But what am I asking is — I really want people to think about their actions and their behavior and what they can impact on their own. And it’s pretty easy. You know, the little things will go such a long way.”
A reduction in worldwide beef and lamb consumption would help reduce carbon emissions and stave off dangerous climate change, a UN report released in August found.
Another study published in the journal Nature found that to keep global warming under 2C, an average world citizen needs to eat 75 per cent less beef and 90 percent less pork. The average world citizen also needs to halve their consumption of eggs, and replace them with five times as many legumes.