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Interview with Chiara Pavan – Cheffe of Venissa Restaurant

This month for De-LAB we interview Chiara Pavan, cheffe of the Venissa Restaurant in Mazzorbo (VE), 1 Michelin star and 1 Michelin Green Star. Her experience will lead us to the discovery of sustainable catering. Enjoy reading!

Catering in Italy is a growing sector, and so are the socio-environmental impacts related to it: food waste management, waste sorting, etc.  How do you see the role of catering in relation to the socio-environmental sustainability challenges ahead? 

The most important issue in this regard is the management of food systems and their impacts, especially at the level of raw material sourcing. We need to understand where the greatest waste is, whether at home or in the catering industry, which if it is well structured can reduce food waste to a minimum. Obviously, we have to look at the macro-figure, i.e. the fight against climate change, food education. I personally am part of a European project that tries to give tools to chefs to have a lower impact in their daily practices, in their menus. The point is to count on the visibility of chefs as witnesses of change. This is the hope, also because responsible food policies go far beyond catering, we are just actors. Just think of the issue of cultured meat, which is totally ideological, managed to favour intensive farming with top-down policies. In this context, if you have always served beef ribs you will still do so.

There is an excellent restaurant industry that carefully chooses raw materials, origins and quantities, not content to follow fashions. In your opinion, how can this different approach be given more voice and more ‘political’ weight?

Incentives would be needed, unless you run an agritourism, catering that applies sustainability has very high labour costs. Resources are needed to make courageous choices.

Cuisine is traditionally a sector that is open to contaminations, mixtures, experiments: what do you think are the most interesting and what messages do you intend to convey to the consumer/customer?

I think the concept of tradition is a bit problematic in Italy because it clashes with the evolution of cuisine. For example, the ‘classic’ lagoon food – cuttlefish and local fish – no longer exists. 

The everyday is blue crabs, which I used to serve long before they became topical.

The problem is the customer’s expectation of tradition. Cooking in this sense makes culture and opens up new spaces for an evolving world. Within this framework, the common denominator is taste: at all times the palate must be satisfied and things must be good. So a taste that brings people together, opens doors to new ingredients – regardless of whether they are from other cultures – to try to open people up mentally to new products that they have to start getting to know.

Do you believe in the possibility of democratising low-impact catering and food, or do you think that they will remain approaches for a niche audience, with greater affordability? If yes, how could such proposals be made more accessible?

I do not have the solution. The intensive industry and the large-scale retail trade have low-cost proposals that are harmful to the environment and human nutrition… as long as there is the possibility of eating so cheaply, using products with a lot of labour to make that special processing, or organic, or natural, or choosing to use meat that costs money because it is more controlled… it will be difficult to democratise choices. Even for those who make simple but good and healthy products, it is difficult to make them stand up because the cost of labour and raw material is high.

Can you recommend a book and a film to help us understand the challenges of catering – today – in a responsible way?

As a book I recommend “The Hypocrisy of Abundance” by Fabio Ciconte, or “Lords of Food” or “The Big Cart” by Stefano Liberti.

In general, I would like to say that the main theme is the ignorance about food systems that even the most educated people have… we reason in an area that has to do with pleasure, but in reality, if we want to take it seriously, we need European policies to change everything. On these issues, as on that of biodiversity, a creative look is needed; the answer cannot only be compensation to the most damaged sectors, because nothing will change that way.

NB: the interviews shown here are not part of paid commercial services. They have the sole purpose of sharing ideas, projects and reflections among subscribers to the De-LAB newsletter.