Kalu Yala Praises Miami’s Sustainable Restaurant Scene

Miami’s delightful culinary scene has long played an important role in the city’s unique cultural identity, inspiring innovation and attracting some of the world’s most prominent chefs and restaurateurs. Although Miami is best known for its truly outstanding Cuban-influenced dining options, the city’s restaurants draw on culinary influences that span the globe.

With its remarkable culinary diversity and its longstanding prominence in a culture that attracts so many visitors each year, Miami wields a powerful influence over the direction of the restaurant industry both inside and outside of the city limits. It is partly due to this potent influence that the restaurant industry at large has increasingly emphasized the importance of sustainable culinary practices.

It’s not just restaurateurs that have moved toward practices emphasizing sustainability, as consumers have made it abundantly clear that they prefer to dine at a restaurant that values farm-to-table principles. Recent trends have clearly demonstrated that diners overwhelmingly prefer fresh, locally sourced ingredients, and this trend has only grown stronger as more and more people become aware of the environmental, economic, and social issues associated with food production.

As a result of this shift toward sustainable practices, those who aspire to a career in the restaurant industry are seeking out culinary education programs that revolve around the sustainable, farm-to-table methods that are better suited for a rapidly changing world. Kalu Yala, a sustainable community located in Eastern Panama, is one of the most recognizable organizations to offer such a culinary arts program.

Despite its distance from Miami, Kalu Yala has nonetheless contributed to the priority shift among the city’s restaurant industry, as a number of its culinary arts students have strong connections to the city. The program promotes a “closed-loop” system in which culinary students learn to grow as many of their own ingredients as possible, thereby reducing their reliance on outside suppliers while also minimizing carbon emissions.

For Miami restaurateurs, this kind of closed-loop system has become even more popular in the aftermath of a particularly devastating hurricane season. As the home to a massive Puerto Rican community, Miami residents have become increasingly wary of relying on external food sources after learning of the lack of access to agricultural platforms in so many of Puerto Rico’s urban and rural communities. Food inaccessibility is greatly reduced with a closed-loop system in place, which in turn minimizes the potential impact of a future natural disaster or any other kind of unexpected circumstance.

Culinary professionals, of course, are naturally hesitant when it comes to implementing any kind of change that might negatively influence the flavor of a signature dish. Fortunately, sustainable culinary practices do not require any sort of compromise when it comes to flavor: Diners and restaurateurs almost universally agree that a system that emphasizes locally sourced ingredients yields a vastly superior flavor.

Whether they are risk-averse or just naturally resistant to change, restaurateurs that have yet to incorporate sustainable culinary practices need only look to Miami’s thriving culinary scene for evidence that sustainable, farm-to-table principles represent the future of the restaurant industry and offer a multitude of benefits to everyone involved.