Every chef, to one extent or another, is on a mission – mostly to feed people tasty food, to make them happy. But in recent times a number of chefs have realized they can have a greater impact and do something fulfilling for themselves as well as for those around them, and maybe even for the planet.

Johnson & Wales University, as well as other culinary schools, is an incubator for training the next generation of socially responsible chefs. But, in order to become one, it helps to have met one. Two faculty members at JWU, Robert Brener and Paul Malcolm (though all the instructors at JWU are on board with them) have taken on the challenge of modeling how to make a difference in the world for their students by heading up two major green initiatives at the school. One is the development of a community garden to provide some of the food cooked at the school, and the other is an important supporting project for the garden – a composting program that converts kitchen scraps into a high-potency natural fertilizer.
Uptown Magazine sat down with the chefs to find out more about what’s behind all the extra work they’ve taken on. Here’s what they had to say:

Uptown: You both have pretty full schedules – teaching, culinary coaching and team competitions, and families. Why did you take on such big projects as composting and community gardening? What’s the fire in your belly that’s compelling you to take this on?

Robert Brener: My passion, and I think it’s true for Paul, as well, comes from the desire to make a difference.  We hope to create a better world for our young children ¬ Paul’s kids, Griffin, Rory, and Jillian, and my son, Nathan.  Teaching in the College of Culinary Arts allows us to make an impact on an eager audience comprised of future leaders.  To me, that’s pretty compelling in itself!

Uptown: What was the biggest challenge in getting these projects off the ground? How did you get your colleagues and the university to support you on this?

Paul Malcolm: For the composting, we recycled 5-gallon buckets from the baking and pastry labs for two years and ran a successful composting program. During those two years we proved that we could also make it work in our culinary labs.  We remove 140 pounds of green matter from eight culinary labs every week.  What makes it work is that we run it through the combined efforts of our entire community of students and faculty.  During that time there certainly were those who posed serious questions of practicality and wondered about acceptance by the student body, as well as the faculty.  What we learned, though, was that both groups – students and faculty – not only were intrigued, but wanted to do everything they could to make it a lasting, sustainable project for our campus.
Brener: The challenges were many. Trying to create a beautiful garden has enough obstacles in the best of circumstances, but we’re growing our garden on top of a concrete slab, next to the train tracks, in a gravel parking lot.  We have no water source on site yet, and we started with no funding. But we have established a sustainable water system by creating planters that preserve water for the plants, we’ve held fundraisers, and applied for and just received a state grant.  Our greatest hurdle, however, is misconception.  Many do not understand the word “sustainable.”  Really, what we are simply trying to do is raise a heightened awareness of the world, our world.  After all, we rely on the earth for everything, not just for good food.

Uptown: These are pilot projects run at a culinary school. What do you think the implications are for those working in restaurants and food service businesses? How feasible are they and, in a larger sense, what are you modeling in terms of the ethical responsibilities of working chefs and even householders?
Brener: I worked in Munich, Germany, where sustainable waste management has been in the kitchen for decades, and I also lived and worked in Ireland, where most foods were local.  I recall having to let our duck sit overnight before butchery to allow the meat to relax, and our amuse of lemon-essence goat cheese being delivered that day from three miles down the road.  That’s fresh, local and sustainable. That’s the kind of vision that chefs can bring to a community and it’s exciting to be a link in that chain. So now, it’s important to enroll the next generation of culinary professionals into carrying it deeper into their communities.

Malcolm: I grew up in Colorado, working in restaurants since I was 12.  Eating locally grown foods became a reality for me when the many kitchens that I worked in were frequented by local foragers on a regular basis.  The flavors and variety were so much better than the commercial products provided by our vendors.  Later, I moved to Vermont to attend New England Culinary Institute and the lifestyle of the Vermonters was incredibly appealing.  If we didn’t know where it came from, we usually didn’t eat it.  Since moving to Charlotte, I’ve assisted with several farm to fork dinners, some of them held right in the fields where the produce was grown.  So next, Bobby and I plan to incorporate the gardens into all of the culinary labs and are currently working with the other colleges at Johnson & Wales to use the garden as a community learning environment, utilizing the ideas created by Chef Alice Waters in her Edible School Yard program in Berkeley, California.

Uptown: If others want to follow in your footsteps, how can they get the help and information they need to get the ball rolling?

Brener: Anyone interested in getting involved should contact either me or Paul, or contact Mecklenburg County Solid Waste Management.

Uptown: Is this just the tip of the iceberg? What future initiatives do you see coming in terms of stewardship and green activities from the culinary community? What still needs to be done to make a difference, both locally and globally?

Brener: Uptown is, for us, just the beginning of the project. We hope to develop internships and apprenticeships on local farms in addition to establishing a presence at local community gardens and farmers markets.  Education and awareness are our most important goals, so we intend to conduct workshops and provide green management assistance to community gardens who might be interested.  I’m also the adviser to our student organization known as The Co-op.  It is a co-op style group that has been the driving force behind the project.  They have just completed a very successful inaugural year culminating in their green symposium entitled, “Gastro Green: Sustainability in the Food Service Industry.”  We hope to continue programs like this and to reach out to Charlotte uptown in the city’s efforts to establish itself as a green energy center.  There are many misconceptions about our project.   If there is one statement that conveys our message, it’s that little things can make a difference, for sure, but a life change is also necessary to make a real difference.

To help or get more information about these projects at Johnson and Wales contact 
Robert Brenner or Paul Malcolm

~ Peter Reinhart

Gallis’ passion for exploring history, his ability to see beyond boundaries and identify spacial relationships has made him an expert in his field. He has helped shape the vision for U.S. transportation in the 21st century. His uptown Charlotte firm paved the way for how people commute from New York to Orlando, Fla., to Detroit and Memphis, Tenn., which also has a new economic development strategy thanks to him.

But he is also a writer, working on a book about friends who went to Vietnam and returned very different people. He is a historian, able to quote Bible verses and war battles.  And he is passionate about the environment and the impact of global warming.

“It’s apparent to all of us we have a daunting challenge ahead of us,” he says.

Gallis, 66, was born in San Francisco to a Chinese-born Russian father who operated a general goods and timber company that expanded to Oregon.  When the company collapsed during the Great Depression, Gallis’ father moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Oregon. His mother was Swedish. Her family operated timber companies as well. The two had met at International House at the University of California at Berkley and married a short time later.

Gallis, who crewed on a rowing team when he was young, also developed an appreciation for history and art, courtesy of his parents who had their own Chinese art collection. He bought his first piece – a pair of African figurines – from an L.A. art dealer he discovered while buying supplies for a freshman architecture project at a lumberyard next door.

“The importance of collecting art from different parts of the world to me is that it was created as a result of different kinds of ideas,” Gallis says.

Today his first floor office in the Boxer Building uptown resembles a gallery, with hundreds of pieces of Tribal and African art displayed on shelves and whitewashed walls. Feathered masks with shells, carved wooden shapes and masks with cutout eyes fill the library.  But the collection doesn’t stop there. Metal statues tucked between floor plants fill the hallways and decorate desks along with a chair hand carved from a single tree. One of Gallis’ favorite pieces of art is a colorful painting of Chinese letters that hangs in the conference room.

“If you only stick to your own culture, you never expand your mind,” he says. “By collecting different art you get a better understanding of your own history and a deeper appreciation for your perceptions and values.”

Gallis studied art history and earned his architecture degree from the University of California at Berkley and a master’s in architecture and planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to teach at the University of Miami and came here in the early 1970s when a college friend asked him to teach at the newly formed college of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

He was an associate professor there for 20 years before starting his own company, which he called Noah Studios – a name he chose after reading the Bible and recalling Jesus’ first prophet, Noah.

“That little company was our arc,” he recalls. “Noah put trust in God to guide the arc and we left it up to God to get our little company off the ground.”
Decades later, Gallis has been recognized nationally for motivating governments to integrate regional, national and global strategies. His firm’s latest study – the first of its kind – provides insight into coping with nature’s evolution and how man-made systems can evolve efficiently so the two can co-exist.

The framework for his most recent study and those before it stem from lessons learned while watching Charlotte transform from a tiny city into the country’s 21st largest.
Gallis began studying Charlotte in depth in the mid-1980s.  It was transforming quickly from a city to a metropolitan area and people were confused over how to deal with planning as political coalitions emerged and development patterns changed.

“When I arrived here, Charlotte was just a small city with a lot of country roads around it,” Gallis says. “In the course of the next three decades it transformed into a major metro area – it was a great urban learning laboratory.”

His staff crafted a development plan for Rock Hill, S.C. And it was during that research when growth patterns began to emerge.

Using a pen on old hand drawings, Gallis circles little yellow blobs on a map that represents Gastonia, Concord and others. They were getting bigger. And a grid of highways and superhighways was beginning to develop, he says.

The cities were not just growing but they were merging as one big unit or urban network, and the future of any city is related to where it sits inside the network.
This would require new theories and approaches, Gallis says.

A decade later city leaders formed committees to study growth in the region. Rather than build more highways, the Gallis research suggested Charlotte choose building a transportation system along its centers and corridors, which became the transit lines the city has today.

“The key to the future was understanding how these urban networks grew and changed and then how we could affect their future through different policies, regulations and investments,” Gallis says.

He retired from teaching in 1997 to work full time at the newly formed Michael Gallis & Associates, which suddenly began getting nationwide attention for its innovative and efficient strategies.

The firm began studying connections between Connecticut, New York and Boston and discovered relationships between politics, urban economics and geography.  Soon, Gallis and his staff were traveling the country compiling research on numerous regions.

Through this work the firm developed what Gallis calls a systems approach to networks such as transportation, tourism and the environment. The concept is similar to the systems within the human body, each with a purpose and function.

It was through this lens that Gallis and his people determined that the environment was so unique that it should be treated separately.

“We discovered that we knew less about the environment than we did about any other system,” Gallis says. “And it occurred to me that we needed to study the interaction of (the environment and manmade systems), which had never been done before.”

What had been done before simply was man’s impact on the environment such as air pollution and water runoff. But no one had studied how people were building urban ecosystems, Gallis says.

Wearing a crisp white button-down and gray paisley tie, Gallis pops up out of his chair to fetch a book to illustrate his point. He glances pensively through his collection of topics from painting to ocean liners and railroads.  At 6-foot-4, he towers over some of the highest shelves, which include the 1929 plans for New York City, a collection of 19th century atlases and the book that created the Federal Aviation Administration.

In the mash of books, Gallis can’t find what he’s after, but it’s hardly needed. He recalls most of the details he’d hoped and explains how his firm began researching the way cities were growing compared to the patterns of nature. First his staff looked at the Southeast, from Birmingham, Ala., to southern Virginia as well as Atlanta, Columbia, S.C., Charlotte, Raleigh and the Tennessee Valley. On a global scale, Gallis & Associates took the research to another level looking at the relationship between natural and human systems.
“You could see where – as we built human networks such as roads and buildings – we never built either to fit the natural system. We took the environment for granted,” Gallis says. “It is only now we are able to fully appreciate our relationship with nature.”

Currently nature and man-made systems are in conflict with each other, he says.

“We have to move toward co-evolving.”

By identifying effects of growth on the environment such as erosion, depletion, extinction and pollution, Gallis & Associates has identified strategies for action to include new policies, incentives and regulatory procedures up to the federal level.

“The bottom line is we have to rethink the way we manage the growth of our cities,” Gallis says. “We have two systems in conflict and we are facing problems people haven’t grasped.”
Based on its global research and findings, Gallis & Associates is one of several organizations working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study the physical, socioeconomic and ecosystem impact of significant changes in sea levels along the Eastern seaboard.

“We are looking at some of the potentials of dramatic changes that people think will happen in small increments but could be of significant size,” Gallis says. “If we don’t try to understand them we won’t be prepared for them.”

~ Victoria Cherrie