At Terra Madre we talked about our experience – that of a small group of restaurants, suppliers and an environment- alist - at practical implementation of good clean and fair, and how we are now working towards expanding this, creating simple collaborative networks of restaurants and suppliers. It had a great response, and a lot of people asked for copies of the presentation. So I’ve put it up here on the blog. We are feeling out way here. Focusing on practical implementation brings up lots of issues, so – please, please! – respond with comments and questions.

Although the restaurants make a significant effort across the board at implementing ‘sustainability, quality and fairness (as we call the three aspects), this initiative, with the working title Pisces, concentrates on fish. For these Japanese cuisine restaurants, fish is obviously a big item on the menu. But if you don’t use fish, please don’t switch off; there is a lot of cross-over to finding simple (and affordable!) ways of categorising food sources into five ‘good-enough’ broad categories (worst practice, poor, transitional, good and best practice) for the three criteria.

Having been working on this for a couple of years, we have a lot of experience to share, and we also want to know what other people think about the many issues that crop up. We know that we will make mistakes along the way, but our feeling is that as long as you are transparent about this, its far better to try, make those mistakes and try again, than feel intimidated from taking action in case somebody jumps on you from a great height! But the basic challenge is finding something ‘good enough’ but also consistent, without getting so elaborate and bureaucratic (=expensive!) that it never gets off the ground. It also, we feel strongly, needs to complements existing initiatives, filling in the gaps that prevent widespread implementation and which provides a ladder up for those, like us, currently ‘less than perfect’.

There is a lot more that I’d like to say, jumping off from the presentation itself, but that can wait. You’ll find the slides from the presentation below.

There are a lot (39) slides here – the downside of doing pretty presentations. I’ve worked very hard at getting the size down (in case you think I work in luxurious conditions, I have a 28k dial up connection). Click on each thumbnail below to bring up a larger, readable(!) version of the slide. Then, click on the back arrow of your browser to get back from the slide to these thumbnails. If you have any comments, please put them on the blog to share with others, but if you do want to contact us directly, you can do so at macgarvinATmodus-vivendiDOTcoDOTuk and carolineATmoshimoshiDOTcoDOTuk