Fruit, nuts, and bananas: Sampling the world’s first tree-based menu
Top vegan chef Kirk Howarth speaks to BusinessGreen about the power of food to drive environmental change
Ever wondered what a meal made entirely using ingredients from trees would taste like? Probably not, but it is not entirely unfeasible that could one day come to a restaurant near you.
On Wednesday, a three-course menu composed entirely of tree-derived ingredients was served in East London by plant-based chef and one-time Great British Menu contestant Kirk Howarth.
It kicked off with a savoury fruit salad capped by a delicate slither of avocado ice-cream cast into the shape of a leaf, which was followed by a ‘tree nut loaf’ that would win over even the most entrenched critic of the much-maligned veggie staple – especially when soaked in a chestnut and coffee gravy. Dessert, meanwhile, came in the form of a shot of mango puree embedded in creamy cacao mousse, accompanied by a dollop of pistachio ice cream.
BusinessGreen‘s verdict on the meal? A sumptuous feast of nutty, tangy flavours, even if its tree-based ingredients meant the meal veered on the sweet side. A side of smoked banana topped with a cashew brittle is never going to go amiss, regardless of which course it comes with.
The occasion for the meal was not the latest clean-eating fad to sweep East London, but a left-field promotional event for the UK launch of Treedom. The company has good reason to get people salivating over trees. It manages a platform which allows individuals to sponsor a recently-planted tree in the Global South, and subsequently name it, geo-locate it, and track its health and growth on an app – think hi-tech Tamagotchi for the climate-concerned.
A number of high profile brands, including H&M, Enel, and Samsung, are already working with Treedom to offer tree sponsorship through customer loyalty programmes and employee rewards schemes, and the hope is that the technology can provide a much more engaging and consumer friendly route into the often confusing world of nature-based solutions.
There is certainly growing interest in trees, in all their forms. Despite its unusual and protein-lite premise, all sixty places for the £50 “treegan” tasting menu sold out ahead of time. It is reasonable to assume the popularity of the pop-up dining experience is not evidence of an under-the-radar community of tree food fans, but testament of Howarth’s reputation as one of London’s most inventive plant-based chefs. The Hackney restaurant he runs with his sister, Plates, is a well-loved fixture of London’s plant-based food scene.
Pulled out of the kitchen after a press preview of the meal, Howarth said he believed that unusual dining experiences were an effective way of encouraging people to think more carefully about what goes into what they eat.
“They have a huge impact on the individual who is eating,” he told BusinessGreen. “Food is such a great vehicle to create change. When you eat, you think, you smell, you taste, and you go home and maybe you are still thinking about it. You’ve got to make people think, so in a week or two months’ time, they’ll remember that dinner, and how delicious it was. And [in this instance], it might inspire them to look at trees and respect trees more.”
Regardless of particular health or budgetary requirements, all people should be encouraged to engage in “conscious eating”, Howarth argued. “It is about [encouraging people to] make the right choices through education,” he said. “It is also about taking the right approach. So, instead of preaching about trees, we bring people together, we educate, we talk and we immerse them in an experience that hopefully they will remember, which will then inspire them to make little changes.”
Howarth admitted that producing the three course meal had been no an easy feat, noting that his team had worked “eight days solidly” on devising the menu. The savoury dishes proved the most difficult to create, he said. “Plant-based main courses alone are very hard to get to the level I want to, so to do it with just trees when 80 per cent of the ingredient list was fruit was a challenge,” he said. “The only savoury ingredients were avocado, coffee, and cashew nuts.”
Howarth stressed that chefs testing new approaches cannot compromise on taste if they want the exercise to create ripples within the industry. “On projects that are going to create noise, you have to you have to impact through flavour,” he said. “It is no point having something that looks visually great if it doesn’t taste great. It is no good having a project that is a world-first like this if it doesn’t deliver when you eat it, if it falls flat.”
Plant-based chefs have traditionally had to work twice as hard to get half as far in a culinary world where meat protein is still the norm. Howarth acknowledged that his decision to adopt a plant-based diet after contracting Lyme’s disease several years ago had required him to shelve many of the techniques he had spent 15 years painstakingly learning from chefs at Michelin starred restaurants. “You have to forget about what you’ve learned and start again,” he said. “But yet you are still judged the same; in fact, you’ve got way more pressure because you’ve got everything taken away.”
But limitations breed the innovation that is necessary to progress, Howarth stressed. “If you’ve lost 70 per cent of the things that used to cook with, you got to make up for that somehow,” he said. “You have to be curious, and you have to research and find ways to create anew. That applies to every kind of format – whatever area of work you’re in.” It is a message that should resonate with green leaders in all industries.
Restriction need not be a daunting prospect, Howarth added. “It is about how you look at it – you can get frustrated, or you can create and [approach it as] fun,” he said. “A month ago, we didn’t know how we were going to get a dish together that we would eat with those ingredients. And now we’ve done it, it almost feels like it was easy.”
There is a risk that expensive food experiments could serve to further fuel the polarising debates around veganism, green elitism, and the scale of behaviour change needed to reach net zero emissions. The comment section on certain tabloids’ reporting on Treedom’s innovative new menu provides further proof of the vitriol such exercises can inspire.
But there is also no doubt that Howarth’s latest commission is a sign of both the growing mainstreaming of plant-based food and increasing understanding around how food systems can impact nature.
Treedom billed the meal as a celebration of trees and all the services they provide humanity and nature, from sustenance and shelter to climate mitigation and biodiversity. But in reality, it felt more like a celebration of invention and innovation. Howarth’s pride in having delivered on a challenging brief and pioneered something new was joyously evident. Other business leaders committed to delivering a nature-positive world would do well to take a leaf out his book.
