Kosta Sarris

Abstract: Americans everywhere are wasting more food every year. This has been proven by many studies; however, all of them consider the average American, not anyone who handles larger amounts of food daily, like chefs. Chefs, more specifically fine dining chefs, make tens of thousands of dishes a year, all involving complex techniques and many ingredients. To find out if chefs are participating in unsustainable practices, the researcher conducted split-pathway interviews with several fine dining chefs. These interviews were ultimately coded and put into niche themes. All of the themes that were reached were connected back into any and all sustainable practices and the extent to which they impacted sustainability as a whole. The themes discovered showed that fine dining chefs are implementing sustainable practices to combat food waste among a broader series of issues. Future research should be conducted on a broader scale to encapsulate a larger area and to determine how long these practices take to implement.