[…] I feel a duty to serve good, nutritious, healthy and tasty things. I feel a responsibility to cook beautiful and colourful things; but I also know that everything does not always have to be beautiful and colourful, especially if it stops being good or healthy or sensible.
I feel a responsibility to serve many interesting, different, unknown or forgotten vegetables. These must follow the cycle of the seasons and grow as far as possible in the earth, and ideally not too far from the place where i will cook them, because if they come from very far away it means that pollution had to be done to move and refrigerate them.
I feel a responsibility to cook as little meat as possible, and if I do cook it, it must be raised under worthy conditions, both for the animal and for the humans who have dealt with it and those who will consume it.
I feel a responsibility to process the whole animal, because that is the best way to respect a living being that died for us. So not only the fillet and the thighs, but also the tripe, the brain, the tongue and the tail. These are more difficult parts to process, so you have to be able to do that properly too. Fish and other things that live in water must be caught for real, in the sea or lakes, and not bred in cages.
I feel a responsibility to use as little plastic as possible, to recycle as much as possible. I feel a responsibility to avoid waste: to recover, to reinvent, to calculate, to burn potato skins to make a vegetable base, to grill the head of a tuna fish and then recover all the little pieces of meat and make a salad out of it, which is a dish that can hardly exist more than once in a while but remains one of the tastiest things I have ever eaten in my entire life […].
Tommaso Melilli, chef.
