A Plant Based Lifestyle to the Rescue

Back in late 2019 we had just opened TREEHOUSE, and Christian was asked to give a talk to a local vocational school. The faculty knew him from his previous adventures, and were excited to have him talk to the students about the issues of sustainability, and the impact of humans on our beautiful planet.

We recorded the talk, and would like to share with you what was discussed!

My Background

So a lot of the work I’ve done has been involved in sustainability and the environment. I was born in Hong Kong, and I grew up mostly in France, America and Hong Kong. I originally got into food as an athlete. I used to row in high school and in college.

Through my athletic career I discovered that a plant based diet was actually a very good tool for me to perform at a high level, so when I was 16 to 18 I was in a world competition, so I started experimenting on my diet, and I saw that my recovery rates and my performance overall grew. That was my first understanding in relationship with food.  And that’s what got me into food.

After my mom got diagnosed with cancer, I started looking into the healing aspects of food, and I was also going to cooking school at that time. It was there where I discovered the powerful use of food as medicine and originally how recipes used to be something that was passed on not for flavour or texture but it was about to fixing a specific illness- a specific condition.

That was a different layer of food understanding that I had. Training as a chef and working in different Michelin starred restaurants showed me sort the highest level of cooking, but I wasn't very comfortable dealing with meat and fish because I was personally plant-based for my rowing career. 

Returning home

To make a long story short, I ended up taking a year off after I finished school to travel the world and try all types of different plant based cuisine and to go to all the countries I wanted see before landing back in Hong Kong about 9 years ago.

When I first got back to Hong Kong, I got my first job in the food industry as general manager of a steakhouse which is kinda the total opposite of what I do. I did that job for 6-months, and I really did not like it. After that I opened my first place at 26 years old- a restaurant called MANA! Fast Slow Food. 

It was my first venture in Hong Kong, and we didn't do a market study- we just felt like there was a need for good plant based food, so we opened that first business, and at that time there was really no infrastructure or demand here in Hong Kong to have things like quinoa, and kale, and all that stuff. There was really no supply so we struggled a lot to get the supply and to get the awareness of this type of food and plant based food. 

We built it to three different locations then I sold the company to an investor and moved on to another venture called HOME Eat to Live. It was a much bigger venture taking the plant based movement and ideology and making it more of a mass market product because my first venture, MANA!, was very niche appealing to already converted people- they were already vegetarian or vegan.

But we felt that if we wanted to create change by creating a business, which is my belief system- business is the main driver of change because if you change businesses and not consumers we can really impact the wider planet.

The Plant Based effect

If you see the planet as as a business we are doing extremely bad business at the moment- we’re running out of inventory about halfway through the year, we're not replenishing our resources, were using free resources like bees, like water, like all these things that are technically labour which represent trillions of dollars, and if you were to replace them with human labour or different labours and we're just not utilising what we have well to be able to provide sustainably for the generations to come. 

The main concept in our restaurants is doing our best to have eco friendly packaging. We use rice for our straws which is something that we can throw away or compost that doesn't leave a big impact. We want to minimise the plastic that we use- basically the only thing that is left is cling wrap- it is the one thing I want to replace in the restaurant business.

Also, of course, plant based food is the most impactful thing we can do as a business is to only serve plant based because   to effect some of the top three polluters in the world.

Air conditioning is number one- the by-products of air conditioning and the gas it creates. After that the number two polluter is meats- the meat and cattle industry. And the third is food wastage so of the top 3 reasons- two of them are food related, so we really feel like the most impactful thing we can do is to choose what food we put in our body everyday.

The Big Picture 

We structure our business principles so as to create environmental profit- that’s all the environmental things that we do as a restaurant, cultural profits or spiritual profit which is who are we feeding, how are we treating our team our stakeholders, suppliers, and after the profit profit because we are still a business and as I said I'm not against business I just think that business needs to be the one that that creates the change because they do impact the masses. 

Imagine if Coca Cola replaced their plastic bottle for something else, that creates a massive impact. If we, us, as consumers need to recycle that plastic bottle it's a very small impact and also we’re seeing that it's really not that impactful. I think it's about 91% of plastic doesn't get recycled. The whole recycling industry is not tangibly working. I think that replacing the items from the source is the main key.

We're planning to expand across the region in Hong Kong, Singapore, so the simple ideology is that the food is quality based. By quality we don't use any processed food at all, so we don't use any fake meat replacements, we don’t use bleached flour, white sugar, anything out of a can, anything that is processed or made by a machine.

We make everything from scratch from the bread to the kombucha. It’s all our recipes and are guided through the ideology respecting that there's no weird ingredients in the food, so it’s really about creating something that is pleasant to the palate, but we also want to cater to their gut.

With the gut it’s really important to take care of what we put in our body and the gut biome which they call the brain affects our mood and affects everything that we are, so it’s important that we create a long-term positive impact in terms of regenerating our bodies and ourselves with high quality food. 

That's really our mission is to create a place that is fast food that appeals to the masses. We call it accidentally vegetarian in order to remove the preconceived ideas that people have with vegan/vegetarian food.

Because so often its so set in people's mind that vegan/vegetarian its boring, it's made by hippies, it's not professional, it’s not hygienic, it's bland. I’ve heard all these- ‘Where’s my protein?’ All of these misconceptions. We found the best way to actually impact those misconceptions is to positively “trick” people into realising that the great meal they just had was actually plant based.

We find that if someone looks at the menu and sees that it all looks good and realise that we just left out the meat and fish, they are more prone to try our food and after they try the food the food is the speaker.

The food is needs to be the full experience- that you feel good, you feel satiated, you're not hungry two hours later, but also you have a good digestion and you feel like it's a valid option. Over the years and over the ventures we feel like we've managed to appeal to a much wider market than what we were able to do before. I think the timing is more urgent than ever that not everyone becomes vegetarian, but that everyone eats more plant based meals. 

Small steps

And that's the message: it’s not about being perfect but it's as humans there's no other solutions that are being provided that I know of that don't involve us all eating more plant based.

There's a lot of trends going towards all the fake plant based stuff. I’m against it, but I think it's a good way to go in that route. I think they're using the message of it's good for the planet but they are omitting is that it's not good for you, and that's my problem with it because I really want the experience to be for the human first while being great for reducing the environmental impact, but it's not technically real food- it's lab made food, and me ,as a chef, and working with chefs we want to create exciting flavours but with the chef’s mind not the scientist’s.

I think once we enter into food science it’s a whole different thing of taking this cell from a carrot and another vegetable and putting it together and creating something that is totally new, but you’re removing the whole aspect.

I always like to say nature is the best designers not human. And when you see the human design it's all inspired by nature- colours, movement- anything that we create is inspired by nature so we should not forget that our inspiration comes from that and we need to respect and keep that connection with nature.

Our slogan is, “One with Nature,” essentially it’s reconnecting the human with nature so through food that's our message but after we communicate on different aspects.

Design Elements

So in terms of interior design we we used as much as possible- recyclable certified eco products like LEED certified cement, bamboo which is a highly renewable material. We had different texture element which is different plants compressed together to make a counter. The textile that we use for cushions is all eco products that it hasn't been sprayed or treated with weird fire retardant or things like that are actually really bad and trying to be really bad for humans because we can ingest that all the time.

We're trying to do our best- it's not a perfect thing-  its an evolving thing all the time.

What new information am I getting?

What can I do? 

There's always that relationship of integrity and what we can achieve. We just feel like food is such a powerful way to change people. There's a lot of misinformation and a lot of different ways of changing, but I firmly believe that the way we eat is the way that can save us truly at this point. I don't think heading to Mars is a real tangible solution. We’ve already not done so well on this planet. What are we going to do on Mars? I’m not too hopeful on that. 

So I do think that the change needs to be now, but it needs to be done in a way that is positive- not making people feel bad or isolated if they eat meat. In the experience of our infrastructure- whatever they do we don’t care. It’s just that this is what we do and we do it in a friendly and welcoming way…

In our next post we’ll share some of the questions asked by the students as well as Christian’s responses. Thank you for reading!