In My Regenerative Kitchen, chef Camilla Marcus writes “that the core beauty of life lies in the friction, those moments when discomfort and uncertainty spark an indescribable energy.” As a climate activist, Marcus founded New York City’s first zero-waste restaurant, west~bourne, which she now leads as a regenerative, carbon-neutral brand (the restaurant closed due to rent challenges during the pandemic). Given her ingenuity, I was curious when that friction manifested as opportunities on her journey to advocate for regenerative farming.

“When it relates to the food system and farming, it’s the exact allegory to where we’ve gotten in food; Every piece of fruit coming out of a mono-crop farm that’s using pesticides and stripping our land to make sure that two apples look identical,” she says. “The land is going dry, arid, and fallow. Yet, we’re still heralding that two apples should be identical on the shelf.”

“Perfect is not the goal, and it’s antithetical to the human experience,” she adds. “It’s going back to the way food used to be grown and letting go of this need for things to be perfect, smooth, and predictable. One, it’s not tenable. Two, it’s not human. Three, it’s not natural.”

In My Regenerative Kitchen, she explains why regenerative farming is “the single biggest impact we can make on the climate crisis” and offers simple practices to reduce your carbon footprint at home. Here, Marcus, who was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People, shares her mission to make regenerative farming as ubiquitous as organic, what needs to change for us to begin investing in nature, and why strong principles simplify decision-making.

This interview was edited for length and clarity. 

In the foreword of My Regenerative Kitchen, Alice Waters powerfully captures the impact of regenerative farming, writing: “Let us embrace the soil as a sacred trust, a reservoir of hope from which the seeds of a sustainable future shall sprout. For in the embrace of healthy soil lies our greatest salvation—a beacon of resilience illuminating the path toward a thriving planet for generations to come.” I’d love to start with you illuminating this vision. 

We all stand on the same soil. Every single human—every living being on this planet—we all share that. For me, that’s one of the most powerful things about being in the food industry. We all have to eat. Food is our most universal language. It’s the thing that crosses barriers, cultures, differences, and divides. What she describes, and is the whole purpose of the book and my personal mission, is: It all starts with the soil. If the soil is healthy, we have a chance to reverse climate change. We have a chance to move past a crisis, and create a better food system—That is more nutritious, and sustainable for future generations, as she says, and frankly, the way it was always intended.

We lost the script post-Industrial Revolution. All the reasons that mono-crop industrial farming came about don’t exist anymore. We have to let go of that false paradigm and go back to the way nature intended, which was thinking about biodiversity and allowing nature to build resilience for itself. Through that, we get much higher nutritional value out of our food. I think that’s what she’s trying to say: The answer is in our land. It always has been.

Something for people to think about—and when I share this, I always find it interesting to see someone’s face—is that 50% of American land is farmland. We think of ourselves as a very tech, capitalist, cosmopolitan, and urban country; that’s what dominates. But, 50% is still farmland. If we let that land go fallow—and we don’t continue down this path of reinvigorating and renourishing our soil—we’re going to have an even bigger problem than we’re facing right now when you think about that scope and scale. We are still very much an agrarian culture, society, and economy.

You start the zero waste chapter with Wayne Dyer’s quote: “When you change the way you see things, the things you see change.” What are the most transformative perspective shifts we need to make to embrace this path to regenerative farming forward? How will that change what we see? 

I had a friend who asked me to do this reel about composting. They said: Where do I even begin? I said: Just get a bin. Start there. Anyone can get a bin. I say to people: Put it on your countertop. As you cook, do things in your home, and buy groceries, collect your food scraps. Don’t put them in the trash. Don’t worry about composting them. I’m not asking anything else, but looking at it. Start letting that get into your psyche. How many bins are you filling up a week? What are you throwing away? Are you buying too much from the grocery store? Are you not being creative enough when you’re cooking?

Just looking at it, humans are inherently very competitive, especially with ourselves. Psychologically, it will automatically start to change how you do things because that piece of your brain is going to click and go: Maybe I can do half or a quarter bin a week. Maybe I can do almost nothing. Again, without even thinking about composting and where it goes yet, putting that into your front view mirror and not hiding it, has a very big effect on how you see and do things. The point is that we have to be facing things. You can’t make changes until you have full awareness first.

Looking ahead at the future of food and regenerative farming, what are the most important questions we should be asking ourselves individually, as communities, and as a society? 

I really do believe the most important question is: What can I do and why wait? If there’s something you can do today, why wait? What’s holding you back? I always say: Take one step. Then, worry about the next. Just do something—one thing—and tell someone about it. If each of us did one practice and shared that practice with someone else, this whole society and our entire climate crisis would be different.

To add to that, can you explain the impact regenerative farming can have on the climate crisis because it’s very eye-opening? 

It’s one of the things that I tried to share in the book in a nonacademic way; wrapping a narrative around the stats so people could understand, from seed to shelf, the carbon emissions all across the way. Delving into this book and why I wanted to write it, I felt over the last five to 10 years, a lot of the conversations were around transit: Our cars and planes are the problem (how we travel and ship). Transit was the issue. What I feel now is that that’s where a lot of the money was. A lot of money was being put into electric cars. A lot of push around: That’s what a consumer can do. They can switch their car. But, when you look at actual carbon data and the emissions life cycle, how we grow our food is the single biggest impact we can make on the climate crisis and the only system that can pull down carbon in time.

When you ask yourself what to do or what questions we should be asking, it’s: How many products can I bring into my home that are building and growing these regenerative farms? Because, they’re what’s pulling carbon out from the atmosphere into our soil. It’s a win-win. It’s not like someone is asking you to sacrifice something to do that. Anything you eat that is regeneratively grown will taste better, feel better, and be better for you.

It’s interesting that you bring that up because you often say that “the long-term solution lies in the land, not a lab.” Still, capital flows into labs and technology, rather than nature. What needs to happen for us to begin investing in nature and regenerative farming?

I’m a chef, but I’m also a JD-MBA. A lot of what I’ve thought in the past couple of years reflecting on that is: Why do billions go into lab-created products that never deliver on their promise? We’ve seen this from cellular meat to now we’re all about protein compounds. We see this every decade, if not every five years; Tons of private and public capital going into things that never end up making financial sense. Things that are created in a lab, we know from healthcare, are not cheap. They aren’t nutritious and, a lot of times, end up having bad health consequences once we get the data. It never ends up delivering on what it’s supposed to. The reason I think capital flows into it is because a lot of that work is protectable with IP and investors feel that’s what makes it unique; that’s going to be the unicorn and why it’s going to be the billion-dollar return.

The irony being, we live in a country that really undervalues food. We see that time and time again. We undervalue our food and hospitality system, despite it being the biggest employer in the country, the biggest effect on climate, and the thing that we spend the most money on every day. We don’t allow any IP protection for anything (very little) related to food. The argument is: Food is universal. Well, so are zeros and ones, and yet we allow people to protect algorithms. Why aren’t recipes protectable? Recipes have no ability to be trademarked. There’s very little protection for restaurants, IP, and names. That’s just my two cents, but when I untangled the web, I saw that being the biggest through line.

Then, the next step is that the media likes to write about fundraising. So, that’s perpetuating that. You start to see this vicious cycle of: Then, that’s what we’re talking about and what the public consciousness is. Media is the biggest translator of what we pay attention to. Like I said, even in the carbon life cycle, so much over the last 10 years was about transit. We were told over and over that’s what it’s about, but actually the data doesn’t show that. But, I see very little writing, especially when it comes to business and food media, on regenerative agriculture; unlike in fashion and beauty, there are a lot of articles around regenerative textiles and the future of materiality in that space.

This is a great segue into your work at west~bourne. Impact is born from intention, as evidenced in your company saving 19,000 trees and protecting 23,000 acres of forest. Still, that impact has required you to have an unwavering commitment to reimagine every aspect of creating a product. What mindset and principles guide you as you create a new paradigm? How do they help you overcome the challenges you face doing so?  

When I started the restaurant, vegetarian restaurants weren’t well written about or well regarded. Now, there’s all this buzz around high-end restaurants that are doing it. But, I always would say and really do believe: When you plant that flag and do it differently, it actually becomes easier because you know what’s right and what’s wrong. You know what’s in and what’s out. Even from a team standpoint, it helps with recruiting because only someone who wants to do it differently is going to join. There’s no question of: What am I getting into? What fits us and what doesn’t? It becomes easier. If you try to live somewhere in between, it’s more difficult. Being plastic-free is a binary choice; in some ways, it’s clarifying and simplifies.

What’s harder is you have to forge your own new supply chain and build those relationships. Linking to the last question, that’s what I say to investors: I dare anyone to try and replicate what we’re doing in less time. Our hope is that as we grow, we can show an example and share our knowledge of how we are doing it differently. It’s not impossible and can be at scale. It should be the new normal and will be the new standard. But, it’s not that simple right now. For me, I find it fascinating and rewarding to say: We don’t want plastic in our supply chain. We’re going to find those amazing innovators that believe in the same mission and grow it together.

You describe this journey as “a collective work in progress, ever-evolving and always in pursuit.” As you look ahead, what challenges offer us the most exciting opportunities to innovate? What’s an area of complexity or a push-pull you’re trying to simplify?

It all goes back to regenerative farming. We all came around to organic over the last decade, and that’s been pretty transformative. Now, we need to push it further. For me, it’s about making regenerative as ubiquitous as the word organic. Instead of feeling confused or disconnected from it, making that our everyday practice. For me, that is the mission and goal—that we move into a world where as many things that are organic are eventually regenerative.

With biodiversity, you’ve explained that part of these farms being able to scale is having products that are built off them. How do you envision the future of that and what needs to happen in that space? 

The future, for me, is you go to a grocery store, and similar to the way there was this trash fish movement 10 years ago—You go to a grocery store and there’s salmon and tilapia. Well, there’s a million fish in the sea. There’s no reason that you’re going to a grocery store and there’s only salmon and tilapia. That’s the goal, is that we are going to be able to see the vast variety that already exists in nature and, because regenerative farming will be the new normal, you’ll start to see it on your shelves. Rather than navel oranges, you’re going to see eight kinds of oranges that may be grown differently and look different. But, there are all types of oranges that we don’t often get to see because that’s not what industrial farming is about. It’s about one. So, to me, I think the future of that will be this incredible richness of variety, that when you connect closer to farms, you see and appreciate. The goal is that that becomes the future of the masses.

What is the greatest lesson that you’ve learned from nature that can guide us as we navigate this shift into regenerative agriculture?

There’s an incredible beauty, inspiration, and creativity in the unpredictable. It’s okay to not know. Next year’s crop might be different than this year’s. You might learn that co-planting certain crops leads to something unexpected and amazing. But, we have to be more fluid. We have to be more nimble and creative to have this co-resilience that’s necessary.