On the ground with the future leaders of the restaurant world
Devita Davison is the executive director of Detroit’s FoodLab, an organization devoted to supporting and promoting local food businesses. Members of the FoodLab are actively building new businesses, and Davison ensures that environmental stewardship and equitable models are baked in from day one. As she puts it, “in the city of Detroit, we can work toward a food-sovereign city and make it a community-based food system, all the way from the seed.”1.
“We ask our members that they commit to this methodology called the triple bottom line of accounting. And that means that you are not only paying attention to the ‘P’ of profit but you’re paying attention to the ‘P’ in people and the ‘P’ in planet. So we call it the three P’s. Even though we are a nonprofit organization, I’m not going to tell this audience that in order for us to dismantle this system, you cannot do it without being profitable. You can’t be broke and try to dismantle a system.
“We, as consumers, we have to dismantle our implicit biases to really understand what costs are. Because if we understood costs, then we would bake the operational costs in to run the restaurant and to the price of the food. Therefore, we can pay our employees an equitable wage.”“How do we get these restaurants to sustain? We go there. We support those restaurants and listen, I get it.