Reimagining Hospitality: Sustainability, Culture and Waste
Written by Bella Northeast, our wonderful Venue Manager.
Infamously, hospitality is an unsustainable industry. The high turn over-rate of staff and exhaustive production of waste create an industry which for too long has retained its unimaginative practices for convenience. Reimagining what our food systems look like is leading to a regeneration of systems, reduction in the unhappiness of staff and the repurposing of waste.
Of course, the hospitality industry did not start out this way. In fact, hospitality did not start out as an industry at all. Hospitality, as a concept, is embedded in the foundations of humanity. Associated with the word Xenia, Ancient Greek’s believed deeply in fostering a respectful and reciprocal relationship between guests and hosts. Xenia is portrayed numerous times throughout Greek mythology and is a dominant theme in Homer’s Odyssey.
Understood as an act of welcoming, hospitality is at the core of the creation and preservation of community. Hospitality is having friends over for dinner, hospitality is being made to feel at ease in a foreign place, hospitality is providing directions for someone who is lost. It was monetised and turned from a concept into an industry sometime around 15,000 BCE.
The first recorded hospitality business was the Lascaux caves in France, which acted as places of rest for members of other tribes. Think old-age Air BnB. Today, the hospitality industry worldwide is worth over $4.7 billion dollars. Established as a fundamental concept of community, hospitality has withstood, and been a major part of, every era and renaissance of culture since its creation. So, what’s missing? Why is hospitality accepted as an unsustainable source of income or legitimate career path?
At the moment, it’s stuck in a rut - hospitality’s history is a pivotal drawcard to its allure. The act of being welcomed and served, of providing a place of refuge from whatever is going on in the outside world, has allowed the hospitality industry to prevail through wars, economic depressions and now even a pandemic. However, within this is the preservation of a hierarchical service structure which promotes a disrespectful, stressful and unsafe environment for staff. Now is the perfect time to address how the hospitality industry can utilise the historical concepts of being hospital within a framework which requires profitability.
Other labour industries experience a 10-15% annual turnover rate. What this means is that each year on average companies must retrain and reintegrate perhaps 1-20 new staff, depending on the size of the company. Often this change can be planned for; employees who are retiring or leaving their specific position are able to train their replacement, or the workplace is able to recalibrate the workload to account for the loss of staff. In hospitality however, the annual turn over rate is 70-80% with the leading cause identified as excessive stress at work. Contemporary TV shows such as ‘The Bear’ and ‘The White Lotus’ use their platform to highlight the high-pressure working conditions of hospitality and strangled modern relationship between patron and server. These TV shows use the cultural norm of ‘the customer is always right’ to parody how hospitality staff are often asked to perform ridiculous and unachievable tasks.
It is very common for young Australian’s first job to be in hospitality. It is less common for young Australians to pursue a career in hospitality. What can we do to make hospitality a more sustainable industry for people to grow and develop in? It begins with legitimating and empowering the staff. This includes things such as providing leadership opportunities, proper training and remuneration, and developing a sense of community within the team. It is trusting employees, trusting systems and working together towards a goal. Hospitality is an entirely public facing industry and this does not need to be something negative. Interactions and relationships with customers can be nourishing, encouraging and insightful. Returning to the concept of hospitality and the pivotal value of respect will allow for the hospitality industry to continue to be a cornerstone of community. Hospitality venues are places to share knowledge, laughter, and most importantly, to share food.
The second major issue surrounding hospitality and sustainability is the production of waste. On average, for every plate of food that is served, staff place 120g (about the size of the small muffin) into landfill; this accumulates to over 250,000 tonnes of food waste every year. Additional to this is the waste produced by take-away materials - take away cups, napkins, cutlery and bags. Although many cafes and restaurants around Australia now turn to compostable or recyclable materials, more often than not the materials continue to end up in landfill as consumers do not follow the waste disposal guidelines or the materials become soiled and are no longer able to be recycled.
There are a few ways in which this can be reduced - starting with our language around waste. The word waste conjures a negative connotation; something that is not wanted, no longer useful and has subsequently become burdensome to the beholder. A resource, however, is useful. It is something waiting to be purposed, able to fix a plethora of problems if just actioned. If we think about waste, and talk about waste, in terms of a ‘resource’ suddenly everything becomes a little bit easier to manage.
A resource can be tracked with a positive outlook. Suddenly an accumulation of resources is not an issue, but rather a gift. There are so many ways that waste can be repurposed if used correctly. Being situated on a farm does immediately offer numerous avenues for food waste, however all hospitality businesses can take steps to being resource focused. Take away cups can be used as seedling containers and bottle caps and large cardboard boxes are loved by local childcare facilities. A post on your local Facebook page will reveal an abundance of people who are looking for the exact thing that you are looking to get rid of. This also encourages a more circular food economy - vegetables from the garden are prepared, food scraps are given to chickens or worms, which in turn encourages the production of more vegetables. Knowledge about waste, how to frame it and how to manage it, allows for a more transparent and thoughtful system about its relocation.
Overall, hospitality is vital to Common Ground Project. The act of welcoming visitors to the space with respect is fundamental to building and fostering community. Reworking the current system of the hospitality industry which make it unsustainable – largely being industry culture and waste production - will enable our Cafe to be a hub of all programs, farming and community events which use the space.
