A FB post from chef Hugh Acheson posed the question of if chefs have a responsibility to promote local  and sustainable farms in their restaurants or if their only job is create good food.  I thought that it was an interesting question and definitely have my own ideas regarding it. 

Here's the article.  What do you think?

For Them, a Great Meal Tops Good Intentions

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Thomas Keller, left, and Andoni Luis Aduriz at Per Se.

By JULIA MOSKIN

Published: May 15, 2012

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Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Andoni Luis Aduriz

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Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Thomas Keller

Supporting local agriculture and food traditions? Far too narrow a goal, they said.

Chefs obligation to help save the planet? A lofty idea, they agreed, but the priority is creating great, brilliant food.

With the relatively small number of people I feed, is it really my responsibility to worry about carbon footprint? Mr. Keller asked. The worlds governments should be worrying about carbon footprint.

The two men were at Per Se, Mr. Kellers New York restaurant, as part of the kickoff for Mr. Adurizs first English-language book, Mugaritz: A Natural Science of Cooking, for which Mr. Keller wrote a foreword.

Mr. Aduriz is one of the figures including René Redzepi of Noma in Copenhagen, Ferran Adrià in Catalonia and Mr. Keller who have ambitious young chefs around the world hanging on their every word.

And though his bearing is modest, at 41 he is already one of the leaders of Spains cocina vanguardia, as the chef and owner of the rustic Mugaritz, outside San Sebastián in the Basque country. He is a pioneer in culinary aesthetics, using taste and technology to create potatoes coated in edible clay that look like just-dug stones; salads like snowfalls; and desserts that evoke dustings of pollen or skeins of frogs eggs.

Each plate seems natural and effortless, but each ingredient is somehow more delicious and beautiful than you have ever seen it before, said Wylie Dufresne, the chef at WD-50 in New York.

Mr. Keller, 56, is a calm and kingly figure, representing both ends of the transition that has transformed fine dining from formal French dinners to anything-goes performance art in just a couple of decades. His cuisine at Per Se and The French Laundry has feet in both worlds, with perfectly roasted lamb saddles in pleasurable coexistence with innovations like buttered-popcorn sorbet and compressed pineapple.

Both he and Mr. Aduriz view the goal of haute cuisine as a seamless fusion of pleasure and art. But more radically, they are united in the belief that their responsibility as chefs is primarily to create breathtakingly delicious and beautiful food not, as some of their colleagues think, to provide a livelihood for farmers near their restaurants, to preserve traditional culinary arts or to stop the spread of global warming. All these are threads of the current conversation about food that inform the menus of high-end restaurants, especially those labeled farm to table.

What restaurant isnt farm to table? Mr. Keller asked. I think about quality, not geography.

When it comes to supporting communities, he said, he chooses to support Stonington, Me., by buying exquisite oysters from a seafood dealer there. There are oysters on Long Island, of course, but Mr. Keller believes that his priority has to be taste, above all other considerations like sustainability, seasonality and food miles.

Is global food policy truly our responsibility, or in our control? he asked. I dont think so.

I agree completely, and it is a brave answer, came immediately from Mr. Aduriz, who also draws on a global palette of ingredients to amplify the northern Spanish ingredients that surround him. Of course I buy as many things as I can nearby, he said. But to align yourself entirely with the idea of sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited.

Mr. Aduriz and Mr. Keller both will benefit from last months announcement of the 2012 Worlds 50 Best Restaurants, which included a celebration at 10 Downing Street in London with British Prime Minister David Cameron in attendance. This list, published by Restaurant magazine, a British trade journal, has steadily gained international traction since it began in 2002.

Such lists are easily dismissed as arbitrary popularity contests, but they also tell the world something about the state of food and determine where a lot of gastro-tourism money goes.

While their restaurants may be accessible only to the worlds 0.1 percent, chefs at top restaurants influence the entire global food community with the way they think, write, tweet and talk about food not just the way they cook it.

This year, the United States and Spain entirely dominated the list: each has three restaurants in the top 10 (Mugaritz was No. 3; Per Se was No. 6). Not a single restaurant in France landed there.

Like the paintings of Picasso and Dalí, Mr. Adurizs food is in the Spanish tradition of radical art. But, he said, although he considers himself Basque and Spanish, national food traditions are increasingly meaningless. Is an authentic Neapolitan pizza made in New York City with American ingredients still Italian food? he asked.

If I cook a Moroccan lamb dish in Spain, is that part of a national cuisine?

Instead of an expression of place, ethos or ethnicity, a meal, to Mr. Aduriz, is an intimate encounter between individual and artist.

The job of a restaurant is to make the gap tighter between our experience and their context, said Mr. Aduriz, quickly adding that such an attempt is an overarching goal, not a day-to-day task.

If you are always thinking about the complexity of the relationship, you will not be able to cook anything.