Haute Cuisine Patagonia Wants To Use Its Food Line To Teach The World To Feed Itself

The Outdoor Apparel Company Has Started Selling Food That'S Healthy For The Environment.

- Brad Wieners

Yvon Chouinard, the short, bluff, fatalistic founder of Patagonia, the company renowned for its pricey parkas, fuzzy fleeces, and exhortations to buy fewer of them, sits in a cafeteria-style Chinese restaurant in Jackson, Wyo.

He scratches a clam from its shell, forks it into his mouth, chews, checks the time. “Oh, we’re fine,” he says. Birgit Cameron, seated on his right, does her best to look reassured. A fairly recent addition to the Patagonia family, Cameron seems as eager to make a good impression this evening as Chouinard is indifferent to how he’s perceived. The two are expected in 10 minutes at the Center for the Arts in Jackson, where they’ll appear on stage together and introduce Unbroken Ground, a 26-minute film produced by Patagonia that highlights the suppliers of Patagonia Provisions, the three-year-old sister food company that Cameron heads. Depending on your level of cynicism, Unbroken Ground may strike you as a well-turned documentary about the ecologically enlightened suppliers behind the foods she sells, or perhaps as a slick marketing piece. Naturally, it’s both.

“It’s hard to get people fired up about how cotton is grown in Turkey,” Chouinard says, “but we’ve got to, because the way 99 percent of cotton is grown, it’s a disaster. And it’s the same with where most of our food comes from. So we use film, because a lot of these little guys we’re working with don’t have the resources to make a movie. We do.”