Beyond the plate: Vancouver’s sustainable food renaissance

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There's something truly great happening in the Vancouver dining scene, and it's not just the way the food tastes. This city has become ground zero for sustainability, a place where the provenance and the viability of the ingredients being used are just as important as any other element of the dining experience.

Vancouver is, after all, the home of the "100-mile diet", an idea coined back in 2005 by local residents Alisa Smith and JB MacKinnon, who spent a year consuming food that had only been grown, raised or foraged within 100 miles – or 160 kilometres – of their Vancouver home. It was a huge success, and the idea has since been picked up by foodies and restaurateurs across North America; however, it's in Vancouver that the movement has really taken hold.

This is a city in which people care about their food. That awareness is borne out on restaurant menus, where local ingredients are utilised and declared, but it's also something that manifests itself in the proliferation of farmers' markets in Vancouver, as well as extensive urban farming projects and various sustainable food movements.

On the restaurant front, the pioneer in Vancouver is undoubtedly John Bishop, a local chef who, all the way back in the 1970s, began challenging fellow foodies to begin scouting out the produce from their local area to create menus that were distinctly of the area. His restaurant, Bishop's (in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood), continues to lead the way, with John playing such a large part in the running of the place that he still sources all of his own ingredients, and even does the oyster shucking.

Eric Pateman is another leader of the local sustainability movement, and his Granville Island restaurant, Edible Canada, is known for its uniquely Canadian fare. Eric uses the likes of wild mushrooms foraged from the local area, as well as sustainable local seafood, local bison, and even syrup made from local birch trees. Edible Canada also has an onsite store selling artisanal Canadian food products, perfect for sampling everything the area has to offer.

Elsewhere in the city, Wildebeest focuses on nose-to-tail cooking using organic-raised animals and foraged vegetables, Burdock & Co offers a casual style of locavore dining utilising sustainable local produce, and Forage is about as eco-friendly a restaurant as they come, using seasonal, locally farmed and foraged ingredients to come up with a spectacular and wildly creative menu. Check out the eatery's all-British-Columbia wine, beer and cocktail list for further inspiration.

Unsurprisingly for this harbourside city, Vancouver restaurants also focus heavily on sustainable local seafood. The Ocean Wise Sustainable Seafood program is an initiative of the Vancouver Aquarium, working directly with restaurateurs and seafood suppliers to inform them of the species that are currently the most sustainable and responsible to harvest. Several of Vancouver's top seafood restaurants use fish that has gained the Ocean Wise seal of approval – guaranteeing it is sustainably harvested – including West Restaurant and Bar, the Japanese-style Hapa Izakaya, the twin eateries Miku and Minami, and the French-style Provence Marinaside.

Of course, this respect for sustainability among chefs has been passed down to the city's greater population, including those who supply the restaurants. There's a huge network of urban farming projects in Vancouver, one of the most notable of which is Sky Harvest, a certified organic, and vertical, urban farm about 4km from the city centre. Here they grow microgreens and other specialist edibles for some of the city's best restaurants – and they deliver them by bike.