From Plate to Planet

Taking regeneration from food to, well, everything else

Plate on the table

Every system starts at the “table”.

What we eat - and how it’s grown, caught, or raised - reflects the same forces shaping our economies, technologies, and institutions. In food, the shift from extraction to regeneration is visible, visceral, and edible. I think that’s why I keep returning to the plate. It’s the most human mirror for our planetary systems.

Food teaches us how our systems work, and more importantly, how they could work differently.

The Covenant on the Table

Last week I wrote about the covenant of regeneration and the balance between refusing systems that harm and rebuilding systems that can heal.

Alice Waters protects the ocean by saying no to industrial aquaculture. Matthew Beaudin rebuilds it by wading into mangrove forests and transforming supply chains from the inside.

Waters holds the ethical line. Beaudin redraws it.

Both understand that food is more than sustenance. It’s a design challenge, a living prototype of our relationship with the planet.

When Matthew serves scallops sourced from certified fisheries or black tiger shrimp raised under mangrove canopy, he isn’t just offering flavor. He’s serving a model of what restored systems can taste like. His food shows conservation and craft coexisting on the same plate.

Food as System Blueprint

In regenerative food systems, every ingredient is a relationship between soil, water, species, and people. When supply chains honor those relationships, they restore balance instead of depleting it.

That’s what regeneration really is: rebuilding that relationship at scale.

When chefs trace shrimp from Vietnamese mangrove ponds to plates, they’re not just designing menus. They’re designing feedback loops, ones that nourish both ecosystems and economies. The farmer’s face becomes visible. The mangrove forest stays intact. The nutrients cycle back.

The logic of regeneration isn’t culinary. It’s systemic.

Because what happens in food also happens everywhere else.

Every Industry Has Its Overfishing Problem

In nearly every sector, we’ve been overfishing - extracting talent, creativity, and natural resources faster than they can replenish.

You don’t need to work in seafood to recognize the pattern:

In fashion, overfishing looks like fast fashion burning through water, cotton, and garment workers while generating 92 million tons of textile waste annually. But companies like Woolly are rebuilding from within: natural fibers instead of synthetics, take-back programs instead of landfills, compostable materials instead of microplastics that persist for centuries. They’re proving you can design for both performance and regeneration.

In finance, overfishing looks like capital flowing exclusively toward quarterly returns while degrading the living systems that make all economic activity possible. But institutions like Beneficial State Bank are asking different questions: Does this loan regenerate watersheds? Support biodiversity? Build community resilience alongside financial returns? They’re redesigning what capital can nourish, not just extract.

In coffee, overfishing looked like monoculture plantations depleting soil, farmers trapped in poverty, and climate change threatening the crop’s future. But Heirloom Coffee Roasters partnered with cooperatives transforming rock-hard clay into living soil through regenerative practices, while proving ecological restoration and economic viability can coexist.

The pattern repeats across industries. The only question is whether we keep hauling from depletion, or do we learn to rebuild the very ecosystems we depend on.

The Six Dimensions of Regenerative Innovation

At Carom, we use the lens of food because it’s tangible. But the framework translates to any business, any system, any industry.

The Regenerative Innovation Canvas asks six questions that apply whether you’re sourcing shrimp or manufacturing clothing:

Habitat & Living Systems

Are you protecting the ecosystems your business depends on, or depleting them?

Matthew’s mangrove shrimp maintain forest cover that protects coastlines and nurtures biodiversity. In your industry: Do your operations integrate with living landscapes, or does your supply chain fund degradation?

Food, Water & Nutrient Cycles

Do your outputs become inputs elsewhere, or do they become waste?

Composting returns nutrients to farms. Closed-loop packaging re-enters cycles instead of escaping them. In your industry: What materials cycle back, and where do you still create linear flows that end in landfills?

Climate & Energy Balance

Are you burning through resources or designing for renewal?

Heirloom’s electric roasters eliminate fossil fuel combustion. Regenerative farms sequester carbon in soil. In your industry: Where does your energy come from, and what emissions could be eliminated through design, not just offset?

Biodiversity, Health & Resilience

Are you optimizing for monoculture efficiency or diverse resilience?

Shade-grown coffee hosts birds, bees, and soil microorganisms. Fifteen tomato varieties tell stories about seed sovereignty. In your industry: Does your model create fragility through consolidation, or resilience through diversity of suppliers, ideas, and approaches?

Knowledge, Innovation & Evolution

Are you hoarding insights as competitive advantage or sharing them as commons?

Pacayal Cooperative’s motto “Quality Does Not Suffer Crisis” spread regenerative practices across Honduras. Open sharing accelerates transformation. In your industry: What would happen if you open-sourced your regenerative innovations for others to learn from?

Kinship & Culture

Do you see your supply chain as transactions or relationships?

Farmer faces on plates. Multi-generational stewardship made visible. The person who grew your meal has a name and a story. In your industry: Who becomes invisible in your value chain, and how could transparency create accountability?

From Kitchen Table to Boardroom Table

These aren’t food questions. They’re system questions.

In the kitchen, a regenerative mindset looks like sourcing with transparency and designing for closed loops.

In business, it looks the same, but just using different ingredients.

The kitchen becomes a prototype for a new kind of enterprise: one that sees its value chain as a living system, not a line of extraction. It’s one that asks whether outputs nourish the inputs they depend on. And it’s one that measures success by what regenerates, rather than what gets consumed.

Chefs practice this intuitively. They understand flow, waste, and feedback. Every meal is a small system of inputs, processes, outputs, and cycles of renewal. The best kitchens operate like ecosystems, not factories.

What if every business did the same?

Every Meal Is a Model

Every meal is a rehearsal for the world we want to live in.

When chefs like Matthew rebuild food systems from within, they’re not just feeding people. They’re also modeling what restored systems look like. When companies like Heirloom scale regenerative coffee or Woolly replaces synthetics with natural fibers, they prove the model works beyond the plate.

Food reminds us that regeneration isn’t theory. It’s behavior.

It’s the way we choose, source, build, and share.

From the kitchen table to the boardroom table, the question remains the same: Are we feeding the system that feeds us back?

From Plate to Practice

Matthew Beaudin’s work in Vietnam isn’t just about shrimp. It’s proving that rebuilding broken systems is possible and that those principles translate.

Your industry has its version of the mangrove pond. The supply chain no one wants to trace. The extraction everyone accepts as normal. The system everyone knows is broken but no one thinks can change.

What if you waded in?

This is the chair Matthew sat in at Terra Madre, the one that felt heavy because transformation always requires us to defend our work to both the preservationists and the pragmatists. But that weight is the covenant’s price.

The Regenerative Innovation Canvas maps where to start. Pick the dimension where extraction is most visible in your work:

Start with Kinship & Culture if you want to make invisible relationships visible. Ask whose labor, land, or knowledge makes your business possible but remains unnamed?

Start with Food, Water & Nutrient Cycles if you want to close loops and eliminate waste. Ask where do your outputs become inputs, and where do they escape as pollution?

Start with Habitat & Living Systems if you want to understand your impact on ecosystems. Ask whether you are protecting the living world your business depends on, or depleting it?

Every business can ask these questions. Sure, the covenant isn’t comfortable. But you know what? Neither is watching the systems we depend on collapse while we optimize their extraction.

Join the Regenerative Innovation Community

Transformation doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens when we wade into broken systems together and prove a different future is possible.

Subscribe free to get weekly insights on businesses proving regeneration works—from coffee roasters restoring ecosystems to banks financing community resilience. Canvas applications, transformation pathways, and regenerative frameworks delivered to your inbox.

Want to go deeper? Solo Explorers get the Expanded Canvas (30+ page methodology), monthly deep-dive case studies with full Canvas scoring, tools and templates, and connection to a practitioner community helping each other apply regenerative thinking.

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Every meal is a model. Every business can be too. The question is: which one are you modeling?