The Covenant and the Shrimp

Alice Waters, Matthew Beaudin, and the Future of Regenerative Innovation

Beaudin with shrimpers in the mangroves of Vietnam

This past week, Matthew Beaudin posted about sitting in "the heaviest chair" he'd ever experienced. In front of him: Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower - two legends of the farm-to-table movement, the people who taught America that where food comes from matters.

He was presenting on "Sustainable Fisheries and the Role of Chefs" at Terra Madre Americas 2025. But the subject matter wasn't what made the chair heavy. It was every fear, every anxiety, every voice screaming "you are an imposter." The weight of defending, even just representing, his work to those who built the very foundation he stands on.

The same week, Matthew - current Culinary Director of Monterey Bay Aquarium and Director of Culinary Innovation for SSA Group - has been sharing his work importing black tiger shrimp from Vietnam's mangrove forests. That includes wading into muddy ponds with multi-generational fishing families, building supply chains with full traceability, farmer faces visible on every plate.

And Alice Waters? She pledged to refuse ocean-farmed salmon entirely.

The tension writes itself.

Alice Waters joined hundreds of chefs refusing to serve ocean-farmed salmon - specifically, the industrial open-net pen systems that have contributed to a 70% decline in wild Atlantic salmon populations since the 1970s. "A simple act of honesty," she explained in support of the Off the Table campaign, "one that protects marine life, honors transparency, and teaches our communities that where our food comes from matters."

For decades, Waters has drawn bright lines. No compromises with systems that harm. No participation in industrial extraction dressed as sustainability. Protect the ocean by refusing to engage with destructive practices. Her menu is a manifesto of absence as education.

Matthew Beaudin stands in the same lineage but walks a different path. He doesn't refuse aquaculture, he redesigns it. In Ca Mau, Vietnam, he celebrates black tiger shrimp raised under mangrove canopy, stewarded by families who've tended these waters for generations. He imports them to the U.S. with full traceability and with farmer faces visible on every plate. During his tenure at Monterey Bay Aquarium, he shifted $1 million in purchasing to local producers within 90 miles, transforming institutional buying power into regional regeneration.

For Matthew, protection means presence. Wade into broken systems to rebuild them from within.

One uses absence as pedagogy. The other uses presence as intervention.

At Carom, we see both approaches as absolutely essential.. and each also incomplete on their own.

This is the covenant regeneration demands us to remember:

Preservation matters. Refusing destructive systems keeps us honest. Without Alice Waters and the 350+ chefs in the Off the Table movement holding the line against industrial open-net salmon farming, "sustainable seafood" becomes marketing, and integrity erodes into greenwashing. Her refusal teaches. It forces the question: Why isn't this on the menu? What harm would serving this normalize?

The preservation strategy protects the wild Atlantic salmon, whose populations have collapsed 70% since industrial farming began. It maintains ethical boundaries that honor the ocean's right to heal. It says: some systems are so fundamentally extractive that our only honest response is refusal.

Restoration matters. Walking away from broken systems doesn't fix them. Someone has to wade into the mangrove ponds, the supply chains, the financial systems so that the systems themselves can work with life, not against it. Matthew's presence proves transformation is possible at scale. His work in Vietnam's mangrove forests shows what regenerative aquaculture looks like: ecosystem-integrated, multi-generational stewardship, full traceability from pond to plate.

The restoration strategy builds alternatives. It demonstrates that aquaculture doesn't have to mean disease-ridden cages dumping chemicals into oceans. It can mean families maintaining mangrove cover while growing food. It can mean knowing exactly which hands raised your meal.

The tension between them isn't a problem to solve. It's a dynamic to hold.

Waters operates through refusal, protecting kinship with beings who cannot speak for themselves, teaching through knowledge that absence conveys. Beaudin operates through presence, redesigning habitat and living systems, rebuilding food-water-nutrient cycles within mangrove forests, honoring kinship through direct relationships with multi-generational stewards.

Neither can exist without the other. Waters gives Beaudin the ethical anchor - the standard against which all transformation must be measured. Beaudin gives Waters the proof of concept – the evidence that regenerative alternatives can scale beyond refusal.

I know what that chair feels like.

At SAP, I spent years teaching design thinking - training consultants, co-facilitating with customers, bringing human-centered innovation into enterprise transformations. But after workshops, executives would pull me aside. They were often the very sponsors who'd brought me in.

"We love what you're doing here," they'd say. "But at the end of the day, how do we separate and translate this against the drive for more software licenses?"

These weren't cynics. They were believers trapped in a system that measured transformation by extraction. They wanted genuine innovation based on co-creation, human-centered design, real change. But in this circumstance they'd be evaluated on software revenue, not social impact.

The heavy chair wasn't defending innovation from skeptics. It was facilitating transformation inside a system that couldn't sustain it.

I pretended the covenant could hold. I would tell myself you could do real innovation and help hit quarterly targets. Practicing design thinking could be both genuine and productized. And that transformation and extraction were compatible if you just executed well enough.

I left SAP in 2014 because I couldn't sit in that chair anymore.

But leaving didn't fix the system. It just meant the next person sat in it - or more likely, no one really did, and "innovation" became exactly what the system there needed it to be: idea + execution + monetization. A sales tool, not a transformation practice.

Today, I sit in a different chair, but now it’s one that I built, and I’m still building.

At Carom, we help businesses do what SAP wanted (systematic transformation toward innovation) but with the integrity they couldn't sustain (genuine regeneration, not extraction). We help innovators redesign from within - knowing they'll be questioned by those who believe purity requires refusal, and by those who believe profit requires compromise.

The chair is still heavy. But this time, it's mine.

And when Matthew sat in front of Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower to discuss sustainable fisheries and the role of chefs, those who were there said they were "solidly behind" the points he was making. Because perhaps the old guard understands: their role (icon, teacher, standard-bearer) is different from his role (supply chain transformer, systems designer, scale operator).

As Matthew put it about Alice Waters: "That's a name I don't mind being in the arena with - she's done an incredible job and I will gladly take the momentum and keep the ball rolling."

The movement needs both.

The covenant isn't comfortable.

It requires:

• Refusing systems that harm, even when refusal is costly. Like Waters turning away profitable salmon sales to hold the line against industrial extraction.

• Rebuilding systems from within, even when success is uncertain. Like Beaudin importing shrimp from Vietnam knowing he'll have to defend every farmer relationship, every supply chain decision.

• Knowing which role you're playing, and when. Preservation and restoration aren't the same work. Icons hold standards. Operators transform systems. Both are necessary.

• Earning trust from both sides – from those who preserve through purity, and those who transform through presence.

Whether it's shrimp in Vietnam, salmon in the Pacific, design thinking at enterprise scale, or innovation in your own industry.. the question is the same:

Which chair are you avoiding?

The one where you refuse systems you could profit from?

Or the one where you wade into broken systems to rebuild them, knowing you'll be questioned by both sides?

The future will be written by those who can sit in both.

At Carom, we help innovators navigate this tension, providing inspiration and frameworks for moving from extractive logic to regenerative potential without losing integrity or impact. If you're wrestling with this covenant in your own work, join the Regenerative Innovation Community.