For the past six years, my husband and I have been in the habit of starting unusual restaurants, including a pop-up with a different menu each night, which evolved into an award-winning restaurant called Mission Chinese Food, which has donated more than $300,000 to the local food bank over the years. (All of the projects we’ve worked on have involved a charitable component, even though it can be challenging financially.) About a year ago, we were asked to open a restaurant on the street level of a new high-rise apartment building — definitely not our typical style. Initially, we weren’t interested, but then we realized it would be worthwhile if we could create a laboratory of sorts for environmentalism in the restaurant industry. To our surprise, the developer agreed and investors miraculously appeared. So, after years of budget restauranteering, we were faced with the brand-new challenge of designing the restaurant of our dreams (or perhaps of our consciences).

We’re now a few months away from opening The Perennial, named in homage to perennial plants’ capacity to mitigate drought, prevent soil erosion, and even combat climate change. As part of our effort to connect culinary and ecological values, we will serve bread made from perennial grains developed by The Land Institute, Wes Jackson’s agricultural advocacy group based in Kansas (using recipes developed by Chad Robertson, the renowned bread-maker from Tartine Bakery in San Francisco). We’re further investing in perennialism through a partnership with an innovative group of scientists and ranchers called the Carbon Cycle Institute, which has developed managed grazing practices that encourage the return of perennial native grasses whose massive root systems sequester carbon from the atmosphere, yielding “climate beneficial” meat.

While working on the design of The Perennial, we’ve explored a few options that haven’t panned out — at least not yet. We visited the MycoWorks studio, where artist/designer Phil Ross showed us samples of sound-absorbing ceiling tiles and furniture made from mycelium, but it’s not yet on the Health Department’s list of approved materials for restaurant fixtures. We met a couple of times with a design/engineering firm called Hyphae about creating a glass-enclosed terrarium in the bathroom to filter greywater from our sinks, purify it with UV light, and send it back to flush the toilets, but we’re tabling the idea for now, subject to budget constraints. These are hard decisions to make and we’d love to work with these innovative designers, but we can’t do everything we’d like in The Perennial’s 4,000 square feet. Maybe someday, but as we approach our opening, the primary goal is to nudge the restaurant industry beyond farm-to-table clichés and instigate a deeper environmental conversation.

“Farm-to-table is now a much abused descriptor,” warns Chef Dan Barber in his recent book, The Third Plate. The problem, he argues, is not just that the label has become a cover for complacency, but also that “the farmer ends up servicing the table, not the other way around.” Barber proposes a new “pattern of eating” to replace farm-to-table, dubbed “whole farm cooking,” which celebrates soil-building crops like broccoli, which is a nitrogen fixer.

I love broccoli more than anyone I’ve ever known, so Barber’s plan appeals to me, but I wonder if it’s realistic to expect a widespread cultural shift in the near future, given how personal and intractable our palates can be. Some people simply will not enjoy broccoli, no matter how much you explain its beneficial relationship to soil ecology. (I’m reminded of George H. W. Bush’s petulant confirmation that there really is no accounting for taste: “I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.”) The restaurant industry can do a lot to influence our consumption patterns, as evidenced by the current trendiness of kale, which is another nitrogen fixer. And yet I do not believe that we’ve all gone crazy for kale for agricultural reasons; kale is popular among chefs because of its culinary merits, rather than its soil ecology. But why not consider both?