Chef Linton Hopkins serves 24 handcrafted, locally sourced burgers each night at his pub Holeman & Finch in Atlanta. Last year, after partnering with Aramark and Turner Field, he started serving 1,200-2,000 burgers at every Braves home game. There are no additives. He uses the same high-quality ingredients. Hopkins found a way to scale up his production without compromising the quality of his product or increasing the price. He's changing the landscape of fast and big food, and here's how he thinks we can make it better.

We demonize words in this country.

I'll dress in my white chef's jacket and stand in front of school children and say, "Who here thinks cheeseburgers are bad for you?"

And they'll all raise their hands. Because they're getting programed that the word "cheeseburger" is bad.

So I reformulate it.

"How about fresh-baked, zero-additive bread? And pasture-raised beef with no hormones? And cheese? And your grandmother's recipe for pickles?"

That doesn't sound like it's bad for you, does it?

I believe in a world where cheeseburgers are healthy and chocolate cake is what you deserve on your birthday and makes your life better. And you should have ice cream.

People say, "Fast food is wrong."

"Big Food is bad."

Fast food isn't wrong. Sometimes I'm hungry and I want my food fast. And Big Food isn't the enemy. How many people are there on this planet? We need some big farms and big kitchens. The problem is how we've structured most large-scale and quick-service food operations. We've added preservatives to reduce the cost of waste and increased levels of salt and bad fats to mask an inexpensive, low quality product.

I believe in pure food. I'm a cancer survivor, and I'm not convinced that just because a rat didn't get cancer from a chemical in a five-year study means I want to put it in my food. Bread should be made of "Flour, water, salt, yeast, egg." You shouldn't have to have an organic chemistry degree to understand what you're eating.

But there have been enough tirades about the evils of Big Food. This isn't about pointing fingers. We—the consumers, the restaurants, and the food companies—have a shared problem, and we need to find a shared solution so that we, as a country, provide good food for all. Over the past few years, I've had the opportunity to work with the good people of Aramark, the food management company that handles the Atlanta Brave's Turner Field, and Delta's Gate Gourmet. Talking to the chefs and cooks who work at these giant food companies, I've learned that chefs are all the same. We want to cook good food. And a lot of times it's the logistics that tell us whether or not we can.

Every logistical system we have should be to protect food, and any system that asks food to not be fresh and good and pure is a bad practice. Of course, so many of these practices that we now find problematic started out with good intentions. Business wants to attract the consumer. You see it when a farmer wants to be the first to bring tomatoes to market because he gets a competitive edge. He finds a variety that ripens earlier, and then all of a sudden, he's attracting customers because he's the only person selling tomatoes. You can see how this idea developed in an innocent way to: "We're the first restaurant to have a tomato salad year round."

That wasn't done out of evil. It was good business, trying to celebrate products and gain market share, but it led to the idea that we can do that with everything. That we can erase seasonality. One of the dangers of course was that in the post-World War II industrialization, we thought chemicals could solve everything, and we started adding preservatives that made food shelf-stable for months at a time. With the cold war, Big Food moved toward a nonperishable, guaranteed inventory system that was inexpensive and required less labor. More factories developed the capacity to use those chemicals and the product started moving into the grocery store. So in a sense it was a good practice: we needed to create a shelf-stable food to feed our population. And we still need to hold some inventory so that regardless of weather pattern, we can feed everybody. But now that we understand the risks of adding artificial chemicals to our food, why don't we focus on dehydration or freezing? Salt, pure vinegar, and spices are all you need to preserve something for a long, long time—especially with heat canning. We don't need artificial preservatives to protect our population.

Last year, we scaled up the burger from my pub, Holeman & Finch, going from 24 handcrafted burgers a night to 1,200-2,000 every time the Braves play a home game. When we moved our cheeseburger to Turner Field, originally Aramark had us deliver bread on Wednesdays. We're a zero-additive business, so our rolls were turning to mold by the end of the week.

So I said, "Well, we're going to have to change that."

Wednesday bread delivery wasn't written in the Bible. It wasn't handed down from Mount Ararat. So we figured out a system that allowed us to deliver fresh bread every day. Rather than design food to fit a perfect model, we designed a model around the perfect food.

There's a lot of money built up around the additive food world, and large food companies come to me all the time and say, "Linton, we buy your bread, but it has a shelf life problem."

Shelf life's not the problem. The problem is a system where people actually want to hold a lot of inventory that never goes bad. Mold is a quality of bread. We don't need to have bread sit there all the time. Our bread shelves should be empty by the end of the day. And customers should be okay with an empty shelf. In our society, we expect to have everything right now. But by meeting that expectation, we've created a system where we're shipping mediocre food from all around the world. We're harvesting tomatoes that aren't ripe and that need a certain kind of soil with chemicals to survive just to feed this need that a sandwich has to have a tomato on it regardless of season. We've created a spoiled food culture and we don't recognize what that's cost us. It has cost us pure food.

I find with Big Food the definitions of our words are often the difference. What do you call "fresh?" For large-scale food, they're proud that fresh meat can be ground and stored for 21 days without going bad. Why can't we create a system where we just grind the meat every day or every two days? The company's still grinding. We deliver fresh-ground meat to Turner Field every other day and cook it to order. Why do you want to hold inventory? Just because you possibly could run out? It's okay to run out.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote: "Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are."

I can promise you that the very definition of who we are as a country is defined by what we eat and how we don't make good food accessible to everyone. We need to work with Big Food to make pure food affordable for all. And we can do that by re-evaluating the logistics of large-scale food—eating seasonally, making it easier for small farms to sell to Big Food, and creating systems that reduce the cost of waste through just-in-time logistics and advanced packaging instead of relying on an inventory system that requires preservatives to keep food from spoiling. Take the H&F burger at Turner Field—I can cook that burger for a million people. It's completely scalable because we built the structure around it.

I see fathers and sons sharing a cheeseburger and a Coca-Cola at a ball game, which I love because I grew up going to Braves games with my grandfather and father. I want to live in a world where we don't demonize hamburgers and chocolate cake. As Mark Twain said, "If you can't make it to 70 without whiskey and cigars, it ain't worth going."

That was then. Now I think: If I can't get to 90 without barbeque, fried chicken, and chocolate cake, it's not worth going.

We need to make that food good again.

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This is The Spill, a new series on Eat Like a Man where chefs, food writers, restaurateurs, policy makers—anyone who has something vital, incendiary, or earth-shattering (or just kind of amusing) to say about the food world today—can write what's on their mind. If you work in the food industry and are interested in writing for The Spill, please send your ideas to spill@esquire.com.

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