Born in Congo, Dieuveil grew up in Germany and began his career in some of Europe’s best establishments. He opened his restaurant Meza Malonga in 2020, where dinner is not just a meal but also a tour of the African continent. Delicately plated dishes feature the Nile perch from Uganda, Algerian olive oil, and Penja pepper from Cameroon. By combining ingredients and food cultures from different countries in Africa with some modern elements, Dieuveil has created his own cuisine that represents not only the heritage and traditions of a vast and varied, continent but also the latest trends. Undoubtedly, such integration has received international applause.

However, Dieuveil’s ambitions are not just for himself. After setting up the digital platform “Chefs in Africa”, which to date has connected over 4,000 professional chefs to career opportunities and the skill development, Dieuveil created a training school to produce the next generation of cooking pioneers. He is on a mission to lay the foundations of an innovative fine-dining scene on the African continent that can compare with Europe’s — but in a distinctive, African way.

When it comes to the understanding of fine dining, different from Europe’s emphasis on exclusivity and competitiveness, Dieuveil focuses more on integration. “If you want to go far, you must share with people,” he says. And his Afro-fusion cuisine has been shaped by this philosophy of sharing. To better understand the diverse traditions, dishes and ingredients of Africa, he went into villages and met with the grandmothers, as they’re usually the masters of amazing, old techniques. These villagers shared their local cuisine and family recipes, teaching Dieuveil regional fermentation (发酵) and preservation processes.

To ensure the quality of fresh produce, Dieuveil sources all his vegetables from his three-hectare organic farm in northern Rwanda, where he continues his “food revolution” by establishing the connection with remote and underserved communities, and involving more students coming from countries across Africa. He said, “Africa is the garden of the world and has an amazing diversity of food. What is happening now with African cuisine and the exposure we are getting are clear indications that our food revolution is already here.”

Sustainability was a hot topic at the Paris Air Show, the world’s largest event for the aviation industry, which faces increasing pressure to reduce the climate-changing greenhouse gases that aircraft emit. Even the massive orders at the show got an emission-reduction perspective: Airlines and producers said the new planes would be more fuel-efficient than the ones they replaced. However, most of those planes will burn conventional kerosene-based jet fuel.

Some companies are working on electric-powered aircraft, which are seen as a way to reduce the environmental effects of the aviation industry, providing zero emissions and quieter flights. However, they are still some way off from widespread commercial use. That means sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) has become the industry’s best hope of achieving its promise of net zero emissions by 2050. SAF, however, accounts for just 0.1% of all jet fuel. Made from sources like used cooking oil and plant waste, SAF can be mixed with conventional jet fuel but costs much more.

With such a limited supply of SAF, critics say airlines are making overly ambitious promises and exaggerating how quickly they can ramp up the use of SAF. The industry even has skeptics: Nearly one-third of aviation sustainability officers in a GE Aerospace survey doubt whether the industry will hit its net zero goal by 2050.

Across the Atlantic, a consumer group called BEUC filed a complaint against the European Union’s executive arm, accusing 17 airlines of greenwashing. The group says airlines are misleading consumers and breaking rules on commercial practices by encouraging customers to pay extra to help finance the development of SAF and offset future carbon emissions created by flying. In one case, the group’s researchers found Air France charging up to 138 euros for the green option.

“SAF is indeed the biggest technological potential to decarbonize the aviation sector, but the main problem is that it isn’t available. We know that before the end of the next decade — at least — it won’t be available in massive quantities,” said Dimitri Vergnc, a senior policy officer at BEUC.

Recently, after I gave a virtual presentation on my book Indistractable, a listener wrote something in the Zoom chat that drove me crazy, “This is great but wouldn’t work for me. I’m a Gemini (双子星座的人).”

Ironically, the Zoom listener is right. If she thinks she’s incapable, she’ll prove it correct — whether it has anything to do with the stars and moon or not. Her inflexible self-identification denies her the chance to improve her life. It’s incredibly self-limiting.

That’s why we should stop defining ourselves as fixed identities and nouns, and instead start describing ourselves using verbs.

Words are powerful. Linguistic research shows that language shapes people and culture; it can also give us insight into ourselves and our behavior. In a well-known study, researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen had all students in the same elementary school take a standard IQ test. Then they randomly selected a group of students, regardless of their test results, and told teachers the group would show “dramatic intellectual growth”. Eight months later, those students scored significantly higher on an IQ test. The study concluded that teachers’ positive perception of students correlated to those students’ high performance on intellectual and academic tests. The labels the children received became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy (预言).

That’s because language shapes expectations, which shape our reality. If we have experiences that lead us to label ourselves with specific nouns during our life, then we are likely to stick with those labels and the behaviors that go with them.

Using verbs to identify ourselves is an effective method for releasing “trapped priors”—a term in psychology for a perception of reality that’s affected or trapped by past experiences. Verbs are action words well suited to describing short-lived behaviors that can and do change. They don’t lay claim to our entire identity, but they acknowledge that we are people first and foremost, not whatever a singular noun may say we are. So, instead of saying, “I am a procrastinator (拖拉者)”, you should say, “I am a person who often procrastinates.”

By focusing on our behaviors, not fixed characteristics, we can release harmful perceptions of ourselves that hold us back from trying methods that might improve our lives — like those that can help us achieve the critical skill of being indistractable.