Food's New Obsession With Ending Waste

Bruised, misshapen, slightly wilted—ingredients once tossed out with the trash are finding favour with chefs and home cooks alike. Tamar Adler reports on food’s new obsession with ending waste in this time of global austerity

- Tamar Adler

Dinner started with a fried skate wing. Upon closer inspection, it was skate-wing cartilage—the fish itself having been dispatched earlier to a less liberalminded eater. What remained was salty, crisp and delicately unctuous, especially dipped into a smoked fish head-infused tartar sauce. Next was a precise and refreshing dice of bruised apples, bok choy leaves and fennel tops with an airy chickpea-water pistachio foam; then a restorative beef-end broth; then a lightly cooked egg from scrap-fed hens.

This was in the spring of 2015, when chef Dan Barber briefly turned the tiny West Village restaurant Blue Hill into a performance art piece called wastED. Barber’s cooks used juice pulp, fish skeletons, kale and cauliflower stems. They simmered, steamed, puréed, pressed, fried, and put all the ingredients we often think of as garbage on a brief menu with arch names like ‘cured cuts of waste-fed pigs’ and ‘pasta trimmings’.

The meal was delicious and had the absorbing force of novelty. It also proved prophetic. Five years later, the food world has become obsessed with ending waste. Perhaps it all sounds hippie-dippy. Until you read, as I did in a rarely perused market report, that today the food-waste business is worth US$46.7 billion and is expected to grow five percent per year for the next decade. And that the annual cost of throwing out what we currently do is US$1 trillion. And that 30 to 50 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to producing, distributing, storing, cooking and tossing food.

STALE TO STELLAR