Wasted Food -- Jonathan Bloom on food waste and how it can be avoided » Repurposing

86ing Waste

Jonathan — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:25:44 +0000

This past week, I gave a series of talks at Mario Batali’s restaurants in LA and Las Vegas. It was an interesting, eye-opening experience.

I learned a fair amount about how restaurants view waste and, hopefully, the warm, professional staff learned a bit about the importance of reducing waste. The restaurant group is already on the right path, as they’re separating and composting scraps, in addition to many other sustainable practices.

In discussions with staff, I realized just how much of a conflict of interest waiters face: ‘upselling,’ or getting to diners to order more than they had planned, financially benefits both waiter and restaurant. Yet, more often than not, it yields waste. One suggested compromise was upselling beverages, not food. Of course, that has other consequences…

I stressed that staff also had a role to play in making doggie bags cool, or at least the norm. Yet that notion seemed to play better in LA than Vegas, where most patrons are out-of-towners, don’t have fridge access, or are going out after eating.

One idea that came up yesterday was intriguing–a restaurant providing repurposing ideas or even recipes on its site to help customers use up leftovers. It certainly can’t hurt!

Thanks to all who attended and to the Batali Bastianich Hospitality Group for hosting me and, true to their name, extending such consistent hospitality.

Bread Love

Jonathan — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:00:46 +0000

I’m on the road now, prepping for a couple of events in San Francisco (find details here). But I had to pass on this useful post communicating 17 Uses for Stale Bread. And you were planning to feed it to the birds!!

Cuppa Waste

Jonathan — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:33:55 +0000

Wasted coffee. This topic could be its own book. In the meantime, it’s a post:

The food waste experts at LeanPath have provided some helpful and potentially money-saving hints on both reducing the amount of excess coffee and what to do with the inevitable excess. While the tips are aimed at restaurants and institutional settings, mostly, they still are quite applicable.

The LeanPath post reminds us that there are alternate uses not just for coffee, but also grounds. Here are the 11 ways to use old grounds. And just because I’m feeling generous, here are 10 more to make it 21 uses for used grounds. Enjoy that coffee facial!

For some reason, I can’t get as outraged at coffee waste as I do with food waste. (Am I alone on that?) Still, growing coffee, like all agriculture, is resource-intensive. May as well try not to dump out a full pot at the end of every day or night.

Offices must be among the larger sources for coffee waste (cafes, of course). I’m wondering does anyone out there work at a place that utilizes the extra Joe at the end of day or is it dumped?

Wrapping Up 2009

Jonathan — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:46:10 +0000

Lost in my post-Christmas haze was National Leftovers Day in Australia. It makes plenty of sense, given the usual Christmas dinner abundance. And rest assured the Kiwis are onto the idea, too (in a Dec. 30 article I’m writing about on Dec. 29–a clear example of my soothsaying prowess).

In the U.S., we have the Friday after Thanksgiving for the same unofficial holiday. But don’t be fooled–it definitely was not made official by President Obama. Regardless, given how much holiday waste of all kinds we create, we may as well try to reuse at least some of it. (Gift bags would be another suggestion).

The last item of 2009 comes from our friends at BioCycle. As we all look back at the year (and perhaps a decade), the magazine provides a great roundup of where we stand with US food waste collection. The article lends a nice sense of who’s leading the way and, by the relatively few examples, how far we have to go.

Onwards and upwards!

Supermarket Stretching

Jonathan — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:31:13 +0000

Great news from Maine: In her Diner’s Journal blog, Julia Moskin wrote about a local grocer that finds a way to use up most of what it stocks. Oh, those frugal Mainers!

Moskin’s reported details on Rosemont Markets, a kind of outtake from her piece on Portland’s food scene, seem so obvious in hindsight:

When the local concord grapes on the shelf are past their prime, they go into the commissary kitchen and come out as Zippy Grape Jam. Bananas turning brown? They are peeled, dipped in chocolate, and sold frozen — and local kids eat them up.

Quite a few supermarkets do some repurposing. Many places–even Costco!–turn rotisserie chicken into chicken salad. But I’ve not seen any store do it as creatively as Rosemont (and I’d love to hear about some of their other tricks).

There are many, many opportunities for supermarkets to use goods they won’t sell. For instance, stuff that’s reached its “sell-by” date. With more and more grocers making prepared foods, hopefully this trend will flourish. It would seem to be in a market’s bottom line interests to stretch their foods.

Yet, repurposing does require time from one or more of the store’s workers. The three other barriers that prevent most places from doing so (and must be overcome):

1. Lack of imagination

2. Lack of time/effort

3. The fear of anything not perfectly fresh and the subsequent banishment to the trash.

(Hat Tip: Serious Eats and Diana Foss)

S.Y.S. (Save Yer Scraps)

Jonathan — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:11:49 +0000

Today, I spoke with chef Liza Shaw of San Francisco’s A16. The Italian restaurant has a bit of a reputation for its Meatball Mondays, where they serve the uber-popular dish made from scraps and trimmings.

A16 mostly uses prosciutto scraps saved throughout the week. No wonder they’re so good!

I realized meatloaf, sausages and soups were good uses for odds and ends, but for some reason, I’d never lumped meatballs into that category. Shaw said they usually add beef left from other dishes, and that they’ve included lamb, duck and chicken scraps in the past.

Another secret is the 60/40 meat-to-bread ratio, which not only stretches your meat supply but makes the meatballs retain the drippings. In fact, using too much meat is detrimental, as they dry out.

Shaw uses her old-ish bread here, so it’s a case where repurposing and saving foods creates a more savory dish. Does anyone do this at home–with meatballs or another food item?

Eating Done the Fridge

Jonathan — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:02:46 +0000

The Eating Down the Fridge (and pantry and cupboard) experiment ended Sunday, but not without many a participant learning many a lesson. There were some nice insights in this wrap-up post. I particularly enjoyed these:

I love that this exercise is encouraging me to use up my leftovers in new meals instead of letting them go bad. — Kari, DC

I also learned that I need to …monitor the produce pantry better – I lost a few winter squashes because I did not check on them, and found a box of sweet potatoes (from the garden) that I forgot we had! — rowandk

…It has been gratifying to see just how well we can eat just based on what we have on hand…I have certainly figured out which pantry items I replenish because I use them all the time, and which are there from lack of use/interest. — holdenfoodie

While I didn’t quite last the entire week without grocery shopping, my freezer and pantry are much more manageable. We must have eaten a lot of quesadillas, as we discovered last night that we’d exhausted our stockpile of salsa. We found out the hard way–with salsa-less burritos.

EDF also prompted an appreciation for a well-planned week of meals with the corresponding grocery purchases. Not to say that I execute these plans flawlessly. After all, I’m the one who’s about to bike to the store for mas salsa (Herdez, of course) to dress our leftover burritos.

Anyway, kudos to A Mighty Appetite‘s Kim O’Donnel for getting us all to think a bit. She summed it up well:

Last week, we gave ourselves the time and space to watch — how we spend our money, how we cook and eat and how we appreciate what we have in our collective midst. That’s a pretty amazing accomplishment.

Sausages Sizzle Again

Jonathan — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:17:33 +0000

On the repurposing food front, I recently heard from an Australian reader named Angela. I’ll let her tell the story:

We, too, are constantly looking for ways that we can use leftovers and avoid wasting food. I thought I’d share something that we did for the first time this week. We had a BBQ on Friday night and I was left with a tray of cooked sausages that no one ate and also leftover cooked onion.

We wrapped the sausages up with the onion in some puff pastry and made an enormous amount of sausage rolls. We ate them all weekend and put some in the freezer for snacks. I’m constantly amazed at the ways we can use up food that previously we would have thrown away.

Well done, Angela! High marks for creativity and for thinking ahead, with the freezer.

The sausage roll, as anyone who’s ever visited the UK or another Commonwealth country will remember, is like a more common, slightly-less-unhealthy version of a corn dog. All that to say, the next time I have leftover hot dogs, I’m bathing them in batter and deep frying.

Making Meat Last Longer

Jonathan — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:22:37 +0000

Monday, I wrote about the turning excess buns from barbecue takeout into garlic bread. Well, what about the meat?

We had two rather large containers of chopped beef and barbecue chicken and had consumed more than our fill of both. Yet, plenty more remained! My idea: meatloaf!

I was really glad to have my mom around, because I’ve never actually made a loaf of meat. Not only did she improvise a top layer of leftover potatoes, she made the whole thing, allowing me to focus on ogling my week-old son.

We topped the whole thing with some of the sauce from the barbecue takeout and used bread crumbs salvaged from the end of a loaf. But fear not–the egg was no leftover.

The results were like some sort of culinary alchemy–turning leftovers into a magical, improved dish.

Parents of Wasted Food

Jonathan — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 05:15:49 +0000

No, I’m not writing to confess how much food waste family life creates. That’ll come in a year or so. (Joking, hopefully).

More to the point, my parents are in town helping out while we get used to life with a son (a cute guy, in my humble opinion). Fortunately for us, my mom has been doing a lot of cooking. In watching some of her practices, I’ve been reminded how I became drawn to the issue of food waste.

No leftover is too small to throw out. All scribbles can enhance another meal or snack. In particular, I got a kick out of one tactic:

A generous takeout-barbecue-lunch provided by my sister-in-law left us with a slew of leftover buns. My mom sized them up and saw garlic bread. Totally!

And they were great. Yes, this was just a small thing, but it provided hope that parenthood isn’t synonymous with food waste. Now I’m doubly confident we’ll be OK on that front.

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Thanks to everyone for passing along your kind wishes and to my brother Seth for pitching in with a very cool post.