The Misshapes

Miraval Arizona Resort & Spa offers waste-reduction cooking classes; Baldor supplies chefs with a line of produce called SparCs (scraps backward—it took me days to crack the code); former Patagonia employee Jeremy Kaye and his brother, Blue Hill chef Adam Kaye, have debuted The Spare Food Co.—which will offer consumer The packaged foods that use nearly every part of each ingredient. Perhaps it all sounds hippie-dippy. Until you read, as I did in a rarely perused market report, that today the food-waste busi- ness is worth $46.7 billion and expected Misshapes to grow 5 percent per year for the next decade. And that the annual cost of throwing out what we currently do is $1 trillion. And that 30 to 50 percent of Bruised, oddly formed, global greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to produc- slightly wilted— ing, distributing, storing, cooking, and tossing food. And that American families, fixated as we are on expiration ingredients once tossed dates and signs of wilt on our organic little gem lettuce, out with the trash are spend about $1,500 a year on food we never eat. Of all the sectors touched by this garbage gold rush, finding favor with chefs the one that seems most interesting and most unlikely is and home cooks alike. restaurants. It’s one thing to buy an imperfect box of pasta a week past its “best by” date, or turn your chicken carcass Tamar Adler reports into bone broth, or grill your chard stems. It’s another thing on food’s new obsession entirely to pay restaurant prices to be diligently served odds and ends on date night. with ending waste. Or is it? I decided to do some research. I read about Restauranglabbet in Stockholm, serving a daily buffet of reclaimed food: glacéed Jerusalem artichokes, or a creamy DINNER STARTED WITH a fried skate wing. Upon closer purée of broccoli stems, or maybe cauliflower with the inspection, it was skate-wing cartilage—the fish itself Japanese dried-seaweed-and-sesame-mix furikake. And having been dispatched earlier to a less liberal-minded it seems like at Copenhagen’s Amass, anything one orders eater. What remained was salty, crisp, and delicately unc- is likely to be an exercise in creative repurposing. There’s tuous, especially dipped into smoked fish head–infused “Yesterday’s Bread,” “Chewy Beetroots with Walnut Pulp tartar sauce. Next was a precise and refreshing dice of Custard,” “Pumpkin Trim Dumplings,” and for dessert, bruised apples, bok-choy leaves, and fennel tops with an “Potato Skin Fudge.” airy chickpea-water pistachio foam; then a restorative beef- But flying anywhere for a no-waste meal defeats the pur- end broth; then a lightly cooked egg from scrap-fed hens. pose. So I staked my hopes on one of Massimo Bottura’s This was all back in the spring of 2015, when chef Dan anti-waste refettorios. Bottura, whose Osteria Francescana Barber briefly turned the tiny West Village restaurant Blue in Modena, Italy, is acclaimed as one of the best restau- Hill into a performance-art piece called wastED. Barber’s rants in the world, became a food-reclamation connois- cooks used juice pulp from Liquiteria, fish skeletons from seur after spending the spring of 2015 turning would-be Acme fish, kale and cauliflower stems from produce whole- discards from the Milan Expo into free communal meals. saler Baldor. They simmered, steamed, puréed, pressed, He recruited other like-minded culinary luminaries such fried, and put all the ingredients we often think of as gar- as Daniel Humm, René Redzepi, and Alain Ducasse and bage on a brief menu with arch names like “cured cuts of designed menus from bruised vegetables and stale bread waste-fed pigs” and “pasta trimmings.” in a reimagined Milan community kitchen called Refet- The meal was delicious and had the absorbing force torio Ambrosiano. It still exists, housed in an old theater, of novelty. It also proved prophetic. Five years later, the and the premise is to simultaneous- food world, painfully aware that America discards up to ly tackle food waste and hunger. ODDS AND ENDS 40 percent of our food, has become obsessed with ending Homestyle dishes like passatelli in Zero-waste waste. For home cooks, there are Misfits Market, Hungry restaurants have brodo— noodles made from bread- Harvest, and Imperfect Foods, which deliver misshapen proliferated from crumbs in broth made with Parmesan and surplus produce to home kitchens around the country. Copenhagen to rinds—and homemade ravioli filled London to For aspiring home cooks, chef Alison Mountford offers a Brooklyn. Lorenzo with braised leftover meat and herbs meal-kit service called Ends+Stems, “designed to reduce Vitturi, Green have been such a success that Bottura food waste while making cooking approachable and fun.” Stripes #1, 2013. and his wife, CONTINUED ON PAGE 187 ANATOMY THE FROM SERIES DALSTON 166 THE MISSHAPES and grills or makes into sausage. “It’s the regenerative agriculture, committed to CONTINUED FROM PAGE 166 reason we can operate the way we do and returning carbon to the soil—arrive in Lara Gilmore, cofounded Food for still stay affordable,” he says. crates or pails or urns. Soul, a nonprofit aimed at continuing Almost none of this waste-free focus On a warming night recently, I met a to address these parallel social and envi- is visible on the menu. Chef Dan Barber friend for an early dinner at New York ronmental ills. Refettorios exist in Rio de says it really shouldn’t need to be: “wast- City’s first zero-waste restaurant. It’s a Janeiro, London, and Paris, and there are ED never really closed,” he tells me. “This tiny wine bar in Fort Greene called Rho- more on the horizon for North America. is something that got lost in all the cover- dora, deeply inspired by London’s Silo. Still, those aren’t open yet, so I had to age. Sure, it was about calling attention to Until last year, Rhodora was Metta, settle for an interview. Bottura, an expan- food waste. But the driving force was that known for its wood-fired cooking. In its sive and poetic speaker, explained that chefs already deal with waste brilliantly. newest incarnation, Rhodora focuses on we waste so much food only because we So many cuisines are all about absorbing natural wine and being as gentle on Moth- are blind to inner beauty. “If you can see waste. These classic dishes that we asso- er Earth as possible. I happened to stop in the invisible potential behind stale bread, ciate with the great food cultures. You for dinner on the same day The New York behind bruised fruits, you can expand your just don’t call them waste. You call them Times ran a long article about Rhodora’s creativity and use them for what they can bouillabaisse.” It’s true. The Provençal anti-waste philosophy and careful menu. offer.” He says that each dried or overripe soup is traditionally made of fish that The restaurant’s Halley Chambers had ingredient is perfect for a certain recipe. couldn’t be sold at the market. Barber been fielding phone calls from around “Straight out of the oven, a loaf of bread says the meat and fish bones, vegetable the country. After reading that Rhodora is good to be eaten as it is,” he says. “The stems, cheese scraps that American home doesn’t stock takeout containers or doggie day after, it will be perfect to make pappa cooks discard are the backbone of the bags, a woman from Kansas called to ask al pomodoro or bread pudding. After two world’s great dishes. The message of wast- if she could bring her own Tupperware. A days, the bread can be breadcrumbs for ED wasn’t meant to be “Let’s start cook- Brooklynite wondered if Rhodora would meatballs, passatelli, and cakes.” ing our trash.” It was “Great cooking has accept his compost. Putting down the I love those dishes. “That’s what the always relied on trash.” phone, Chambers led me out the kitch- real beauty is,” Bottura says, “to make en door to the sidewalk. Under a small something valuable out of something that “No-waste restaurants are good perfor- hutch, an Oklin composter buzzed, wait- might be seen as not having any value at mance art. They can raise awareness of ing to turn any crumbs that drop from a all. Something recovered is something the amount of waste in the First World, diner’s table into rich soil, which Rhodora gained.” And does this recovery project where we overconsume.” I’m talking to hopes to send to Brooklyn’s urban farm, work in high-end restaurants? Certo! Krishnendu Ray, chair of the Department Brooklyn Grange. “Use vegetable peels and scraps, fish and of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU. There aren’t likely to be many crumbs. meat bones to make broth. Ugly fruits Ray is openly critical of chefs promoting The menu is necessarily austere. Bread and vegetables taste just as delicious as waste reduction. Why? Ray says that by arrives daily by bike from She Wolf beautiful ones, and sometimes even more. focusing on the behavior of restaurants, Bakery. Marlow & Daughters sends over The responsibility of the chef is to find the we risk distracting ourselves from the real plastic bins full of pickled vegetables and inner beauty in each product. You just have problem: inequality. “That is why people eggs, which are returned and refilled. an ingredient in each stage of its lifespan.” are hungry. None of these projects talk Cheeses show up wrapped in muslin At Brooklyn’s Olmsted, chef Greg about inequality.

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