Miraval Arizona Resort & Spa offers waste-reduction cooking classes; Baldor supplies chefs with a line of pro- duce 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 mar- ket 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

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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. Because inequality is instead of paper. There are radishes. A Baxtrom has built a restaurant on exact- dangerous. To rectify it, you’d have to take soup. An impressive array of tinned sea- ly these same principles without making from the very rich and give to the poor.” food, including a number of the world’s a big deal out of it. Olmsted is one of the And there’s an environmental argument finest sardinillas—tiny sardines—from hottest tables in New York. “We save to be made against anything short of Galicia’s Conservas de Cambados, and everything,” Baxtrom tells me. “When revamping the entire American agricultur- octopus and mussels from Portuguese we make pickled peppers, we strain them al system—which is itself unsustainable. importer José Gourmet. And the staff and use the pulp for Bloody Mary mix.” According to food-and-climate nonprofit discourages overordering. My friend and I Olmsted’s tangerine-hued brunch kathi Zero Foodprint, on average, 70 percent requested the $115 Emerson platter, which roll is made from day-old crepe batter of a restaurant’s carbon footprint comes seemed to contain much of the menu— (it’s thicker and slightly chewier than the from the production of ingredients on its and were strongly advised to reconsider dinner menu’s carrot crepe) and filled menu. That means saving Parmesan rinds because it’s supposed to serve six. It is with falafel made from carrot pulp. “We and cauliflower leaves is a mere drop in the the only time I have ever been downsold juice 300 pounds of carrots a week. So proverbial bucket. Barber says the same in a restaurant. (In the end we insisted, we have a lot of pulp.” And the dollop of thing. Inequality and overconsumption and though I’m sure we’re both overcon- yogurt raita that tops it all is studded with underpin our food system. It doesn’t mat- sumers of the first degree, we thought it cilantro stems and bruised herbs. Little ter what a few innovative restaurants do. was fine for two.) We also drank a not bits of dough left from making pierogi Which doesn’t diminish the cultur- insignificant amount of the Italian natural get rerolled and grilled into flatbreads. al value of chefs’ finding new ways to winery Franco Terpin’s Ribolla Gialla, Baxtrom gets animated talking about trim recoup food. And in our restaurant-­ with which anyone could probably eat all left from cubing rutabaga. His scallops fetishizing age, chefs often lead the way. the canned fish in the world. with XO sauce are made from scallops that Take a place like Douglas McMaster’s Chambers gamely walked me through get torn before coming to market—which Silo, in London, where not only is noth- even the most pedestrian of the restau- might otherwise be left unsold. Olmsted ing discarded but dinner plates are made rant’s systems. Kitchen and dining-room buys pockmarked apples for pastry, pork from plastic bags and tables from used towels and napkins arrive wrapped not in that a butcher cut in the wrong place for food packaging. Local, seasonal ingredi- plastic but in linen. There are no garbage prime pricing—which Baxtrom skewers ents—from farms that practice so-called cans. There is an ingenious replacement

187 for soap dispensers: a machine that turns paid a premium for regenerative agricul- clean, its natural lines defined as if the salt and water into soap. “We all use it,” ture. But the theory of individual change angle of my jaw and the plane of my Chambers told me cheerfully. “We’re is just not moving at the pace that we need cheek have been sculpted anew. And I feel non-hierarchical. So there’s no chef, no to fix the climate. So I think zero waste is oddly drained—in a good way. “You can servers, no dishwasher.” really an important goal, but it can’t be do it once a week,” says Portland, Ore- When I asked owner Henry Rich why the end goal.” gon–based licensed acupuncturist Beth he opened Rhodora, he’d answered, “I @ Griffing Russell, speaking to a big part really wanted to create space where New FACE TUNED of #guasha’s 21st-century viral appeal: Yorkers could go out to eat without par- CONTINUED FROM PAGE 168 Unlike with Botox, these results can ticipating in an unsustainable economy— techniques. Before even entering the be replicated at home. Griffing Russell either the externalization of carbon or the treatment room, I have to fill out two emphasizes that home gua sha enthusi- externalization of waste.” I tried to pay pages of paperwork covering everything asts should not neglect the neck. “Flick close attention to whether my conscience from my menstrual cycle to my bowel up,” she instructs, moving her gua sha was assuaged by knowing I hadn’t partici- movements, a line of questioning that tool from one ear to another and around pated in either. The verdict? Not assuaged is more comprehensive than many con- the base of the skull to stimulate the mus- at all. Which on reflection seems like a tes- versations I’ve had with my primary-care cle that connects the back of your head tament to the restaurant’s success. When physician. The customized experience “to the wrinkles in your forehead.” I’d asked the executive director of Zero begins with an edible honey-and-ber- A few days later I try the no-frills ver- Foodprint, Karen Leibowitz, to try to ry mask that Woods prepares on the sion to alleviate some persistent tension quantify the value of restaurants’ reclaim- spot—“Your skin loved that,” she says and fatigue at Oakland Foot Health Cen- ing wasted food or working to become as she wipes it off—and includes a deeply ter, a walk-in storefront not dissimilar carbon neutral, she answered bluntly, relaxing gua sha interlude administered to the medical-massage clinics in Chi- “Restaurants changing one by one isn’t with cooling spoons and stone tools of na serving working-class men on their going to do it. It’s great that restaurants all shapes and sizes. lunch breaks, aunties, grandmas, and, are buying sustainably. It’s great when a When I catch a glimpse of myself once upon a time, me. “Gua sha has saved farmer sees that their neighbor is getting post-treatment, my face is bright and many peasants’ lives,” my masseuse tells

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