Disposing of Leftovers: One Restaurant Has a Way to Fight Food Waste: Making Food Out of ‘Trash’
The chef has a suggestion about how to dispose of the leftovers in the fridge. I’ve added squid, octopus, numerous different veggies, tired greens, fennel … anything!”
There are a number of ways to use leftover food. NPR asked Murphy to give us some ideas to get started. Below you will find a few of his easy to make recipes that use leftover items.
Restaurants can make practical tweaks, like reducing or customizing portion sizes. “That’s a big one,” said Roni Neff, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies food systems and waste. “Seventy percent of the food that’s wasted in restaurants is happening after it’s served to people — on their plates.”
“To look at the ugly food or the imperfect food, that it doesn’t have to be the best of everything, is a relatively new way for people to look at their food,” said Jordan Bow, the founder of the distributor Royal Hawaiian Seafood, and Shuggie’s main seafood source for oft-discarded fish parts like halibut cheeks and various types of bycatch. “I’m counting on the chefs to be creative and not just do what everybody else does.”
Like a few other sustainability-focused restaurants and chains in the U.S. (e.g. Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and Lighthouse in Brooklyn, New York) Shuggie’s sources food that local producers cannot sell because there’s a surplus, it looks irregular, or it’s past its prime.
Source: One restaurant has a way to fight food waste: Making food out of ‘trash’
How do we give away food? Organizing the Food Independence Gardens Food Walk of Pierce County, Washington, during Climate Solutions Week for the Future of Food
According to research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, people are spending more on eating out in this country than they are at home, and the restaurant industry was responsible for almost 10 million tons of leftover food in 2022, according to 2022 data from ReFED.
Methane traps more heat than carbon dioxide, which causes global warming. Human-caused methane emissions are mostly from agriculture, fossil fuels and food waste that ends up in landfills.
But if everyone ate fare that might otherwise be thrown out — say, weird animal parts or milk that’s close to its sell-by date — we’d significantly reduce the impacts of human-caused climate change.
When we started working on this year’s Climate Solutions Week, all about the future of food, we realized solutions seem to fall into three groups: What we grow, how we cook and eat, and what we often end up wasting.
There are dozens of sites across the city called Food Independence Gardens, or FIGs. To date, the organization has given away tons of food to people and families throughout Pierce County.
David Thompson is an urban farmer in Tacoma, Washington, who is trying to fight food insecurity by to connecting people to fresh fruits and vegetables.
“There are people who do this every single day for their livelihood,” said Paula Moran of the United Way of Greater Nashua. “If you come out and you volunteer one day a year, big deal, but at least it gives you an appreciation of how hard people work.”
Last fall, after an unseasonably wet and unpredictable growing season, volunteers gathered at Kimball Fruit Farms, located at the New Hampshire–Massachusetts border, to glean. Picking leftover produce to give it to people in need is what the process entails.
There can be a powerful impact on where the compost ends up. almond orchards outside the city are supported by food waste collected from residences in the city.
It would have been much easier for the campus staff to toss the school’s food waste into a city-provided green bin, thanks to California’s law that requires municipal food waste recycling.
The K-8 students at The Wesley School in North Hollywood adorned a series of 5-foot containers with a giant banner that reads: “5,220 lbs of food waste saved from landfills.”
Community-Led Changes to the Gulf South: A Case Study on Oyster Reefs and Coral Reefs on Alabama’s Gulf
Below are a few community-led solutions to the latter. While lots of powerful changes can start at home, sometimes the scale of the problem benefits from a community-wide approach.
Oyster reefs on Alabama’s coast, like many others in the Gulf South, have taken a beating from climate change. Returning oyster shells to the water helps more oysters grow in their place to play an important role in their ecosystem. They help with erosion by giving natural protection to the shoreline, and they also help with water quality by removing coliform in the water.
