Eating Trash: The Chefs Turning Food Waste Into Trendy Eats | CBS Reports

food isn't waste until it's actually wasted some of the food that we're looking at is perfectly good millions of tons of food waste mount in U.S landfills every year in the US we waste up to 40 percent of our food supply to help solve the problem chefs across the country are wielding their expertise people rely on Chefs and The Culinary Community to help with education on how we can be less wasteful in the kitchen and transforming scraps destined for the trash into delicious nutritious meals we'll take the things that have a little bit of a ding a little bit of a scratch and we'll make the soups and the meals out of those from fighting climate change this was the number one thing that we could do to combat climate change yes yeah yeah yeah rescuing food waste to relieving food insecurity so if we eliminated food waste could we eliminate hunger yes their Innovations are helping to fight some of the most Monumental issues of our time I get excited when I see something like that it is a little bit harder to work with something like that but I feel like it's our responsibility [Music] foreign [Music] menu if you prefer not to make any decisions tonight we have a special scrap tasting menu so that's where our chefs use fun scraps from the kitchen and make some tasty treats for you great I will do the scrap tasting one wonderful nice and easy we'll get that going for you that's good thank you thank you so uh this restaurant incorporates kitchen scraps and food waste into its menus really curious to check it out I have no idea what to expect and I know that this could could go terribly terribly wrong four to ten percent of food that restaurants purchase never makes it to a customer and over a third of food served to customers goes uneaten costing restaurants billions every year here at Sullivan's scrap kitchen Chef Terence Rogers is trying to change that looks beautiful it just does not look like kitchen scraps at all this is great thank you wow this is very good basically like an Italian rice ball that's been fried it's really good [Music] I never went to culinary school but I know good food want to taste it and these dishes using ingredients that are typically thrown away defied my expectations this arancini uses old risotto rice stewed apples left over from brunch an extra Brie meant for a charcuterie board the green coconut curry fish chowder features unattractive salmon and it's garnished with a potato chip that's a few days old the brisket carbonara uses chopped brisket scraps and hides egg yolks left over from making meringues and finally an apple cinnamon creme brulee makes use of more of those leftover egg yolks and apples but aside from being delicious these dishes are also trying to solve a colossal problem what is food waste food isn't waste until it's actually wasted so you know some of the food that we're looking at is perfectly good you know fresh produce that just never gets harvested or you know a big pan of mac and cheese in the back of a cafeteria that never gets served and then other times it really is kind of waste it's actually much more complicated than one thing but what we see is that throughout our food system there is so much extra food that ultimately we're not using and it's going to waste in the U.S between 30 to 40 percent of food is wasted every year the vast majority filling landfills rotting in fields or floating in sewers more food reaches landfills than any other single material in everyday trash in 2021 alone the US wasted 80 million tons of food largest shares residential trash thrown away by individual consumers but 16 flows directly from the food service industry there are a number of of restaurants that are picking up on this and utilizing Surplus Foods upcycling what sort of an impact can can restaurants have being able to absorb some of that surplus food that is out there is a great way to like increase the efficiency of the whole system and and utilize things and waste less restaurants that have relationships maybe directly with a farmer or even a distributor they can go and and have that conversation of like oh you have all these tomatoes that got hit by hail and so they have marks on them that's okay I'll make a special stew with those or something and so I think that ability of chefs to be creative to react pretty quickly to what's available is an important factor in being able to use up some of this extra food because oftentimes it is pretty last minute around the world chefs are using their influence to help mobilize the fight against food waste Terence Rogers is one of many here in the U.S our focus is reducing food waste and promoting sustainability in the kitchen we've got a catering business that has its own food so sometimes we have imperfect pieces of fish or in vegetables or little things that we might not want to serve on these plates so we kind of built a restaurant with the idea of using these odd and end pieces around it to kind of round out the plates these scraps so when I hear the word scrap I think leftovers I think unwanted pieces of meat or fish or vegetable are they sort of I don't know second rate ingredients to to work with yes and no they might not be the most highly sought after but that doesn't mean they're not delicious like you could peel a carrot you maybe want to serve that carrot without its skin on or anything else but that skin has a ton of flavor in it you just wouldn't want to eat a peel of carrots so you have to find a way to manipulate the ingredients and I think that's from us from a culinary side really gets us excited because we get to be creative with that it's like okay what can we do people might think we're just serving like leftovers that we were about to serve at an event that we didn't brought back cool down or serving them now which just isn't the case because we you know we have to keep food safety and first and foremost in the kitchen so they are second rate ingredients but that doesn't mean they have to be second-rate food you just have to manipulate them and you have to you know do we all love doing that here cook [Music] thank you so this is your your weekly uh weekly visit weekly ritual yeah for the past um maybe seven years now oh wow it's been a long time Kayla Abe is the co-founder of shugi's trash pies a restaurant in self-proclaimed food waste Paradise every week she buys local vendors unsellable or undesired product today kind of a special pickup from these quote ugly chocolates born out of a kitchen blender got the belt too hot when I was panning them so I ended up with one big ball of hazelnuts and vegan milk chocolate to these slightly off color but perfectly edible walnuts I mean it's just like a shade darker very lightly yeah to these squat carrots that a typical buyer like me would probably look right past this was quite unattractive um what do you what do you have to say to that I look at it like it's more like a being curious about it then just going for the regular carrots yeah kind of like for me it's really more uh sweet and tender or smaller better and then when you see this what do you see I get excited something grocery stores sure wants uniformity um but even like for prep in a kitchen like it is a little bit harder to work with something like that but also I feel like it's our responsibility [Music] while Kayla organizes her food waste haul back at shugi's trash pies her co-founder and Lead Chef David Murphy is prepping one of their famed trash pies so I'm told that I have to earn my meal today oh yeah so uh what are we doing get you a sexy little little apron here let's get you all suited up uh today we're gonna be making a uh one of our uh best pizzas it's uh it's called the sausage party sausage party okay yeah so we're gonna be spreading out some dough today a really cool part about our dough uh is that at the base of it uh it's made with whey from the cheese making process and then spent oats uh that are from the oat milk making process that are then milled down into a flour you'll see this a little bit later carried over into our dessert we save all this stuff uh we bake it off and then we Mill it down into a crumb which we make into a crumble with a ton of butter a ton of discolored walnuts and that's going to go on our dessert a little later you've been in non-trash kitchens before you've been doing this for a while yeah baby oh yeah you would have thrown this away we would have we would have to test that for sure once you get up to like Michelin level Cuisine um there's so much discard we've all been trained for decades to go after the the perfect tomato all right one without a blemish one that's like perfect and ripe and juicy that doesn't have like a weird knob or a scar and that's what's really cool about this is like just showing people hey you can take all that stuff that would have otherwise gone just by the wayside and and help help rescue that stuff all right here we go 60 60 sausage oh nice that was beautiful let's do it I would not have imagined that this is trash that this is a trash pie so where did this idea come from I think really the the start of our food waste Journey really came from talking to Farmers at the farmer's market after growing and harvesting and transporting food having to deal with waste just because of cosmetic irregularity or Surplus bumps and harvest that they need to move really quickly um and we just felt like we could do something on a local level to help sequester some of that waste and later realized the massive climate impact that all this wasted food has as well statistics range due to complicated data sets one study found that food waste in the U.S emitted close to one trillion pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2017. that's like driving over 100 million gas powered cars for one year or burning over 500 billion pounds of coal climate footprint of food waste is actually larger than that of the entire aviation industry and that's really happening for three reasons first when food goes to landfills it rots there and produces methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas second it takes a huge amount of resources to grow Harvest pool cook transport food and get it to our tables and third food is really one of the key drivers of the land pressures that are leading to deforestation and other conversion of NATO ecosystems project drawdown a non-profit analyzing climate Solutions ranked reducing food waste as a top climate change mitigation strategy out of 76 potential options I think in general we're all aware of the climate crisis we're in and people feel compelled to do something on a personal level and by coming here and eating we're giving people a pretty like you know a pretty simple way to come eat have a good time and still do something positive I'm gonna indulge in a sausage party and then save the world right yes yes you are yes you are that turns absolutely [Music] foreign [Music] we're gonna call this chicken picada so one of the things we rescued this week where lots and lots of capers it's a little Berry yeah that's a lot like a pickle it's used in a lot of French food We rescued it from a restaurant that is no longer in business Chef Susie DeYoung daughter of award-winning Chef Pierre Adrian is the founder of the soup a non-profit dedicated to using food waste to fight food insecurity in the greater Cincinnati area here 270 000 households are considered food insecure we did 450 of these today of these meals wow so um yeah so this is the exact same dish you and I are gonna have yep that they just served so it's really important no matter what your socioeconomic background is that you will enjoy a good meal you get this you get the hot plate dude I'm going to pretend I'm eating oh really good is it good how is food waste pertinent to the issue of food insecurity it can feed them feed insecure three meals a day I know that like so if we eliminated food waste could we eliminate hunger yes Nationwide 35 million Americans were food insecure in 2019 but the amount of surplus food from retailers and consumers could feed over four times that number it's not a lack of food it's a lack of systems Distribution Systems to get the food in a manageable way for most people that's why we choose to cook it we'll take the dinged strawberry you know what to do with it we know what to do with it you cut it off it doesn't mean it's food waste and you just use it yeah cook it [Music] this is the chaos that ensues here every morning uh shipments are just coming in pouring and uh I mean it's like going to the supermarket you've got all this fresh produce deli meats perfectly good veggie trays cheeses juice this is crazy yes this is the chaos this happens just from Kroger three times a week and then on top of all the other rescues that we do and this is all I mean this is all perfectly good so this is stuff that was packaged before even went to the grocery store so this is from the Distribution Center so they have to have a certain amount of shelf life before it even gets to the grocery store so we have Radicchio mushrooms green beans of Swiss chard wow um this is not cheap no no half of the 10.5 million tons of food waste generated by grocery retailers is a result of concerns over date labels which are not federally regulated for the majority of products causing confusion and unnecessary waste and this food is donated to them at no cost on any given week lesoop diverts nearly 13 tons of food from the landfill anything might land on the front step from perfect salmon fillets projected due to Broken packaging to two thousand pounds of quinoa rejected because a product was discontinued to 46 000 pounds of onion rejected by a wholesaler for unknown reasons and much of this product will end up being transformed into Le soup's bread and butter soup so what are you uh cooking up today we have to make about 120 140 gallons of soup a day to keep up with our demand so I kind of went shopping through our walk-in got eggplant onions a little bit of Endive got lots of tomatoes that came in they're washed and ready to go they got some tahini um couple different spices so probably gonna make some kind of Middle Eastern tomatoey baba ganoush kind of soup everyone that I've spoken to here has said that this place feels like you're at constantly in an episode of chalk oh probably yeah and it kind of all falls on you as the executive chef a little bit I kind of am like the director of chaos a little bit um as things come through the door like it's kind of opposite I've been in the industry for 27 years it's opposite from anybody anywhere else where as a chef you're like I want the best looking things but here we want those better looking vegetables and fruits to go out to the pantry so that people can have like really nice you know fresh produce right and then we'll take the things that have a little bit of a ding a little bit of a scratch and we'll make the soups and the meals out of those so we know how to cook around it we know to you know prepare it since you started lesup in 2014 do you have any sense as to how much food you've rescued from the landfill four and a half million pounds we've rescued that you transformed or donated correct I can't even fathom how much food that is and that's one little person in one little city in America like that's just here despite being one little person Susie has one massive operation on top of the thousands of pounds of food transformed and donated every week the soup also takes its surplus food and distributes it for free every Friday so how is everything going this morning really well everyone lined up pretty quickly and the lines flowing pretty smoothly it's today I brought 373 pounds of produce today 674 of protein and 108 of bread um then 234 pounds of deli meat wow this is Gene she comes every week one of my favorite people you say you're here every week every race yeah every single weights and you're picking up food for for people who can't afford yeah they're fortunate for yeah yeah I mean if he struggles so far to work five days a week and sometimes they don't get to go to the grocery stores you know that's me I'm that girl to store yeah very for the blessing yeah a blessings to everyone and I thank you ma'am oh you're welcome it's my love right here what will we do without you all right thing I love is watching the cooks finally get to interact with the people they're Phoenix so they see and feel the impact and they have conversations to come back and say hey y'all you know the soup was way Bland last week they wanted it spicier or you know and it's it's valuable information that you're getting in real time I love it [Music] from Susie's non-profit soups to terence's classical scrap dishes tequila and David's playful trash pies chefs are proving there's no wrong way to fight food waste do you think that chefs have a responsibility to helping shape how the public sees and interacts with food I do our industry as a 50-year survivor of restaurant World went through a lot through coven and I think we're we're much more tuned in to how everything can collapse everything can collapse in a minute having a plan of how to keep people fed should be in every single City someone has to kind of like take the lead and push and help educate people on how to be less wasteful in their kitchen because you work you know full-time job you've got a family you've got kids so you're not going to be spending you know 40 hours a week figuring out how to reduce the food waste in your own life so I think people rely on Chefs in The Culinary Community to help with education on how we can be less wasteful in the kitchen any responsible Chef should be out there putting this into practice in their menus it is up to us us as chefs have the ability to influence Food Markets if we can do it here that means other people can start to build on that and do that in other places so if anybody wants to throw down in the kitchen you bring me your waste I'll give you mine and we can we can throw down thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: CBS News

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Id: 4xS-grlssPw

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023