Food Waste and Sustainability

In today’s blog, I wanted to highlight an article about food sustainability and creativity. The future of food and food production is a topic that affects all of us in the industry, as well as how we’ll tackle the problems associated with it. At the end of September, WIRED.com released an article highlighting the ethos and ingenuity of Shuggie’s Trash Pie and Natural Wine, a restaurant that opened earlier this year in San Francisco. The focus of Shuggie’s is to combat food waste – and, by default, combat the impact that food waste has on climate change – by rescuing food that is being thrown away and turning it into creative meals.

Food is tossed out for a variety of reasons, and not just because it’s gone bad. A large amount of food is thrown away because it’s bruised, because there’s too much, or shoppers don’t purchase it because it looks ugly. Sometimes it’s not even picked in the fields because another crop is more profitable at that time. “The US alone discards $218 billion worth of food each year. Producing these discarded morsels eats up a lot of energy,” and the numbers are staggering. The article details how “the equivalent of 37 million cars’ annual greenhouse gas emissions and 21 percent of US water use all go down the drain.”

To challenge our notion of what is actual “waste,” Shuggie’s uses rescued food, food byproducts, and less desirable cuts of protein such as chicken feet and offal. And all of this takes lots of time to source, lots of determination, and lots of creativity. Check out the article here to learn more!

Source: “One Solution to the Food Waste Problem: Eat Your Garbage.” Wired.com, 29 Sept 2022.