Famous chefs put food waste into good use
Top chefs organise projects to turn wasted food into good meals, and Hong Kong bartenders form unofficial council to fight the cause
The statistics are staggering: close to one third of the world’s food production is wasted each year. That’s about 1.3 billion tonnes, amounting to roughly US$680 billion in industrialised countries and US$310 billion in developing countries.
These sobering figures, along with their own daily experience of seeing the volume of food thrown out of kitchens each day, have inspired some of the world’s top chefs to take a stand.
In 2015, Massimo Bottura of Osteria Francescana, just voted second best restaurant in the world, started a soup kitchen in Milan that served meals to the homeless using food donated by a supermarket because it was close to its sell-by date, was misshapen or damaged.
The same year, US chef Dan Barber, whose restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns in upstate New York, is now number 11 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list and is described by many as America’s best restaurant, launched a pop-up called WastED. The pop-up focused on creating high-end
meals from traditionally discarded ingredients.
Early last year, Barber took his pop-up, WastED, to Britain. The event took over the rooftop of London’s iconic Selfridges department store, and featured guest chefs including legendary French master Alain Ducasse and his executive chef at The Dorchester hotel, Jean-Philippe Blondet, as well as superstar Gordon Ramsay. Other top chefs included Jason Atherton, Yotam
Ottolenghi and Fergus Henderson.
During the five-week event, the menu featured everything from juice-pulp burger made from leftover vegetable pulp from juicing machines, to cod cheeks and collars served as a main course and a Salt Beef Ends Burrito, which came wrapped in a crêpe of blood and bran.
