At least that’s how it looks, judging by the growing number of restaurants nationwide that are openly using produce scraps and underutilized cuts of meat in their dishes.
While the idea of minimizing food waste isn’t new, most chefs have traditionally kept their use of culinary remnants on the down low. “There are many restaurants that do this sort of thing,” says Celia Lam, a Vancouver-based chef, food sustainability advocate, and online instructor at Matthew Kenney Culinary Academy who developed a zero-waste module for the school’s Fundamentals of Plant-Based Cooking curriculum.
“So the ones putting [root-to-stem cooking] at the forefront are really exciting, because it creates the opportunity to show leadership around this really big issue of food waste.”
Keep reading to learn which restaurants are at the forefront of this scrappy food movement…
(Photo: Celia Lam / Salvage Supperclub)
“For me, it’s really about 100 percent utilization of what we have,” says Wildcraft executive chef Bryant Wigger. “There’s a crazy statistic that something like half of the food produced [worldwide] goes to waste, so whatever we can do to help prevent food waste is a step towards fixing that problem.”
(Photo: Wildcraft)
That means carrot tops are used as garnish, tomato drippings are upcycled into salad dressings, and other veggie trimmings are pickled, roasted, and dehydrated before being incorporated into a dirty rice dish. Everything plant-based is considered before it’s tossed in the compost for the on-site veggie garden.
(Photo: The Gadarene Swine)
And with healthy fast casual restaurants now following suit—like Sweetgreen, which teamed up with Barber to introduce a veggie scrap salad (pictured) this summer, or Shake Shack, which featured WastED’s juice pulp burger on its menu for a single day in May—it’s looking like kitchen detritus is on its way to becoming the new “it” ingredient.
(Photo: Sweetgreen)
“There’s this celebrity culture around chefs—people look up to them. And when you have people like Dan Barber and schools like Matthew Kenney’s doing things that support food sustainability, that’s when we’ll see positive changes,” she says.
And, at the very least, we’ll have a few more dishes that are worth a double tap on Instagram. “Cooking with kitchen scraps has definitely heightened my sense of culinary creativity,” says Wildcraft’s Wigger. “It’s challenging to use every part of every ingredient—and make it taste good!”
What else is cooking? How about the fact that we’re in the middle of a bowl craze (blame smoothie bowls)...
(Photo: Celia Lam / Salvage Supperclub)