by Chef Hari Pulapaka, Global Cooking School, and Stetson University
It is 10 p.m. and the last food order has left the kitchen. The cooks have stepped off the line; some are commiserating in the alley, others smoking, on the phone exploring post-shift plans, putting back a cold one, one recanting the “shift from hell.”
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the dish crew is clanking with angst amidst obsessive territorial banter with food runners and servers, not all unjustified. There is a bounty of food in and around the kitchen. So much so that even end-of-shift pickings by staff, some “make-sitting” on upside-down 5-gallon buckets (you’ve seen the memes) can hardly make a dent in the healthy amounts of leftovers and scraps. This could very well be a reality from just about any large food and beverage event around the country, but it could also be a scaled-down regularity in a neighborhood restaurant. Perfectly good-to-eat food is wasted even in professional kitchens which are already constrained by razor-thin food margins. Certainly, the average household does worse.
Commonly Wasted Food: bread, trims and cores of vegetables, wilted herbs, “questionable” mushrooms, past “best-by date” dairy and eggs, meat trims, fish, and other seafood trims.
Let’s take bread, for example. No matter how processed bread might be, it takes a lot of resources (ingredients, energy, labor, transportation, packaging, storage) to access a loaf of bread. By not breaking bread and discarding untold amounts to landfills, we are, in fact, breaking our implicit pact of symbiosis with the planet. Let’s catch bread before its demise in a landfill by elevating it to the centerpiece of your next meal (see recipe at the end) or the climate crises resulting from food waste in landfills will reach a breaking point.
What happens to all the “compromised” food at the end of a shift in a professional kitchen? First, the food isn’t necessarily compromised. The urge to eat food they’ve been around all day isn’t particularly strong for cooks. After some are picked through or packed, in reality, a non-trivial amount gets discarded. And not even to be composted but, in fact, thrown in the trash to be hauled over to a landfill. The herculean effort that it takes to grow, process, distribute, and prepare the food makes this less-than-noble resting place for perfectly good-to-eat leftovers a travesty, to put it mildly.
And even if there was good intent, one in which the leftovers could help alleviate hunger and food insecurity in the community, the fear of health concerns and subsequent litigation chickens out even the best of intent. By some calculations (Feeding America), 34 million people in the United States alone are food insecure, including 9 million children. Hunger affects, disproportionally, children, seniors, people of color, indigenous peoples, and the poor. Food insecurity and hunger can be significantly alleviated by reducing food waste and re-channeling excess food to individuals in need who cannot afford or lack access to sufficient and nutritious food. So, why hasn’t this happened already? The fear of lawsuits, lack of systems including distribution logistics, unawareness, and sometimes, old-fashioned apathy is to blame.
Can you imagine if all the food available for consumption was also actually…consumed? Can you imagine a world where there was zero food waste? Why aren’t we significantly closer to that ideal in the year 2023?
The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, passed in 1996 encourages companies to donate surplus food to nonprofits by providing civil and criminal liability protection to the food donors and the nonprofit mediums. Fast forward 25 years to 2021 when the Food Donation Improvement Act (FDIA) was first introduced as a staunchly bipartisan bill in the United States Congress culminating on Jan. 5 of this year when the bill was signed into law by President Biden. Part 1 of the FDIA extends the liability to donations offered at a good Samaritan reduced price. Part 2 is perhaps even more significant, the FDIA extends protections to certain donations given by food businesses, those which are already required to comply with food safety requirements, directly to those in need. Currently, the law only protects food donors who donate food to a nonprofit organization that distributes the food to insecure individuals. Food insecure individuals will now be able to pick up food straight from the source, such as local restaurants, grocery stores, and schools.
Can you imagine if safe-to-eat food at the end of the day from restaurants, institutional food service, and grocery stores not only nourished the immediate staff but any excess, also nourished the immediate community? The legal constraint, often cited as the greatest hurdle to good intent namely litigation is now, officially, a non-issue.
Want to reduce food waste at home? Get started with Chef Hari’s recipe for Scrappy Bread Pudding.
