November 30, 2010

Toque
Laurie Wiegler

Whittling Away at Food Waste

The Whole Fish

Chef Nico Chaize of Nico’s Pier 38 says that discards

are few in his kitchen. This is the way of the Japanese
and the French, according to this Lyon transplant
to Honolulu. “Cooking oil is recycled by the same
company that picks it up from me and they use it
for biofuel,” he says.

At Nico’s, carrot, celery and onion peels as well as

fennel stems go into the broth; while fish bones,
fish scraps, meat scraps and chicken bones are also
used in soups.

F
or some chefs, throwing out a whole carrot Chef Nico Chaize at his restau-
rant, Nico’s, in Honolulu
is out of the question. They don’t need a lec-
ture about the world’s hungry to act with a
conscience as they cook. Yet in America, there are “For the fish – the
few guidelines that require chefs and restaurant whole fish, not [a]
owners to do the right thing, let alone the green fillet – you get about
thing. 30 to 40 percent
waste,” says Chaise.
Too few regulations mean it’s up to the responsible “And that waste,
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chef to use all food products whenever possible, [meaning] the bones,
eliminate waste with portion sizes and be mind- head, things like that
ful about expiration dates – and even this means – I try to recycle as
knowing when “expired” isn’t necessarily spoiled. much as I can. I take
bone[s] from tuna,
According to the National Restaurant Association, scrape the meat out,
which runs a green web site called Conserve, dining scrape meat off the
establishments are in a unique position to eliminate bone and use it to make dishes [such as] ahi tuna
some of this waste by recycling, reusing and redu- bowls.”
cing their food and non-food products.
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At Scoma’s in San Francisco, Executive Chef Alan

Even so, it’s impossible to know exactly how much Fairhurst now uses fish scraps as well, but in a great
food is wasted in US restaurants, so we tapped lobster bisque. “This is what would have been gar-
sources from Hawaii to Illinois to the Carolinas – bage, and we’re making a nice profit from it,” he
Printed with

including a book author and a French chef in Ho- says.

nolulu – to try to find out.

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Toque
Whittling Away at Food Waste
Cooking with Grease
Cooking oil is one of the biggest issues for restaurants
in terms of cost and disposal. Each year, about 2.6
billion gallons of used cooking oil is generated in
the U.S., according to GreenMuze. It is reused and
disposed of in various ways, most promisingly as
an additive to make biofuels.
One of Green Dining Network’s 7,000-gallon tankers picking up a load of
waste vegetable oil.
In Arizona, a company called Green Dining Network
actually removes WVO (waste vegetable oil) from
member restaurants at no cost and partners with
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Amereco Biofuels to produce a usable diesel fuel.
Scoma’s uses some of its oil waste to fuel their
“Veggie-mobile” and what’s left goes to the nearby
Golden Gate Bridge to power maintenance trucks
and equipment. Total oil waste for the restaurant
is roughly 90 gallons or 700 pounds of vegetable
oil each week.
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November 30, 2010
Chef Alan Fairhurst and staff show off the award they received for compos-
ting and recycling 95 percent of their waste.
Scoma’s — which is also located in Sausalito — claims
to divert 95 percent of its city restaurant waste from
landfills via composting and recycling, and because
of this has received numerous accolades including
“Golden Dumpster” awards from San Francisco’s
Department of the Environment as well as state
Waste Reduction Awards.
Fairhurst, a 1988 graduate of the California Culinary
Academy, says the restaurant’s green approach has
evolved since it opened in 1965.
““
“This is what would have been garbage,
and we’re making a nice profit from it.”–Alan
Fairhurst
“I think the attitude down here changed in the early
‘70s. I have only worked here since ‘99, but [even]
then we had already embarked on a major chan-
ging of guard [which occurred] in the late ‘70s and
early ‘80s, when we got a lot of fresh blood in the
restaurant. [With an influx of young people came]
a more idealistic, more energetic [approach].”
Fairhurst says they saw what was going on in San
Francisco – which he calls a unique microcosm in
the social responsibility arena – and that was an
atmosphere in which “it was impossible for McDo-
nalds to sell [burgers] in Styrofoam.”
Then too, there is the other imperative: profits.
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Toque
Whittling Away at Food Waste
Bobby Fitzgerald runs the Naperville, IL White Cho-
colate Grill and he says waste is “absolutely a top-of-
mind management topic every day. Any restaurant
– and I can only speak for restaurants — that isn’t
dealing with waste on a very aggressive basis is foo-
lish because there is the underlying morality of it,
but restaurants are [also] for-profit organizations.”
Fitzgerald has even created a mobile app to calculate
restaurant waste.
“There was not one, so I had it made and it is the
only recipe cost calculator available out of hundreds
of thousands of apps. It is going well with a few
thousand downloads and we are working towards
a custom version for a large food supplier,” he says.
The Half-full Can
According to the EPA, about 100 billion pounds a
year of uneaten, prepared food ends up in incine-
rators or landfills. Processing that wasted food costs
the country $1 billion a year, according to 1997 sta-
tistics. There are no more recent statistics for this,
nor are there stats for restaurant waste from either
the EPA or the USDA.
However, in about a month the USDA will publish a
report in the Journal of Agricultural Sciences, pu-
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blished out of the UK, that will break down tonnage
of waste worldwide both at the retail and consumer
levels. (Toque was unable to get a sneak peek.)
In recent years the USDA has fielded more and more
phone calls from students and journalists on the
subject of restaurant waste, according to economist
Jean Buzby, who compiled the upcoming report.
She’s been compiling data from the past seven years,
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having taken over the task from her predecessor.
“I’m the only one here working on this,” Buzby said
from her Washington, DC office. “No one has told
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November 30, 2010
She says that in the upcoming report, restaurant
waste will fall under the purview of consumer
waste (as opposed to retail waste) and yet, it will
still be impossible to differentiate which portion is
attributable to home cooking and which is from
restaurant dining.
Asked via e-mail why the US government hasn’t
focused enough on restaurant waste, author Jona-
than Bloom, who wrote American Wasteland: How
America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food
(and What We Can Do About It), said that both the
USDA and EPA have too many responsibilities, and
studying food waste isn’t at the top of their lists.
“In addition, restaurant industry groups don’t seem
to want to know (or sponsor research on) how much
food is wasted at eateries. Throw in that restaurants
aren’t a focus for either organization [EPA or USDA]
and you have today’s underwhelming stats on res-
taurant food waste.”
Measuring the Waste
Yet, the dialogue surrounding food waste is defi-
nitely getting louder, and the EPA does have strict
guidelines when it comes to composting, by virtue
of its 40 CFR Part 503, which helps delineate sludge
from other types of compost materials. Further, busi-
nesses are increasingly recognizing the commercial
green in the waste stream.
Such a climate is ripe for companies such as Lean-
Path, which makes products to measure food waste.
Cofounder Andrew Shakman thinks in a year he
might have figures for restaurant waste, but says
right now he and partners Stephen Rogers and Bill
Leppo focus on what they consider “volume food
service” — hospital cafeterias, college campuses,
cruise ships and casinos.
They do plan to expand to restaurants, though, as
long as they have the type of volume that warrants
a $10,000 purchase of a food waste tracker.
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 November 30, 2010
Toque

Whittling Away at Food Waste

Empty Trash

At Mama’s Fish House on the North Shore of Maui,

they not only grow their own vegetables eight miles
away in Haiku, but have created a farm for compos-
ting. Fish are brought here directly from the sea,
making the carbon footprint almost non-existent.

Chief Engineer Scott Burns has not only grown ve-

getables for Mama’s but even took a skinny pig, fed
him with vegetable compost, and fattened him up
for a supper once.

Many years ago, Burns bought a giant food proces-

sor, coined “the scrap-a-later,” which has proven
to be a boon for business. With this processor, Ma-
ma’s is able to consolidate up to eight barrels of
food waste, tin, cardboard and other materials into
usable food waste pulp at a time.

Of course, the reason behind such self-reliance isn’t

rocket science.

“Here on the North Shore we’re isolated [so are not]

what most people or companies would want to call ‘a
good account,’ ” Burns says, without a trace of irony
in his voice. “They don’t want to drive out here to
get our waste so we’ve been having to haul it our-
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selves, and I am in charge of how that gets done.”

In addition to writing for Toque, journalist Laurie

Wiegler reports on the Gulf oil spill and effects on
marine wildlife and other wildlife for Examiner.
com. She has written for AARP, Scientific American.
com, the New Haven Advocate, SF Weekly, Time Out
New York and numerous other publications. You
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can follow Laurie and her environmental tweets

on Twitter (@Writerweegs).
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