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,
Click here to send your feedback

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.
joliprint

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.

http://www.toquemag.com/back-kitchen/whittling-away-at-food-waste

Page 1
 November 30, 2010
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.

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.
One of Green Dining Network’s 7,000-gallon tankers picking up a load of
waste vegetable oil.
Fairhurst, a 1988 graduate of the California Culinary
Academy, says the restaurant’s green approach has
In Arizona, a company called Green Dining Network evolved since it opened in 1965.

““
actually removes WVO (waste vegetable oil) from
member restaurants at no cost and partners with “This is what would have been garbage,
Click here to send your feedback

Amereco Biofuels to produce a usable diesel fuel. and we’re making a nice profit from it.”–Alan
Fairhurst
Scoma’s uses some of its oil waste to fuel their
“Veggie-mobile” and what’s left goes to the nearby “I think the attitude down here changed in the early
Golden Gate Bridge to power maintenance trucks ‘70s. I have only worked here since ‘99, but [even]
and equipment. Total oil waste for the restaurant then we had already embarked on a major chan-
is roughly 90 gallons or 700 pounds of vegetable ging of guard [which occurred] in the late ‘70s and
oil each week. 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].”
joliprint

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-
Printed with

nalds to sell [burgers] in Styrofoam.”

Then too, there is the other imperative: profits.

http://www.toquemag.com/back-kitchen/whittling-away-at-food-waste

Page 2
 November 30, 2010
Toque

Whittling Away at Food Waste

Bobby Fitzgerald runs the Naperville, IL White Cho- She says that in the upcoming report, restaurant
colate Grill and he says waste is “absolutely a top-of- waste will fall under the purview of consumer
mind management topic every day. Any restaurant waste (as opposed to retail waste) and yet, it will
– and I can only speak for restaurants — that isn’t still be impossible to differentiate which portion is
dealing with waste on a very aggressive basis is foo- attributable to home cooking and which is from
lish because there is the underlying morality of it, restaurant dining.
but restaurants are [also] for-profit organizations.”
Asked via e-mail why the US government hasn’t
Fitzgerald has even created a mobile app to calculate focused enough on restaurant waste, author Jona-
restaurant waste. than Bloom, who wrote American Wasteland: How
America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food
“There was not one, so I had it made and it is the (and What We Can Do About It), said that both the
only recipe cost calculator available out of hundreds USDA and EPA have too many responsibilities, and
of thousands of apps. It is going well with a few studying food waste isn’t at the top of their lists.
thousand downloads and we are working towards
a custom version for a large food supplier,” he says. “In addition, restaurant industry groups don’t seem
to want to know (or sponsor research on) how much
The Half-full Can food is wasted at eateries. Throw in that restaurants
aren’t a focus for either organization [EPA or USDA]
According to the EPA, about 100 billion pounds a and you have today’s underwhelming stats on res-
year of uneaten, prepared food ends up in incine- taurant food waste.”
rators or landfills. Processing that wasted food costs
the country $1 billion a year, according to 1997 sta- Measuring the Waste
tistics. There are no more recent statistics for this,
nor are there stats for restaurant waste from either Yet, the dialogue surrounding food waste is defi-
the EPA or the USDA. nitely getting louder, and the EPA does have strict
However, in about a month the USDA will publish a guidelines when it comes to composting, by virtue
report in the Journal of Agricultural Sciences, pu- of its 40 CFR Part 503, which helps delineate sludge
Click here to send your feedback

blished out of the UK, that will break down tonnage from other types of compost materials. Further, busi-
of waste worldwide both at the retail and consumer nesses are increasingly recognizing the commercial
levels. (Toque was unable to get a sneak peek.) green in the waste stream.

In recent years the USDA has fielded more and more Such a climate is ripe for companies such as Lean-
phone calls from students and journalists on the Path, which makes products to measure food waste.
subject of restaurant waste, according to economist Cofounder Andrew Shakman thinks in a year he
Jean Buzby, who compiled the upcoming report. might have figures for restaurant waste, but says
right now he and partners Stephen Rogers and Bill
She’s been compiling data from the past seven years, Leppo focus on what they consider “volume food
joliprint

having taken over the task from her predecessor. service” — hospital cafeterias, college campuses,
cruise ships and casinos.
“I’m the only one here working on this,” Buzby said
from her Washington, DC office. “No one has told They do plan to expand to restaurants, though, as
Printed with

me to work on it.” long as they have the type of volume that warrants
a $10,000 purchase of a food waste tracker.

http://www.toquemag.com/back-kitchen/whittling-away-at-food-waste

Page 3
 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-
Click here to send your feedback

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
joliprint

can follow Laurie and her environmental tweets

on Twitter (@Writerweegs).
Printed with

http://www.toquemag.com/back-kitchen/whittling-away-at-food-waste

Page 4