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THE MISSHAPES
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 166
Lara Gilmore, cofounded Food for
Soul, a nonprofit aimed at continuing
to address these parallel social and envi-
ronmental ills. Refettorios exist in Rio de
Janeiro, London, and Paris, and there are
more on the horizon for North America.
Still, those aren’t open yet, so I had to
settle for an interview. Bottura, an expan-
sive and poetic speaker, explained that
we waste so much food only because we
are blind to inner beauty. “If you can see
the invisible potential behind stale bread,
behind bruised fruits, you can expand your
creativity and use them for what they can
offer.” He says that each dried or overripe
ingredient is perfect for a certain recipe.
“Straight out of the oven, a loaf of bread
is good to be eaten as it is,” he says. “The
day after, it will be perfect to make pappa
al pomodoro or bread pudding. After two
days, the bread can be breadcrumbs for
meatballs, passatelli, and cakes.”
I love those dishes. “That’s what the
real beauty is,” Bottura says, “to make
something valuable out of something that
might be seen as not having any value at
all. Something recovered is something
gained.” And does this recovery project
work in high-end restaurants? Certo!
“Use vegetable peels and scraps, fish and
meat bones to make broth. Ugly fruits
and vegetables taste just as delicious as
beautiful ones, and sometimes even more.
The responsibility of the chef is to find the
inner beauty in each product. You just have
an ingredient in each stage of its lifespan.”
At Brooklyn’s Olmsted, chef Greg
Baxtrom has built a restaurant on exact-
ly these same principles without making
a big deal out of it. Olmsted is one of the
hottest tables in New York. “We save
everything,” Baxtrom tells me. “When
we make pickled peppers, we strain them
and use the pulp for Bloody Mary mix.”
Olmsted’s tangerine-hued brunch kathi
roll is made from day-old crepe batter
(it’s thicker and slightly chewier than the
dinner menu’s carrot crepe) and filled
with falafel made from carrot pulp. “We
juice 300 pounds of carrots a week. So
we have a lot of pulp.” And the dollop of
yogurt raita that tops it all is studded with
cilantro stems and bruised herbs. Little
bits of dough left from making pierogi
get rerolled and grilled into flatbreads.
Baxtrom gets animated talking about trim
left from cubing rutabaga. His scallops
with XO sauce are made from scallops that
get torn before coming to market—which
might otherwise be left unsold. Olmsted
buys pockmarked apples for pastry, pork
that a butcher cut in the wrong place for
prime pricing—which Baxtrom skewers
and grills or makes into sausage. “It’s the
reason we can operate the way we do and
still stay affordable,” he says.
Almost none of this waste-free focus
is visible on the menu. Chef Dan Barber
says it really shouldn’t need to be: “wast-
ED never really closed,” he tells me. “This
is something that got lost in all the cover-
age. Sure, it was about calling attention to
food waste. But the driving force was that
chefs already deal with waste brilliantly.
So many cuisines are all about absorbing
waste. These classic dishes that we asso-
ciate with the great food cultures. You
just don’t call them waste. You call them
bouillabaisse.” It’s true. The Provençal
soup is traditionally made of fish that
couldn’t be sold at the market. Barber
says the meat and fish bones, vegetable
stems, cheese scraps that American home
cooks discard are the backbone of the
world’s great dishes. The message of wast-
ED wasn’t meant to be “Let’s start cook-
ing our trash.” It was “Great cooking has
always relied on trash.”“No-waste restaurants are good perfor-
mance art. They can raise awareness of
the amount of waste in the First World,
where we overconsume.” I’m talking to
Krishnendu Ray, chair of the Department
of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU.
Ray is openly critical of chefs promoting
waste reduction. Why? Ray says that by
focusing on the behavior of restaurants,
we risk distracting ourselves from the real
problem: inequality. “That is why people
are hungry. None of these projects talk
about inequality. Because inequality is
dangerous. To rectify it, you’d have to take
from the very rich and give to the poor.”
And there’s an environmental argument
to be made against anything short of
revamping the entire American agricultur-
al system—which is itself unsustainable.
According to food-and-climate nonprofit
Zero Foodprint, on average, 70 percent
of a restaurant’s carbon footprint comes
from the production of ingredients on its
menu. That means saving Parmesan rinds
and cauliflower leaves is a mere drop in the
proverbial bucket. Barber says the same
thing. Inequality and overconsumption
underpin our food system. It doesn’t mat-
ter what a few innovative restaurants do.
Which doesn’t diminish the cultur-
al value of chefs’ finding new ways to
recoup food. And in our restaurant-
fetishizing age, chefs often lead the way.
Take a place like Douglas McMaster’s
Silo, in London, where not only is noth-
ing discarded but dinner plates are made
from plastic bags and tables from used
food packaging. Local, seasonal ingredi-
ents—from farms that practice so-calledregenerative agriculture, committed to
returning carbon to the soil—arrive in
crates or pails or urns.
On a warming night recently, I met a
friend for an early dinner at New York
City’s first zero-waste restaurant. It’s a
tiny wine bar in Fort Greene called Rho-
dora, deeply inspired by London’s Silo.
Until last year, Rhodora was Metta,
known for its wood-fired cooking. In its
newest incarnation, Rhodora focuses on
natural wine and being as gentle on Moth-
er Earth as possible. I happened to stop in
for dinner on the same day The New York
Times ran a long article about Rhodora’s
anti-waste philosophy and careful menu.
The restaurant’s Halley Chambers had
been fielding phone calls from around
the country. After reading that Rhodora
doesn’t stock takeout containers or doggie
bags, a woman from Kansas called to ask
if she could bring her own Tupperware. A
Brooklynite wondered if Rhodora would
accept his compost. Putting down the
phone, Chambers led me out the kitch-
en door to the sidewalk. Under a small
hutch, an Oklin composter buzzed, wait-
ing to turn any crumbs that drop from a
diner’s table into rich soil, which Rhodora
hopes to send to Brooklyn’s urban farm,
Brooklyn Grange.
There aren’t likely to be many crumbs.
The menu is necessarily austere. Bread
arrives daily by bike from She Wolf
Bakery. Marlow & Daughters sends over
plastic bins full of pickled vegetables and
eggs, which are returned and refilled.
Cheeses show up wrapped in muslin
instead of paper. There are radishes. A
soup. An impressive array of tinned sea-
food, including a number of the world’s
finest sardinillas—tiny sardines—from
Galicia’s Conservas de Cambados, and
octopus and mussels from Portuguese
importer José Gourmet. And the staff
discourages overordering. My friend and I
requested the $115 Emerson platter, which
seemed to contain much of the menu—
and were strongly advised to reconsider
because it’s supposed to serve six. It is
the only time I have ever been downsold
in a restaurant. (In the end we insisted,
and though I’m sure we’re both overcon-
sumers of the first degree, we thought it
was fine for two.) We also drank a not
insignificant amount of the Italian natural
winery Franco Terpin’s Ribolla Gialla,
with which anyone could probably eat all
the canned fish in the world.
Chambers gamely walked me through
even the most pedestrian of the restau-
rant’s systems. Kitchen and dining-room
towels and napkins arrive wrapped not in
plastic but in linen. There are no garbage
cans. There is an ingenious replacement