Going out for a meal is a big part of the modern food culture and restaurants are one of the key figures in the food ecosystem. While we can control the food waste in our own homes, it’s not easy to control waste at restaurants. Leftovers are too often left behind and food scraps are tossed. It’s easy to practice the discipline of finishing everything on your plate, but how do restaurants ensure that their food waste is minimized at every stage?
Traditional strategies to reduce food waste like zero-waste cooking, meal planning and composting are effective at the household level. However, with proper planning and execution, these same strategies can be used at restaurants as well.
Silo, London, UK
Silo in East London is considered the world’s first Zero Waste fine dining restaurant. Helmed by Chef Douglas McMaster, the restaurant only offers a limited set menu. This eliminates the problem of any particular item on the menu that doesn’t sell well in a few days and will spoil in the refrigerator. Every food scrap not consumed is composted on-site, and Silo even invites the neighbourhood to use its composting machine. The compost is then sent to the suppliers as fertiliser for their farms.
All deliveries of ingredients made to the restaurant are packed in reusable crates or containers, which Silo then returns to the farmers for reuse. If something is delivered packaged in disposable plastic by mistake, the chef will send it back. To make sure that nothing is wasted along the way, the team at Silo mills its own wheat into flour, churns its own butter, rolls its own oats, makes its own nut-based milk, and ferments its own beverages. Check out Silo London's official website here
Yazdani Bakery, Mumbai, India
Yazdani Bakery is a legacy in Mumbai that started zero-waste cooking way before the concept was even popular. The old-school bakery was established in 1950 by Irani immigrant Meherwan Zend named after his hometown Yazd in Iran. While the bakery is famous for its variety of breads, pastries, puffs, biscuits, and cookies, for all the regulars, one of the favourite items on the menu is their dry toast or rusk.
Food waste goes hand in hand with hunger. During the days of persecution in Iran, the people could not afford to throw away anything and they would use leftover dry bread or naan by crushing it into small pieces and mixing them with anything they had available from salt, pepper, and curd and sometimes with chopped onions or mint. Yazdani Bakery sliced the unsold leftover bread at the end of the day and baked it into dry toast for the next day’s breakfast to ensure nothing goes to waste. This toast is popular to this day, either to pair with tea or crushed into papeta-ma-gosht which is a curry made of mutton and potatoes. Check out Yazadani on Tripadvisor here.
Regenerative Eating Resduses Food Waste
While regenerative eating might sound like a new concept, most Indian and Southeast Asian communities have been practising it for centuries. You can find traditional rural cafes and remote communities across Asia using age-old recipes that use every part of the food like curries made from watermelon rinds and stir-fries made out of offals which are usually discarded. In fact, one of the world’s most popular dishs, Fried Rice is a way that early Asians came up with to use up leftover rice. Alongside rural communities practising regenerative eating, many cafes have started adopting the concept throughout urban cities across the world.
