Best Before… Who Knows?

Best Before… Who Knows?

Real food. It’s what everyone wants — farm fresh and chemical free. But real food spoils. In the field, on the truck, at the store and in your fridge. That’s why innovators and entrepreneurs are coming up with new and nifty ways to help prolong the life of food.

The next time you purchase perfectly heart-shaped strawberries on the East Coast, consider this: They were probably picked and packed into their plastic clamshells on a Central Valley farm in California between five and eight days ago.

They could have been harvested on a balmy 70-degree morning or in the 95-degree heat of mid-afternoon. Perhaps they sat in the field for one hour — or four. Maybe the pallets took five days to cross the country in a temperature-controlled trailer, or maybe the trailer refrigerator broke down halfway through the journey. Once at the store, the strawberries might have sat on the shelf for a day, or a few more. “Many things can impact shelf life,” says Kevin Payne, vice president of marketing at Zest Labs, a San Jose-based tech company trying to take the mystery out of produce shelf life. “But you can’t see those until the very end,” when 24 hours later, your picture-perfect ruby strawberries morph into camo-green fuzz balls.

Six dollars wasted. Dreams of strawberry shortcake vanished.

And now you can add that pound of trashed berries to the 400 pounds of food you personally waste each year. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), 40 percent of food produced for human consumption in the United States goes uneaten. Just one-third of that wasted food could feed the 48 million Americans living in food-insecure households.

Wasted food is bad for humanity, but experts believe it could be even worse for the earth. Food waste is responsible for 16 percent of our country’s methane emissions — the pollution equivalent of driving 37 million cars per year. Growing, processing, transporting and disposing of food uses roughly 10 percent of the U.S.’ energy budget, 50 percent of our land and 80 percent of our fresh water consumption. So, when you figure 40 percent of that goes unused, that’s a lot of unnecessary pollution accelerating climate change.

In the developing world, most food waste occurs in the field or in transit due to poor infrastructure or lack of refrigeration. But in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world, the majority of food is wasted on the farm, at the supermarket and at home.

The food industry had mostly resigned itself to these inefficiencies. “The approach has been that waste is the cost of doing business,” Payne says. “And the solutions have historically been reactive.”

That’s all starting to change thanks to a shift in food culture, environmental awareness, technological advances and a host of entrepreneurs shaking up the industry through food-shelf-life innovations.

Polluting the Planet

Wasted food is bad for humanity, but experts believe it could be even worse for the earth. Food waste is responsible for 16 percent of our country’s methane emissions — the pollution equivalent of driving 37 million cars per year. Growing, processing, transporting and disposing food uses roughly 10 percent of the U.S.’s energy budget, 50 percent of our land and 80 percent of our fresh water consumption. So when you figure 40 percent of that goes unused, that’s a lot of unnecessary pollution accelerating global warming and climate change.

Protective skin

Searching for ways to prolong a food’s shelf life is nothing new. Humans have been salting fish, meats and cheese for thousands of years. We’ve created techniques like smoking, pickling, waxing and, more recently, adding chemical preservatives or ozone, to prevent spoilage. Today, delicate greens are packaged in Modified Atmosphere Packaging (MAPs) to replace most of the oxygen in the bag with carbon dioxide (a gas that slows spoilage). What’s more, refrigeration technology, which many experts agree is the key to extending shelf life, continues to grow more efficient.

Yet some of the industry’s most impressive technologies — canning, freezing and pasteurization — were developed nearly 200 years ago. Fresh produce, which is wasted more than any category of edible food, is in higher demand now than ever. People want cleaner food — food that’s safe, with few ingredients and very little processing. Therefore, we need to find alternative ways to slow down the basic life process known as respiration. Food respires after it’s harvested, which means it consumes oxygen and gives off CO2, heat and water. If you slow a plant’s respiration rate, you can extend its shelf life. If you extend shelf life, you can reduce food waste.

Apeel’s product coats fruits and vegetables, slowing water loss and oxidation — two key factors in spoilage. The coating is made from edible plant materials and reinforces the protection provided by a fruit or vegetable’s natural skin. The diagram shows the microscopic layers of a strawberry’s skin. Image courtesy Apeel Sciences.

“Most solutions today have been focused on the transport period” of harvested produce, says James Rogers, founder and CEO of Apeel Sciences, a San Diego-based company that developed an imperceptible, tasteless and organically derived second-skin for produce. “We have controlled-atmosphere shipping, refrigeration, high-humidity storage — all of these are kind of solving the key things that cause produce to spoil, which are water loss and oxidation.”

Slowing food spoilage during transit is important, but Rogers wanted to protect produce through all stages of the supply chain, especially on the farm and at the grocery store.

“If you look at some of the most successful companies of our era, they’re using resources that were not being optimally utilized,” Rogers says, referring to Uber and Lyft for ride sharing and Airbnb for house sharing. “We can use technology to unlock some of that wasted value to improve efficiency.”

That’s what Rogers did when in 2012 he launched Apeel Sciences. The idea came to him while driving through California’s lush Central Valley, listening to a radio program about the one billion people who are hungry on this planet. He wondered why, when there was such an abundance of food growing around him, was one third of that food being wasted. With his knowledge of material sciences as a Ph.D. student and grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation, he began experimenting with ways to improve the shelf life of African cassavas, mangoes and bananas without using costly and environmentally unfriendly refrigeration.

To do this, he looked to organic materials left over on farms — grape skins, stems, leaves, etc. He and his team of scientists blended the matter up and extracted fats and specific food molecules. When these molecules are transformed into powder and combined with water, the resulting liquid can be rinsed over produce at wholesale produce-sorting facilities to create an undetectable “second skin.”

“We’re trying to use food waste to solve the food-waste problem,” Rogers says. The added “peel” acts to “physically slow down the rate at which water evaporates out of the produce and the rate at which oxygen gets into the produce,” he explains. “By doing that, we can dramatically extend the shelf life of most types of fruits and vegetables even without the use of refrigeration.” This science led to a Series B $33 million investment in the company, with big grocers like Kroger and Costco buying Apeel-treated produce to reduce their food waste.

Spicy Solution

Another entrepreneur using food to save food is Kavita Shukla, founder and CEO of The FreshGlow Co., which developed a natural paper infused with organic spices and active botanicals that when placed near produce can double — sometimes quadruple — its shelf life.

The idea came to Shukla when she was 12 years old, visiting her grandmother in Bhopal, India. Her mother had warned her not to drink the water, but she forgot while brushing her teeth. Her grandmother quickly mixed up a spice elixir for her to drink. Shukla never got sick. When she got home, she began experimenting to see if the same spices could clean dirty pond water. They did. Her tests soon turned into a winning science-fair project, which set the course for her professional life.

“For the most part, food-spoilage technologies involve toxic pads, refrigerated transport or a lot of plastic,” Shukla says. But “customers are really aware now. They are asking, ‘Hey, is that apple waxed? What is the wax?’”

To make FreshPaper, the company infuses a proprietary blend of bacteria-inhibiting spices into compostable, organic paper. The paper can be slipped into berry cartons, vegetable bins or bags of leafy greens. The exposure you get to the spices is similar to what you might get while walking through the spice aisle of a grocery store, Shukla explains.

Best of all, Shukla’s paper is inexpensive, compostable and safe for humans and the environment. “I had my grandmother in mind when I designed the technology,” Shukla says. “She never had a refrigerator.” The product is already sold in 180 countries.

For the FreshGlow Co., which has taken it slow and steady, scaling up is the goal: to bring its product to larger produce companies and food distributors around the world. “That was always my intention — to use the technology to reduce food waste across the supply chain,” Shukla says.

FreshPaper sheets are infused with organic spices and active botanicals. The FreshGlow Co. founder Kavita Shukla learned as a child that certain spices can inhibit bacteria growth. She turned her home remedy into a simple solution for prolonging the life of produce.

Data-driven Distribution

While entrepreneurs are recognizing the financial and humanitarian opportunities of extending food shelf life, Silicon Valley hasn’t really tapped into this huge revenue stream. Zest Labs in San Jose is trying to change that. The tech company is making the cold supply chain more efficient by accurately predicting the shelf life of produce as it moves around the country. It does this through the Internet of Things (IoT), the interconnection of computers and everyday objects through data sent and received via the Internet. These IoT sensors monitor the temperature of produce on each pallet, from field to the retail shelf.

Zest Labs uses pallet- by-pallet temperature data to help predict the rate of produce spoilage. “No other industry would accept one third of their production going to waste,” says Zest Labs CEO Peter Mehring in a video on the company’s website. Image courtesy Zest Labs.

“The largest impact on produce is temperature, harvesting conditions and variety of the product,” says Zest Labs’ Payne. “Pallets harvested first will vary from bottom to top,” he explains. “We can figure out that pallet A has this much shelf life, and pallet B has this much.” They do this by producing a Zest Intelligent Pallet Routing (ZIPR) code, which routes pallets with less freshness to the nearest location and those with a longer shelf life further afield.

Zest Labs has “removed the randomness of food distribution,” says Dr. Jean-Pierre Emond, a co-founder of The Illuminate Group and an expert on the cold chain. “For each pallet coming in, they now know exactly what to do with it.”

Zest Labs technology is enabling growers and retailers, who have never had this type of data, to profit more and waste less. They do this by reducing pre-harvest water, fertilizer and labor costs, as well as post-harvest costs for waste removal. Large companies like Costco have tapped into Zest Labs’ technology to help their growers, distributors and themselves.

“I never see anyone winning with food waste,” Emond says. The entire food supply chain stands to benefit from these new solutions.

To better understand the science behind Apeel’s product, check out this story from WIRED magazine.

Sell by? Use by? Why?

Food loss on the farm, in transit and at the retail store is significant. But the largest category is even closer: Nearly half of America’s food waste happens at home. A 2012 NRDC study found “the average American consumer wastes 10 times as much food as someone in Southeast Asia, up 50 percent from Americans in the 1970s.”

The food-waste problem is partly cultural. In the U.S., food is relatively inexpensive compared to other parts of the world. Thanks to busy lifestyles, we over-buy and under-plan. And inconsistent shelf-life food labeling confuses consumers and retailers. What does “sell by” and “best if used by” mean? Are foods past those dates actually spoiled? Often, they are not.

In 2013 the NRDC reported that food expiration date codes contribute considerably to the estimated 160 billion pounds of food trashed each year in the United States, “making food waste the single largest contributor of solid waste in the nation’s landfills.” Food expiration date codes are not federally regulated. They vary by state and are often arbitrary, providing false confidence in a food’s freshness or spoilage.

“There isn’t a rhyme or reason to how food codes are set,” says Michael Malmberg, chief operating officer of Daily Table, a nonprofit Boston-based grocery store that sources nearly expired food from local farms, distributors, grocery stores, restaurants and bakeries, and resells that food at affordable prices. “It’s set by the manufacturer or packager and can be done for marketing reasons — if they want to turn a product over faster.”

Doug Rauch, a former president of Trader Joe’s — and Malmberg’s boss — saw an opportunity to change perceptions of shelf life at the retail level. Rauch was well aware of how much perfectly good food was wasted by grocery stores due to confusing food labels. While a fellow at Harvard University, he also learned that food malnourishment meant not just “a deficit in calories; it was a deficit in nutrition, and supply chain issues,” Malmberg says. “(Doug) realized there is a need not only for access to food, but access to healthy food that’s affordable.” Out of that came the concept for Daily Table, which opened its doors in June 2015.

Rauch likes to think of his two grocery stores, located in Roxbury and Dorchester, Massachusetts, as the T.J. Maxx or Marshalls of the food world — where you can shop for quality products at reduced prices without the stigma that comes with visiting a food bank. This model, backed by the PepsiCo Foundation, the Kendall Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, recognizes the flexibility in food expiration codes.

“It’s all well and good to have healthy produce,” says Malmberg. “But if people get home from work and don’t have dinner on the table, they’re in trouble.” So Daily Table also set up an on-site kitchen and hired chefs to turn ugly produce or products that are not moving off the shelves quickly enough into affordable, nutritious, ready-to-cook and grab-n-go meals that cost the same price or less than nearby fast food. Daily Table hopes to open more stores because “the concept will be more effective at scale,” says Malmberg. “We are currently covering 65 percent of our expenses. We think with a third or fourth store, we can break even.”

Breaking even, when it comes to food waste, would be a big step in the right direction.

Daily Table in Massachusetts takes in food rejected by other retail outlets for aesthetic reasons. For example, an entire pallet of organic cauliflower heads that were deemed “unmarketable” due to a few brown spots were saved before they ended up in a dumpster. The DT team sorted and repackaged them for sale as raw produce and as part of their prepared foods offerings. Image courtesy Daily Table.

Related Stories

On Our Loading Dock

On Our Loading Dock

Our nightstands are loaded with books to read, and our laptops are packed with websites to explore and unpack wisdom about the global food supply chain.

Books

The Omega Principle (Paul Greenberg)

The author of several books about our seafood, Paul Greenberg takes us for a deep dive into the merits, demerits and challenges of Omega 3, a nutritionally beneficial fatty acid found in seafood. As you might imagine, the consequences ripple right through the seafood supply chain.

American Catch (Paul Greenberg)

In another book, Greenberg uses stories about three types of seafood — Eastern oysters, sockeye salmon and shrimp — to chart the rise and fall of American fisheries.

The Plant Paradox (Steven Gundry)

If you think eating bread makes you fat, you might find an argument in this book to support your theory. There’s lots of debate between these covers, and nutritionist Steven Gundry will give you reason to reconsider the science behind most diets.

 

The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America (Marc Levinson)

For some history about mom-and-pop stores, in the context of the grocery juggernaut that was A&P (aka The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company), read Marc Levinson’s book about the grocery giant. A&P threatened Main Street stores long before anyone had ever heard of Walmart.

Podcasts

Eat This: Our Daily Bread series

We continue to be fans of Jeremy Cherfas’ “Eat This Podcast.” Recently, he explored every angle and story about wheat in at least 31 micro-episodes. You will learn about Red Fife, sourdough, bakeries, mills and more. We love enthusiasm, and Mr. Cherfas’ zeal takes us to a very complicated slice of bread. 

Planet Money

Born out of the financial crisis in 2008, National Public Radio’s podcast about the economics of everything covers food in unexpected ways. From the cost of popcorn in a baseball stadium to the concept of “free” food, Planet Money is full of insights about the role economics plays in how we eat.

Food52’s Burnt Toast

Since 2009, Food52 founders Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs have curated this community-based trove of kitchen goods and recipes. Their podcast, “Food52’s Burnt Toast,” will elucidate just how your toast burns — and why. Such a simple food, with a complicated twist.

Article

We found another ingredient map in the article “Deconstructing the Environmental Footprint of a Sandwich” in Anthropocene. You may never again order a meat sandwich. Check out the first issue of Food+City for our map of the ingredients for a sandwich made in Austin.

Film/TV

Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown

The passing of food legend Anthony Bourdain is a good reason to review (or re-view) his award-winning Parts Unknown. It’s worth 
reconsidering every episode in appreciation of his close-up view of food and the people around the world who make it.

Ugly Delicious

As our screens flood with documentaries that shame and disgust us, we are ready to see a new take on the food world. David Chang does this with his series about ordinary food made by ordinary people. The series also has helpings of Chang’s personal story about his beginnings as a chef and his conflicted relationship with Korean cuisine.

Water and Power: A California Heist

Food production relies on water. With fires raging in California during the summer of 2018, water resources for firefighters were even more scarce. Long the focus of battles between environmental conservation activists and economic development advocates, water resources are hotly contested. If you want some historical context for this topic, check out the PBS “Cadillac Desert” series, especially “Mulholland’s Dreams.”

Recipe Tracker: Cooking Out of the Box

Recipe Tracker: Cooking Out of the Box

Have you ever had a compost bin full of bits and druthers that you think are almost edible? You know, the thin peels of broccoli or carrots or apples? What about a refrigerator drawer with wilted greens or the selection of cheeses you got for that cocktail party a month ago? Do you just chuck them out, concerned that they’re not fresh enough to use or be delicious?

And what about the money you spent on those ingredients? Or the costs of producing them? Does tossing no-longer-fresh food take a toll on your grocery budget, as well as your environmental conscience?

As landfills are increasingly brimming with food that was produced but never consumed (for a variety of reasons), it may be time to reconsider the ways in which we assign a value to ingredients. After all, in less affluent eras — or areas of the world and the U.S. — people couldn’t afford to waste food products that could still contribute to a tasty and nutritious meal. Think of it as a really good time to figure out how to be creative with your organic kitchen matter.

The good news is lots of people, including some of the world’s best chefs, are working on ways to address this very issue. In fact, two recent cookbooks — or, let’s say, sources of recipes — approach the notion of creating a dish from opposite ends of the spectrum. One, “Bread is Gold,” by the world-renowned chef Massimo Bottura, is a collection of recipes and stories by and about a variety of chefs who were called to cook using only products that arrived at a pop-up soup kitchen during the 2015 Milan World Expo as excess, day-old or deemed insufficiently fresh to sell.

The Expo’s theme, “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life,” spoke directly to Bottura, who worked with a parish priest in the city to transform an old theater into a dining hall that could accommodate, restaurant-style, 100 guests each day — serving lunch to area school children and supper to local homeless people.

For the fancy chefs who came to Milan to cook for a day or two at the Refettorio, their constrained ingredient lists were the catalysts to their creativity. Deliveries included days-old bread, produce in various states of maturity or discoloration, cheeses and other dairy products that were nearing or past their sell-by dates. Each day’s supplies were different and unpredictable. After the initial shock of the arbitrariness of that day’s delivery wore off, the enterprising chefs got straight to work, creating delicious and comforting meals for their guests.

“Something of apparently no use could become a secret weapon in the kitchen, a super power that could magically transform a dull dish into a vibrant one,” Bottura writes about the solution Chef Cristina Bowerman devised for using the outer — and often discarded — leaves of vegetables: Dry them and grind them into intense powders that add stealthy flavor to dishes. (She’s not the only one who makes savory powders from dehydrated vegetable peels; read on.)

The chefs wasted nothing because very little was available to start with. Even banana peels were used to make a chutney. It was a revelation, even to one of the world’s top chefs, Bottura. “If you open your mind and start thinking differently about ingredients, then you no longer have to throw away a banana peel ever again,” he writes.

“Bread is Gold” shares stories and recipes by chefs who fed hundreds of people using food deemed unfit to sell. The key to success? Human chefs who applied their knowledge and experience to effect a delicious outcome.

Chef Massimo Bottura

By contrast, for Chef Watson, developed by IBM — yes, that Watson — the sky’s the limit when it comes to ingredients. Through machine learning and algorithms, an online app called Chef Watson will take in up to four ingredients that you suggest (whether or not you see how they might result in something delicious) and output a set of instructions that it “believes” will create an edible dish. Chef Watson offers a never-ending source of combinations for any ingredient under the sun. [Editor’s note: Alas, IBM closed its Chef Watson site in June 2018.]

The computer ingested the entire archive of Bon Appetit magazine, as well as a huge dataset of different ingredients and their detailed flavor profiles. From there, Chef Watson learned to recognize synergies — ingredients that seem to go well together (understood perhaps by frequency of pairing or through the logic of their marrying profiles). Garlic and tomatoes. Mushrooms and butter. Pork and apples.

As the recipe appears on screen it displays three graphic measurements — synergy, pleasantness and surprise — that help the user determine how the hypothetical dish might turn out. Just as constraints fueled the chefs at the Milan Refettorio, the search for novelty drives Watson’s recipes.

While the platform is available online for anyone to use, Chef Watson has been on a few roadshows, employed by featured chefs to make novel dishes. The chronicle of these events is a book called “Cognitive Cooking,” another collection of experiential narratives and try-it-yourself recipes.

“Cognitive Cooking” shares stories and recipes by IBM’s Chef Watson, which generates recipes from any combination of ingredients. The key to success? Human chefs who applied their knowledge and experience to effect a delicious outcome.

If you have unused ingredients lingering in your fridge and pantry, don’t toss them — type them into Chef Watson’s ingredient fields and await a recipe generated just for you. You can refine outcomes through filters such as cuisine type, dish type or even holiday. Dinner solved!

Central to the recipe successes shared in the book are the chefs — the human cooks — whose expertise and creativity helped shape Watson’s “suggestions” of unusual ingredient combinations into viable outcomes. For instance, an early trial was a pastry recipe for Spanish Almond Crescent. But the ingredient list included more liquids than would work to make a stable dough. A chef at the Institute of Culinary Education tweaked the recipe, substituting some ingredients for others to ensure a satisfying outcome but still maintain the flavor profile Chef Watson suggested.

“This is the nature of the human-machine collaboration,” the book notes. “The computer doesn’t dictate. It suggests.”

For IBM Watson Group Engineer Florian Pinel, Chef Watson has great potential to help people eat more healthfully by personalizing recipes according to dietary constraint and personal preference. It also could help reduce food waste by making suggestions based on what lurks in your refrigerator, finding ways to use the last of those beets along with the remains of the star fruit and ground pork you bought for last weekend’s cooking project.

“People can create new, personalized recipes on the fly,” Pinel said in a 2014 TED@IBM talk. “People can cook food that’s flavorful and healthy without ever eating the same thing twice.”

Whether you come to your starting line with leftovers and remainders or a motley collection of ingredients for your next unique Watson creation, a key component is a human willingness to see the value in every piece of the puzzle. Whether it goes into tonight’s dinner or becomes part of the stock for tomorrow’s sauce, just about every edible thing on Earth has a value that should prevent it from simply being next week’s landfill fodder.

IBM engineer Florian Pinel talks about the thinking behind Chef Watson in this 2014 TED@IBM Talk.

That’s certainly the philosophy that drives Chef Ian Thurwachter of Intero, an Italian-themed fine-dining restaurant in Austin.

Fine-dining restaurants are often known for their pristine ingredients and precise techniques, the combination of which should result in a mind-blowing dining experience that’s hard to replicate at home. But often, there’s a cost to this level of quality, and it’s not only found in the prices on the menu.

For example, to create carrot brunoise, the delicate ⅛-inch dice that often garnish soups or stews, one must start with an irregular, round vegetable and make it square. In the same vein, to get to the heart of a broccoli stem, arguably the sweetest, most tender and delicious part of the green brassica, the outer peel must be removed first.

In both instances, once you’ve finished cutting and have the finished ingredients, ready to sprinkle or roast or puree, you also have a pile of peel and other trimmings — byproducts that often end up in a compost bin, or worse, the garbage.

Not so at Intero, where Chef Thurwachter operates a no-waste kitchen in which every stem, peel, animal organ, off-cut of meat or other commonly tossed odd and end is put to flavorful use.

Chef Ian Thurwachter. Photo by Kenny Braun.

This Intero dish features a pesto made from radish tops, carrot tops and almonds. Extra carrot greens top the dish as a leafy garnish.

Yum Yum powder (dehydrated fermented broccoli scraps) sprinkled over a dish that highlights the rest of the broccoli plant, grilled florets and thin slices of pickled broccoli stem.

A branzino fish entree dusted with lemon powder.

Take the humble, fibrous broccoli peel. At Intero, they pack it with salt and sugar and leave it to ferment for several days. “It balloons up, is intensely pungent, with a very off-putting smell. But the flavor is really awesome — it’s got this tart saltiness,” Thurwachter explains. “We take all that and dehydrate it and turn it into a powder that’s got this background funkiness. It’s intensely savory, and we use it as a seasoning.” (Another clever dehydrated use for vegetable peels….)

The idea for this transformation came from a sous chef who had seen some something similar with mushrooms. Thurwachter engages his team in regular brainstorming sessions to figure out how best to use all the scraps.

“About once a week it’s a necessity,” he says, “but we try to make it an ongoing thing. Every day we have projects.” Projects such as dehydrating the smoked carrots his bartender used for a cocktail. The resulting powder will go into a pasta dough. Or using remnants from artichokes that were served as a bar snack in a stock that pairs with a rabbit tortelloni. “It’s just constantly trying to move these puzzle pieces around,” he says about the challenge of using all the parts.

It’s a challenge that resembles the no-waste reality of Italian farmers of earlier generations. “I love Italian cooking more than I love Italian food because it’s really a cuisine that historically is based on poverty,” Thurwachter says. He explains how veal farmers used to sell their prime cuts to fancy restaurants in Milan and keep the off-cuts — the lower-valued and harder-to-sell cuts — such as the shanks and head, for themselves.

But just as Bottura’s chefs made scrumptious meals from undervalued ingredients in Milan in 2015, Italian farmers of yore tapped into their own creative wells.

“They came up with things like osso bucco milanese (using the veal shank), which is the quintessential Italian dish,” Thurwachter explains. And it didn’t stop there. Arancini, fried rice balls, are made from leftover rice, stuffed with leftover veal and fried the next day for yet another meal originating from humble ingredients. “And then there are these really elaborate preparations where the farmer’s wife took the time to completely bone out the veal head and roll it up into this beautiful roulade and braise it and then slice it super thin and serve it with bitter greens and a salad. I would take that veal roulade with a salad over a veal chop any day of the week,” Thurwachter says, vividly illustrating an alternative way to value ingredients.

While he’s set a different challenge for himself than Massimo Bottura or Florian Pinel, Chef Thurwachter relies on a similar asset: “Our biggest resource in the kitchen is our collective creativity.”

Paste made from fermented broccoli peel before being dehydrated.

Homemade vinegar-in-process at Intero using carrot tops and leftover wine from bottles sold by the glass.

On Our Loading Dock: Food System Resources

On Our Loading Dock: Food System Resources

Our nightstands are loaded with books to read and our laptops are packed with websites to explore and unpack some wisdom about the global food supply chain.

Books

Before the Refrigerator (Jonathan Rees)

Before the refrigerator, there was the icebox. But if you didn’t live in the frozen tundra, getting ice required a complex choreography. Jonathan Rees traces the process of ice harvesting and distribution — a key method of preserving perishable foods — as it evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the country moved toward mechanical cooling, widely available ice played a vital role in transforming the American diet. (Read Jonathan Rees’s Food+City story about the cold chain.)

Coffee Lids: Peel, Pinch, Pucker, Puncture (Louise Harpman, Scott Specht)

Some things just seem like they were always there, as if no one could possibly have spent time inventing them. The ubiquitous plastic lid on the humble paper coffee cup is just such an item. But take time to consider its nuanced and varied design features, as architects Louise Harpman and Scott Specht have in this delightful mini-primer on industrial design, and you may enjoy your morning joe even more.

Barges and Bread (Di Murrell)

It’s not every day that a historian has lived the life she’s writing about. But for Di Murrell, barging has been her way of life for more than 30 years. Her book looks way back to 13th century London and the history of the grain trade on the Thames. Grains and bread — not coincidentally, a synonym for money — were staples for all citizens because, as a commodity crop, grain was stable, and large quantities could be transported efficiently over even the shallowest waterways. Take a trip back in time with the historian barge master. (Check out our story about the role of barges in moving food throughout history.)

The Flavor Thesaurus (Niki Segnit)

As we investigated IBM’s Chef Watson, another source of clever food pairings sprang to mind: Niki Segnit’s “The Flavor Thesaurus.” Structured like Roget’s classic, the book lists ingredients — such as beets, blueberries, oysters — and offers classic and novel pairings based on flavor themes. Recipes and other suggested preparations are included in the text. It’s a fantastic resource for moving off the beaten path and developing your own recipes.

Fishing Lessons (Kevin Bailey)

Bailey provides a glimpse of the future of the global fishing industry, documenting the rise and fall of fish populations, the loss of indigenous fisheries and the arrival of fish farms. He makes the case for a future seafood industry that includes “new” artisan cultures while incorporating new ways of selling direct to consumers. He says that his book provides “a fine-grained view of the larger issues in the world’s fisheries — too many fishermen with too few fish, conflicts with other resource users, loss of fishing rights and degraded habitats.” There’s room for hope, according to the author.

The Long Haul (Finn Murphy)

Finn Murphy dropped out of college in the late 1980s, much to the chagrin of his parents, and became a long-haul trucker. He’s a furniture mover, but his experience driving the nation’s highways — and navigating the small lanes of Lower Manhattan or the mountain passes in Colorado’s Rockies — runs in parallel to the thousands of other haulers who transport our food, our packages and everything else we buy and ship. This catchy memoir offers multiple tableaux, and lots of juicy slang terms, of one life on the road. (Read about another truck driver, Annette Womack, in our Food Mover story from Issue 2.)

Podcasts

Sourcing Matters

Host Aaron Niederhelman takes listeners with him as he examines problems with and solutions for feeding ourselves into the future. He finds leaders focused on food system reform and reducing environmental impact who tell stories worth pausing for. “Our goal with this show is to celebrate leading voices committed to promoting food values through proper natural resource management,” says the podcast’s website. “It is, after all, the sourcing which matters.”

Films

Rotten (Netflix)

This series of six episodes dives into various parts of the food supply chain, exposing some unsavory realities of the industrial food complex. Mass deaths of honeybees, the plight of peanut farmers in an age of allergies, the economics of dairy farming and the dwindling global fish supply are among the tough topics the filmmakers tackle. It may leave you wanting to move to the country and grow all your own food.

Magazines

Eaten: The Food History Magazine

Social and economic historian Emelyn Rude launched a new magazine in the fall of 2017 with a focus on the history of food. Filled with luscious eye candy, rediscovered recipes and gastronomic essays, the magazine transports readers through time on a common vehicle — food.

Waste Not

Waste Not

Food waste is a messy subject. What can one person’s efforts to record her scraps teach us about reducing our footprint?

Logi, a mythological Nordic warrior, won an medieval eating contest that involved consuming a tray of meat and bones — and the tray itself. (The tray was made of bread in those days, so it’s not such a big deal as it appears.) His gluttonous display was typical of the way men proved they were, indeed, men. The more food consumed, the more powerful the man.

For centuries, now, eating enormous quantities of food has been as necessary among the elite — who use consumption as a marker of social status — as it has been among the poor, who never know when the next famine will occur. The abundance or scarcity of food is one of the world’s paradoxes. We eat a lot, though not quite like Nordic warriors. And at the same time, we waste a lot.

Food waste tops the list of concerns for food system reformers these days. And why not? The UN Food and Agriculture Organization claims that we waste about 1.3 billion tons per year of edible parts of food, or about 4o percent of the food we produce. That’s enough to motivate anyone to reconsider what goes into the trash bin after a meal. The 2013 FAO report, “Food Wastage Footprint, Impacts On Natural Resources,” dissects the mountain of food waste generated each year. Perishable fruits and vegetables occupy much of that mountain for obvious reasons. In spite of advances in food preservation, we haven’t yet found the right technology for eliminating perishability.

“…we waste about 1.3 billion tons per year of edible parts of food, or about 4o percent of the food we produce…”

But before wringing our hands, we should wonder about what constitutes “food wastage,” as the FAO calls food waste. We hear about food waste in the media and at events that reference the same FAO report. As much a consequence of recirculating Internet data, this reliance on a single source can’t be our only source for the war on waste. If the topic is so fundamental to improving our food system, should we be evaluating a range of studies from multiple perspectives? Even without reading the UN report, we might wonder about packaging and about all the leaks along the food supply chain where food becomes waste. Did the FAO really go to a significant number of landfills and weigh all the different types of waste? Might there be other methods for finding food leaks and breaks the food distribution system?

The whole topic is messy. But even without knowing the exact amount of food waste in our food system, I imagine we’d all agree that the problem could use a big solution.

But overwhelming problems often numb our ability to act individually. Wondering what just one person might contribute to heap of wasted resources, I spent a week photographing my food wastage footprint. I became so self-conscious about my food waste that I began eating more trimmings and food before taking a photo, simply because I was embarrassed by the amount of waste that was about to become public record. Being shunned by one’s peers because of an oversized waste footprint could become the next neurosis requiring treatment by modern psychiatrists.

One day’s waste print.

While I worked to overcome the fear of disapproval, I saw that my food waste footprint had grown to the size of Sasquatch by the end of the week. This wasn’t a complete surprise, since the amount of food that I was required to buy in the grocery store was more than one person could eat in a week; remains of a head of lettuce and a quart of milk were all spoiled by the end of the week. Perhaps this is an admonition to never eat alone. More fun and less waste.

While my experiment wasn’t life-transforming, taking the photos did tell an interesting micro-story about one person’s waste footprint.

So what are the takeaways?

I wonder if there is a better way for single people to buy and prepare food. Would more single-serving packaging alleviate the problem? Lately I’ve noticed “Ready to Serve Brown and Wild Rice” from Riviana Foods in packages of two servings, ready to microwave. It might help, but packaging still needs a solution: even my single-serving yogurt leaves me with a foil top and plastic container at the end of the snack.

Would growing my own food lessen the amount of waste, since I could pick just what I needed for a meal and compost the remains each day? Maybe, but that would require a lifestyle change for many of us.

How about portion controls? When I ate out, the waste trail increased. Restaurants, unless you eat exclusively at over-priced, small-plate restaurants, typically serve more than you can eat. In my case, a sandwich was served with a side of coleslaw, which I don’t eat and didn’t see on the menu.

While my micro-experiment was both fun and enlightening, the exercise missed some of the bigger-picture considerations. How can we see beyond the FAO report? Bjorn Lomborg joins the United Nations Food and Agriculture to emphasize the amount of food wasted in the global food system. Lomborg moves beyond the statistic to consider systemic solutions, such as the need for improvements in our global transportation infrastructure. Ronald Bailey’s book The End of Doom points out that we have a highly productive food system that will produce enough food in the future. There’s enough food, it seems, just in the wrong places.

So how do we get all the food to all the right places in the right condition: unspoiled, nutritious and tasty? We could use a focused, concerted effort to address distribution and minimize food left in the field, on the loading dock and in the waste bins of food processors. Those efforts include new packaging, tracking and transport technologies. Everyone, from chefs to consumers, needs a behavior-changing incentive to prepare, serve and consume food in smaller quantities. The move toward selling food in smaller-portioned packages is just a small step in that direction.

These innovations, many of them in the works now, will do much more to lower the amount of food waste than anything revealed in my photos. But, hey, try it yourself. Take your cellphone and snap a few post-meal images of your food trail. What do you see?