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Hola!
When I started this newsletter early August, I was divided between making the first issue one about all things Japan and ramen because I’d been cooking so much of it and talking about food waste because I had read some really interesting content around sustainability and waste management. The second issue, therefore, finds root in this thought that was planted in my head in late July.
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Chefs have been coming together to cook meals using donated/unused raw ingredients from restaurants and large-scale events, and serving them to needy locals. These “soup kitchens” began as a pop-up concept at the Milan Expo but have expanded into a mobile nonprofit that aims to feed the hungry. And the man behind them is Massimo Bottura, who we’ve watched on the first episode of Netflix’s famed Chef’s Table series.
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Theater of Life is a new documentary on Massimo Bottura, focusing on food waste and his Food for Soul campaign. (You can watch Theater of Life on Netflix here.)
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What's more, an Italian chef took inspiration from Food for Soul at Refettorio Felix to host a two-day food-waste Calabrian festival last weekend.
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As Indians, I think we do a far better job of not wasting fresh produce than American or European households. Bruised veggies make it to curries, mixed veg soups and khichdis all too easily and not-so-fresh vegetable produce is sold at lower prices for those who care to salvage whatever they can of it. Overripe fruit nestle in the smoothie fad and find their way into banana breads, plum pies and the like. And if your veggies or fruits are beyond the stage that they can be used, the easiest thing to do with them is to dump them into a composting pit - raw vegetables, peels, coffee grounds et al.
There are also innovations like Evaptainers that make electricity-free refrigerators and plasma-storage to store fresh food better, with the end goal of reducing food waste in third world countries.
However, I still think we fare poorly in terms of leftover management. Most people I know over-order at restaurants, don’t bother asking for doggie bags and casually waste food at meal times even at home. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) is working to create a network of food banking partners to collect and distribute excess food from restaurants and large-scale events to the hungry. About how well that will fare or whether this will get the importance it deserves is a-whole-nother story.
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Low-waste cocktails are the next big thing (call me the next time you see fermented pineapple skin being used anywhere).
A bar in London makes cocktails using citrus stock out of limes after they’ve been squeezed and beet-salted rims from dehydrated leftover beet pulp.
There’s also Toast Ale which is made with bread that would otherwise go to waste.
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Farm to Table
Around a third of the food produced for human consumption around the world never makes it to the table. There’s a very interesting graph that you can play around with here that shows food wastage by continent, and at what stage of “farm to table” these losses occur.
Farm-to-table in the truer sense is picking up rapidly across the globe. Dan Barber is not only a proponent of the farm to table movement, but also an advocate for efficient waste management through his wastED pop ups in London and NYC. They’ve used agave pulp leftover from tequila production to make paper to print their cocktail menu!
Pop ups all over USA thrive on the farm to table culture, like this one in the backyard of a home that seats only 22 people. Or this one called Ranchopatel (trust a Gujarati to come up with a name like that!), where Chef Niven Patel grows seasonal produce to provide for 15% of his restaurant's needs. The farm to table concept enables the creation of a self-sustaining environment - grow your own fruit and veggies, feed farm animals the poor (albeit homegrown) produce, let them also eat weed to maintain farm boundaries and poop to fertilize the soil, use the animals for egg and meat - beautifully explained in the Chef’s Table episode featuring Dan Barber and Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
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Closer home, Chef Thomas Zacharias at The Bombay Canteen plans and changes menus seasonally. Paul Kinny of 212 All Good in Mumbai sources miso from a small Japanese community in Uttarakhand and makes in house bitters from local berries fresh hibiscus flowers.
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Manu Chandra of Toast &Tonic, Monkey Bar and The Fatty Bao in Bangalore buys his seafood from vendors from Kochi, who fish only in certified waters and a bunch of folk who run Know Your Fish have come up with an ocean-sensitive seafood calendar for India’s west coast.
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What is key then, is that chefs at upscale restaurants present this information to us when they serve up their lovely looking dishes, so that we better understand the source of our food.
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Alternative Flours or Flour Alternatives?
As far as home cooks go sustainable cooking isn't that difficult either. Water leftover from soaking chickpeas doesn’t only make it to our chhole or chana masala. Chickpea water (or aquafaba) can be whipped up and used as a substitute for egg whites in vegan recipes.
If you thought flour made from crickets, silkworms and scorpions was news in the world of sustainable cooking, maybe you haven’t read about coffee flour and wine flour yet. And the latest protein on the block is the larvae of black soldier flies. While most insects that can be made into protein-rich flour need to be fed grain, these larvae eat absolutely any waste food, which they then convert into protein and fertilizer. While research labs that manufacture these “alt flours” swear by their health benefits, whether or not the average consumer thinks they impart flavour and are within a price point that appeals to them is yet to be seen.
While on the topic of alt flours, I tried my hand at baking with spent grain last month - mash from the beer brewing process that is usually discarded or fed to cattle. I painstakingly dried out a couple of kilos of the mash and then pulsed it into a flour to make crunchy cookies! Little did I know that there is a company called Regrained in San Francisco which does exactly that!
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All this sustainable food talk has led to to some lovely reads on foraging foods and using the whole beast (and plant!) when cooking. More on that next month though!
Until then, nom nom!
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And just in case, you missed last month's newsletter, you can read it here.
Funnily enough, a lot of interesting Japan-centric content has appeared in my life since. Here are my top finds:
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