From Trash to Treasure: Why's It So Hard to Save Restaurant Leftovers From the Dumpster?

Gastropod

Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley

Science, Food, History, Arts

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 October 2024

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Every day, at the end of service, restaurants throw away tons of entirely edible food: heaps of pastries and whole loaves of bread, vegetables chopped but not cooked, noodle dough, fish off-cuts, and more. An estimated 20 billion meals's worth of still edible food overall is tossed every year here in the US, and more than 85 percent of it ends up in the landfill. Meanwhile, more than one in ten Americans are food insecure. So why is it so hard to keep all of that perfectly good food out of the trash and get it onto people’s plates instead? This week, we’re taking a deep dive into the dumpster (not literally!), to explore the most innovative and surprising new solutions to this toughest of food challenges, including the wizards transforming everything from stale bagels to gallons of banana cream concentrate into a delicious dinner. Did someone order meals, not methane? Oui chef! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	One thing that came in in my early days everything was this cinnamon flavored banana cream concentrate.
0:12.0	It was like these five gallon like vats of it and we got like a whole
0:16.4	palette of it. Holy moly that sounds disgusting. Not my favorite thing to eat either but in this case it was an opportunity
0:25.6	an opportunity to take something that might have gone into the trash and turn it into something
0:30.1	delicious. I do love delicious and I also love keeping food out of the trash and I of course
0:36.1	I'm Nicola Twilly and I'm Cynthia Graber and this is Gastropod the podcast that looks at
0:40.6	food through the lens of science and history.
0:42.9	This episode, why does it matter if we keep banana cream concentrate out of the trash?
0:47.7	That's just one of the many random things that a restaurant might find itself with more of
0:52.4	than it can use. the dumpster beckons which is a tragedy on many levels
0:58.1	But is there anything that we or the restaurants or that our elected officials can and should be doing about it?
1:04.5	As it turns out, there are a bunch of new exciting approaches to helping restaurants cut down
1:08.8	on waste and get what's still edible, like say leftover pizza or maybe some banana cream
1:14.2	concentrate get it all to people who need it and we are going to check out some of
1:19.0	these cool new ideas in person this episode of Gastropod is supported in part by the
1:24.2	Alfred P Sloane Foundation for the public understanding of science,
1:27.2	technology and economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media
1:31.6	Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.
1:38.0	Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks.
1:41.0	It's never too late to try new things and it's never too late to reinvent
1:45.5	yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kix is the city-sized crossover vehicle
1:51.0	that's been completely revamped for urban adventure.
	...

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