Today restaruants find ways to reduce food waste and use food waste to feed the poor by giving it to soup kitchens and food pantries. Many restaruants are aiming at zero waste or reducing waste with food and other products they use.
Composting In Middletown, CT
Composting: Photo Source The Idea Garden
In Middletown CT the city has a program that collects restaruants food waste for compost. Their Feed The Earth Campaign turns organic waste to compost for growing plants in gardens and on farms. The sanitation department in Middletown provides compost bins to restaurants as part of their sanitation services. They can make healthy soil from compost to grow crops.
Composting Makes Soil: Source Progressive Charlestown
Zero Waste Restaurants
The Rhodara Restaurant in Brooklyn does not have trash cans. They do not use single use plastic and they shred cardboard to use in compost. The restaurant donates cork to a company that makes shoes. Staff delivers bread by bicycle carried in a bin from a local bakery. They wrap cheese in beeswax paper.
In London the Silo serves a set menu and makes compost for suppliers and customers that they can take home for their gardens. The plates they use are made from recycled plastic. They use local farmers and producers and make butter and almond milk on site. The restaruant buys their meat from sustainable producers, mill their flour, and makes butter and cream.
Serve Market and Cafe in Seattle has food and coffee delivered in resuable bulk bins. It uses dispensers for sugar no packets, and resuable to go cups. Graffiti Earth in New York uses damaged and irregular produce and seafood to make meals. The Harbor House Inn in CA grows 80% of the food on their farm and uses forgaing from local tidepools. They use a composter that turns vegetable waste into compost overnight.
More Restaurants With Sustainable Practices
The Overends Kitchen at Airfield Estate in Dublin grows their own fruit and vegetables on their farm and produce butter, milk, and cream. They focus on farm to table meals and use leftover food like bread for sandwiches and leftover coffee grounds to bake beetroot overnight. They give extra produce to other restaurant or sell them at the farm market.
Overends Kitchen makes yogurt and ice cream with leftover cream, milk, and brown bread. The caterer they use saves cheese rinds to make stock and risotto.
Candied Oranges
The Bakery 41 barters with customers for home grown fruit in exchange for bread and pastries. They get boxes of apples, pears from customers and boxes of banana, chocolate from a vendor so they can make banana and chocolate muffins for a local school. One farmer takes unsold bread from them and feeds it to his pigs on the farm. The bakery uses apple peels to make apple jelly.
Feeding Pigs Leftover Food: Cam AC UK
There are many restaruants that have their own gardens, greenhouses, and farms. The have innovative ways to not waste food and grow some of their own product. This is a growing trend and in the future you will see mor restaruants that focus on sustainable food and growing their own.
Vegetable Garden at Ardradity Castle: Gordon Bran Geograph Britain
References:
Middletown first in CT to turn restaurant scaps into compost, by Casandra Day, Middletown Press, July 14, 2021
How Chefs are Reducing Food Waster in Their Kitchens, by Silvia Thomas, Irish Times November 2023
The Rise of Zero Waste Restaruants, by Emily Matchar, SmithsonianMagazine/Innovation, March 2020
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