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

, ,

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' worth of still edible food is tossed every year here in the US, and more than 85 percent of it ends up in landfill. Meanwhile, more than 1 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 meeting 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!

Episode Notes

A Caucasian man in a green bandana with red-blonde beard displays two plastic wrapped packages, of raw pork chop and a whitefish, in the back of a truck packed with banana boxes of food; a microphone emerges from bottom left.
Rethink Food's sustainability lead, Matt Riegler, displays pork chops and fish filets that would have been thrown away before they were donated to Rethink, to be repurposed into meals for the food insecure. (Photo by Nicola Twilley)

Dana Gunders

Food waste expert Dana Gunders is the president of ReFed, a nonprofit focused on research and action to combat food waste.

Matt Joswiak, Ken Baker, & Rethink Food

Matt Joswiak is a the founder and CEO of Rethink Food, a New York City-based nonprofit transforming food that would be wasted into nutritious meals for the food insecure. Ken Baker is Rethink Food's culinary director.

Ken Baker, Rethink Food's culinary director, (left) helps load hundreds of bags of chips destined for the dumpster at Chelsea Market. Instead, they'll accompany packed lunches prepared by Rethink. (Photo by Nicola Twilley)
An African-American man with braided hair, wearing chef's gear, black apron, and black gloves, stands at an industrial stainless steel stove covered with vegetables - cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, cabbage - that he is stirring with a long metal spatula.
One of the chefs at Rethink cooks pounds of vegetables, largely donated by grocery stores, for their packaged meals. (Photo by Nicola Twilley)

Chris MacAulay

Chris MacAulay is the vice president of operations for North America at Too Good To Go, an app that lets restaurants make surplus food available to customers at a low price.

Emily Broad Leib

Emily Broad Leib is Founding Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, the first law school clinic in the country focusing on solutions to food system challenges.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics

This episode of Gastropod was supported by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Check out the other books, movies, shows, podcasts, and more that they support here.