TED Talks are almost always captivating, but here’s one that’s actually related to food waste. Very related.
British chef/restaurateur Arthur Potts Dawson discusses his approach to sustainability–both with food waste and otherwise–at his restaurants Acornhouse and Waterhouse.
Some highlights, for me:
I basically created a menu that allowed people to choose the amount and the volume of the food that they wanted to consume. Rather than me putting a dish down, they are allowed to help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted.
You can’t get rid of waste. But this story’s not about eliminating it, it’s about minimizing it.
On that last point, it’d be great if all restaurants could compost their veggie scraps on-site and grow food in containers w/ the resulting soil amendment. And have a worm bin. And a dehydrating desiccating mascerater!
Be sure to stick around for the People’s Supermarket part toward the end. At around the 7:25 mark, Dawson pledges that the co-op will have ” zero food waste.” (While still fabulous, this almost always means that they will compost their waste, not that there won’t be any.)
And Dawson ends his talk nicely by raising a neat notion: ‘Nature doesn’t create waste. In a closed cycle, waste is the end of the beginning.’
Amen.
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