Going Green in the Granite State

NPR’s Morning Edition recently profiled a tiny composting company in New Hampshire. It’s always fun to see food waste receive national attention.

EcoMovement collects restaurant food waste from about 30 eateries near Portsmouth, N.H, and I’m sure that number will only grow after the company’s NPR exposure.

Founder Rian Bedard saw composting up close while living in San Francisco, then brought it to New England. And restaurateurs are eating it up there, partly because of the cost savings.

Bella Sol owner Brian Pearson estimates that the service has cut the restaurant’s trash removal expenses by at least 75 percent.

I’m impressed that Bedard gives customers an incentive to reduce their waste by making the fees based on the amount produced.

The most interesting angle of the piece, in my mind, though, was the idea of whether these small composting operations will push the waste giants to offer composting service. While that would put the minnows out of business, it would mean composting has a much larger reach. In that way, composting’s arc may come to resemble the story of organic farming.

June 3, 2010 | Posted in Composting, Restaurant | Comments closed

No Food For You!

Talk about a culture clash. A Japanese chef in Sydney is taking a firm stance on plate waste. As in: don’t clean your plate, don’t come back.

Those who leave food behind at chef Yukako Ichikawa’s restaruant, Wafu, are informally banned from returning. As she put it,

“(When they try to return), if I remember their face, I say no,” Ichikawa said.

In addition to that hard line, Ichikawa also provides an incentive for her customers to eat all of their food.

Diners able to polish off their old-fashioned Japanese meal get 30 percent off their bill and an invitation to join Ichikawa’s exclusive list of more than 800 regulars.

It’s extreme–the whole thing reminds me of the Soup Nazi episode on Seinfeld–but this policy would certainly reduce waste. What do you make of this policy? Too harsh? Just right? Not quite?

June 1, 2010 | Posted in Restaurant | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

It’s not every day that Prince Charles and food waste find themselves in the same sentence. But that’s the story out of Britain, as the Prince of Wales blasted the country’s squandering.

“In this country we waste 10 billion quid’s worth of food every year – wasted. Is that really a sensible system at the end of the day? I don’t think so.”

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Meanwhile, two UK sports stars are launching a food scrap collection service called Eco Food Recycling Limited. The best part is that a table tennis international (Chris Heaps)  is one of them. Just don’t call it ‘ping pong.’

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Eric Lohela is the man behind the Santa Barbara Food Scraps Collection Program. Sounds like a cool guy, but his email signature is cooler: “Sometimes going in circles is productive. Compost!”

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Once a month garbage pickup? It could happen in Portland if this dude (Allen Field) has his way.

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Finally–why throw out those fish heads and guts without extracting some of the nutritional value from them??

May 28, 2010 | Posted in Composting, Friday Buffet, International, Waste Stream | Comments closed

Two items of business

Without many book tasks left, I’ve gone all Facebook and started a page for this here blog. As you super-observant visitors will have noticed, I have a link to it on the sidebar. I humbly ask for your official FB “thumbs up.”

Who knows, I might just do a little raffle next week for all those who’ve officially “liked” the page.

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I really like this photo of food recovery in action, straight from Ames, Iowa. Even more encouraging is evidence that Walmart’s pro-donation policy toward edible but unsellable food is starting to pay off.

photo by Nirmalendu Majumdar

May 27, 2010 | Posted in Food Recovery, General, Personal | Comments closed

Foxy Take-home Box

I love this Red Robin to-go box.

Only one problem–it’s not a take-home box. Huh?!

The faux picnic basket is instead Red Robin’s centerpiece/vessel for ads. Not according to my mother-in-law (bless her heart), who decided it would make the perfect doggie bag and took some leftovers home in the paper box.

Upon further examination, it wasn’t ideal. The handle prevents the box top from opening all the way. Maybe that’s why it decorates tables and advertises RR food instead of letting customers take it home.

While that’s a bit sad–a box so creative really should be a doggie bag–it can serve as inspiration. I’d love to see more establishments come out with neat to-go apparatus (or at the very least avoid Styrofoam).

If restaurants put a tiny bit of effort into their packaging, it would go a long way toward encouraging diners to take home their food (thus avoiding waste and possibly even saving restaurants money if they don’t have as much waste to be hauled away).

I’m curious: Has anyone seen anything constituting fun or interesting to-go containers?

May 26, 2010 | Posted in Personal, Restaurant | Comments closed

Beep, Beep–Anything for the Compost Heap?

Things are really looking up in Washington. The health care bill finally passed, the Wizards got the first pick in the NBA Draft and household compost collection will soon be available for much of the D.C. area.

While businesses have long been able to have their separated food waste picked up by Envirelation, a new operation called  Compost Cab will offer the same service for households (and businesses, too) starting in June.

It seems pretty simple:

You sign up online. We provide you with a standardized bin equipped with a sturdy, compostable bag liner. You fill the bin with your organic material, and once a week, on a reliable, fuel-efficient schedule, Compost Cab picks up the bag, leaving behind only a clean bin with a new liner.

Compost Cab’s site nicely summarizes the environmental benefits of keeping food out of the landfill. Also, they give each customer 5 pounds of finished compost and 1 pound of worm castings for every 50 pounds of food the company collects. Not bad for $8 per week.

Best of all–for the Mr. T fans out there–the company’s taxi and checkerboard motifs and the District location brings back fond memories of D.C. Cab. Now if they could only get Mr. T to collect the compost, existing customers’ participation would probably…increase.

  • May 24, 2010 | Posted in Composting | Comments closed

    Friday Buffet

    Ample Harvest is an awesome site that links gardeners with too much stuff to food pantries. Its founder, Gary Oppenheimer, was profiled as a CNN Hero. Rightly so! (But I’m having a hard time imagining recipients of fresh horseradish , as in the video, getting too jazzed.)

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    Here’s a radio interview with Laura Wright, who wrote the fabulous “Waging War on Food Waste” that I linked to back in February.

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    Were all you 30 Rock fans out there as stunned as I was to hear a food waste reference in Thursday night’s episode? As part of his pseudo-rant at Northeast media elites, Kenneth, the show’s Southern fish-out-of-water, snarled something like: “I’ve watched you people throw out better food than my family had on Christmas.” Tell em, Ken!

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    Cleveland rocks! (And composts)

    Composting Cleveland’s food waste

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    Looks like it’s still full-steam ahead on AD in the UK, as a 30,000 tonne per year facility opened in Staffordshire. Of course, this new AD plant was well in the works before the Tories took over, so it doesn’t really mean much. But a good sign nonetheless.

    May 21, 2010 | Posted in General | Comments closed

    Pay-what-you-can Panera

    Panera Bread has just started a very interesting experiment: a community outreach restaurant where customers pay what they can afford. The sign at the entrance says it all:  “Take what you need, leave your fair share.”

    Panera, called St. Louis Bread Company in its hometown, opened St. Louis Bread Company Cares in Clayton, Missouri on Sunday. More such non-profit eateries  (branded Panera Cares) may be on the way.

    Here’s a bit more on the venture:

    From a food waste perspective, the store sells day-old baked goods from other Paneras (but the sandwich bread is baked that day). That’s a useful outcome for those items, and it’s especially heartening given the previous news that some Panera franchises have poured bleach on their discarded food to prevent Dumpster diving.

    The St. Louis Bread Company Cares has the regular prices listed as a guide, and it will be fascinating to see whether customers pay enough so that the non-profit restaurant is self-sustaining. Hopefully it will, as it’s sure to sustain some folks down on their luck.

    May 19, 2010 | Posted in Restaurant | Comments closed

    Efficient Picking

    I had the privilege of going to a pig pickin’ this weekend. For those of you non-North Carolinians, that means a whole hog roast. Although, in this case it was a half hog (minus the head).

    Now, if you’re going to eat meat–and I do–this kind of event makes for a darn efficient use of it. At these kinds of events, the host usually takes a bunch of meat off the hog to chop into what we here call “barbecue” (because Barbecue is a Noun).

    some pretty well picked porkBut the coolest (and tastiest) part is that they’ll then leave the carcass on the smoker for people to pick at. And the germane part is that people really do pick–with knife and fingers. Not only is it socially acceptable, it’s encouraged.

    So, pick we did. I know I contributed in the cleaning of some of the ribs pictured here. And by the time I left, there really wasn’t much left. Same goes for the rest of the pot-luck buffet.

    Not sure how applicable this idea is for other food situations, but there’s something about relaxed manners that tends to reduce waste. Any other examples come to mind?

    May 17, 2010 | Posted in Events, Personal | Comments closed

    Do Tories Hate Waste?

    After the recent election in Britain, there’s a new Conservative Party prime minister and cabinet. OK, sure. But what I’m wondering is what will become of Britain’s anti-food waste movement?

    Hopefully, nothing. After all, what’s more conservative than conserving your resources (i.e. not wasting)? The question is: is it Conservative?
    image courtesy of Tom Edwards via Creative CommonsI’d guess that there will be less government investment in waste reduction, but that most activity will continue unabated. There’s just so much built up momentum.

    And from what I’ve read, it seems like business as usual:

    While I can’t see this attention on waste evaporating overnight, I hope it doesn’t fade over weeks and months, either. Fingers crossed.

    May 14, 2010 | Posted in International | Comments closed