“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” – Virginia Woolf

I don't like to be preachy but, when it comes to matters of money, I guess that is part of my job description. If I can combine an economic matter with a social or environmental matter, then all the better.

I have come across a statistic several times recently (probably due to Earth Day) that floored me. According to a recent NPR piece 40% of our food is wasted each year in the US (www.wbur.org/hereandnow).  This is the equivalent of dropping 2 of 5 grocery bags. Some sources estimate this waste even higher. This trickles up to waste of water, fertilizer, land, energy, and your hard-earned dollars.

Just think of how this can add up.  According to the USDA (www.usda.gov) a family of 4 on a moderate-cost plan spends approximately $12,908.40 on groceries every year.  If you do simply dump 2 of those 5 bags in the parking lot, you are wasting about $5,150 dollars per year. 

The National Resources Defense Council has chosen Nashville as a pilot city on how to cut down on food waste, not only by changing local policies but by grass-roots, actionable initiatives (www.nrdc.org).

As restaurants are one of the big offenders of food waste, one intriguing way in which the chefs of Nashville are approaching this problem is with amuse bouche (literally, “happy mouth”). Traditionally, amuse-bouche were tiny, bite-sized portions sent out by the chef to whet a patron’s appetite. Today, some of Nashville’s chefs are designing these little bites using surplus ingredients.

Here are some interesting ways in which chefs are using ingredients that are either considered unusable or leftover quantities are too small, normally ending up in the trash bin.

• Cured-beet and scottish salmon napoleon with bibb lettuce - Five Fifty-Five in Portland, Maine
• Warm onion tart with thyme – Tru in Chicago
• Racer 5 Beer Bubble - a golden sphere filled with Bear Republic Brewery's Racer 5 India Pale Ale and a hint of lemon - Cyrus in Healdsburg, California..

It is not just restaurants, agriculture and grocery stores that contribute to this waste. It occurs in our own kitchens as well.

Eugenia Bone, (www.kitchenecosystem.com) a well known food writer and author, draws parallels between natural ecosystems and kitchen ecosystems. In this perfect world there is no waste – everything cycles back into the system, mostly through use or with composting or recycling. Your food will be only as good as the diversity of fresh and homemade ingredients used in this dynamic way. Essentially, you get out of the system what you put into it.

Bone recommends expanding what you do with a food to beyond just that night and then utilize that food in a different way. Look at what you buy often and incorporate homemade ingredients into your kitchen that you use frequently.

One prime example would be when broccoli is truly in season. It may be available all year, but June – November will be prime season for Farmer’s Market regulars and every part of this vegetable can be used. The tough outer layer of the stalk can be mixed with other vegetable scraps to make an excellent vegetable broth.  This can be used as a base for soups, to enrich a pasta dish or to substitute for chicken broth in almost any recipe. It can also be used to make a great pureed soup.  Any parts left from a bunch?  You can boil in salted water and use in place of basil to make a broccoli pesto to augment chicken dishes, pasta dishes and to make a great addition to a nicoise salad.

So we see two very different approaches to the issue of food salvage: chefs creating high-end morsels for paying patrons and recycling odds and ends in the home kitchen.

See if you can look at your kitchen scraps in a different way: it will equate to elegant efficiency in terms of your carbon footprint and your dollars.

Submitted by Keri Gore