EMILY KWONG: You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. It is Climate Solutions Week here at NPR and reporters around the country are bringing you stories on this year's theme-- food. I'm here with NPR culture correspondent Chloe Veltman. Hey, Chloe.
CHLOE VELTMAN: Hey there, Emily.
KWONG: I'm excited to talk about this climate solution with you because it begins in a pizzeria in San Francisco.
VELTMAN: That's right. Shuggie's Trash Pie.
KWONG: I love the name of this restaurant.
VELTMAN: Yeah. And Emily, this pizzeria is not your typical neighborhood pizza joint. For one thing, the pizza crust is made from what's left over after factories produce oat milk. Co-owner and chef David Murphy explains.
DAVID MURPHY: It's a spelt oat flour from the oat milk making process. So companies like Oatly and Minor Figures and all these, they have this pulp that's left over at the end of their process. It gets dehydrated, roasted, and then that gets milled down into a flour for us.
KWONG: Wow.
VELTMAN: Yeah. David's recipes use animal parts that often get cast aside, like meatballs made out of beef hearts. And here's diner Elizabeth Ramirez describing a salad she'd just eaten the night I paid Shuggie's a visit.
ELIZABETH RAMIREZ: It had the wilted greens and some bruised fruit.
KWONG: Yum. Bruised fruit salad. Pizza dough with leftover oats. So does Shuggie's source from, like, dumpster diving?
VELTMAN: Emphatic no, Emily. This is not where sesame street's Oscar the Grouch dines out.
OSCAR THE GROUCH: (SINGING) I love trash.
KWONG: I love that trash monster.
VELTMAN: Me too. Shuggie's co-owner Kayla Abe says her restaurant is focused on keeping food out of the dumpster.
KAYLA ABE: Shuggie's is a climate solutions restaurant, utilizing all types of upcycled ingredients that are typically discarded by our conventional food system, and we make all of those the stars of our menu.
KWONG: Wow. Upcycled food. That's awesome.
VELTMAN: Yeah. And so roughly 30% to 40% of all the food produced globally ends up being thrown out, if you can believe it, Emily.
KWONG: Wow.
VELTMAN: All of this waste is a huge problem when it comes to climate change, which is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels. But here's the thing. Everything involved in making food, from clearing land and raising cattle to packaging and cooking ingredients, contributes to one third of the world's planet warming pollution.
JONATHAN FOLEY: A surprising amount of the world's greenhouse gases come from either producing food or the larger food system in which we all engage every day.
VELTMAN: That's climate scientist Jonathan Foley. He's the executive director of the climate solutions think tank Project Drawdown.
FOLEY: Addressing food waste turns out to be one of the biggest climate solutions of them all.
KWONG: Today on the show, how a small but growing number of restaurants are working to reduce food waste. Though getting people comfortable with the idea of eating trash is far from easy. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR. All right. So, Chloe, we have been talking about how food waste is a massive global problem because of the planet warming gases that are emitted, both during food production and when food decays in a landfill. I assume we're talking about good old CO2 here, right?
VELTMAN: Carbon dioxide is a big one in terms of food production, you know, packaging, processing and transportation. There's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. And that's a problem because once CO2 is in the atmosphere, it can stay there for hundreds of years. So the more we produce CO2, the more that contributes to global warming. But there are also other gases, and specifically methane does a number on our planet because of its relationship to food waste.
KWONG: It's naturally found in the atmosphere. But in terms of greenhouse gases, there isn't as much methane floating around as there is carbon dioxide, right?
VELTMAN: That's right. But it's much more potent.
EUAN NISBET: And quite a lot of the actual warming that's happened is a result of methane emissions, not carbon dioxide.
VELTMAN: So that's Euan Nisbet. He's a professor of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway University of London in England, and he's an expert on this gas. He says methane or "meethane" shows up in two main ways when it comes to food waste. One, it's given off by landfills.
KWONG: Like that's through anaerobic digestion when there's not enough oxygen around. And less than a year later, bacteria starts to break down all the waste in that landfill, and in doing so generates methane.
VELTMAN: Right.
KWONG: Methane.
VELTMAN: Methane. Methane. Right. And Euan says so much of our food ends up there.
NISBET: If you throw a lot of food waste in a big landfill, and there are plenty of those in north America, then it's a quite important part of the global problem.
VELTMAN: And the second thing is it's created by the incredibly problematic for the climate beef and dairy industries.
KWONG: Yes.
NISBET: It comes out the front end of a cow. However, if you let a lot of cow poo rot, it'll make a lot of methane as well.
VELTMAN: So in essence, Emily, we should be more worried about cow burps than cow farts when it comes to controlling methane emissions that exacerbate climate change.
KWONG: That's the sound of climate change right there.
[LAUGHTER]
VELTMAN: I mean, livestock takes up over a quarter of all of the land on earth and is responsible for about 15% of greenhouse gases, including methane.
KWONG: OK, good to know. But there are simple ways to keep those methane levels down some, right?
VELTMAN: Yeah.
KWONG: Well, you can consume less meat and dairy.
VELTMAN: Right. And Euan Nisbet adds, when it comes to the landfill--
NISBET: You don't put the food waste into it.
VELTMAN: And that's where restaurants like Shuggie's Trash Pie--
KWONG: Now, they are the San Francisco restaurant we mentioned at the top of the show.
VELTMAN: Right. Could make a difference. Chef David Murphy is all about using ingredients that many other chefs and home cooks, for that matter, would normally toss, whether that's off cuts of meat, sparing of fruit and veggies, or fruit and veggies that are a bit past their prime. Here he is chopping carrots in the Shuggie's kitchen. Most people would toss the tough carrot tops. David uses them to make his chimichurri sauce, and the rest is for carrot cake.
MURPHY: The base of this sauce is just straight up food waste.
VELTMAN: The carrot tops go into a large white bucket along with surplus dried chilies, salt, vinegar, and olive oil.
MURPHY: And we're just going to cover the tops.
VELTMAN: Then he pulverizes it all using an industrial strength immersion blender. You should see this thing, Emily. It's massive. The whole process takes about five minutes, and the chef says anyone can do it at home.
KWONG: I got to hold on to my carrot tops and make this. This sounds delicious.
VELTMAN: Well, it's your lucky day, Emily. We have this and other signature Shuggie's recipes at npr.org.
KWONG: Amazing. OK, we'll be sure to link these recipes in our episode notes so you can try them at home. I'm really excited to cook these myself.
VELTMAN: And your enthusiasm illustrates how much influence chefs have over how we think about food, and that's key when it comes to getting people inspired about reducing waste.
RONI NEFF: They can help to shape people's views, expand our ideas of what's good food, and they can also shift behaviors in more subtle ways.
VELTMAN: Roni Neff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University who studies food systems and waste. Roni says beyond being trendsetters, restaurants can make all sorts of practical tweaks to lower food waste. One of the biggest things is reducing or customizing portion sizes.
NEFF: 70% of the food that's wasted in restaurants is happening after it's served to people in terms of plate waste or waste at the consumer side.
VELTMAN: Yeah, that's a lot, right? Restaurants can also streamline their ordering processes so extra food isn't sitting around. Sourcing imperfect and surplus ingredients is another great way to keep otherwise perfectly edible produce, meat, and fish out of the trash. And this is something that Jonathan Bow does. He's with Royal Hawaiian Seafood in south San Francisco. His company is a regular supplier to Shuggie's Trash Pie.
JONATHAN BOW: We're delivering, like, fish collars, tuna carcasses, halibut cheeks, all sorts of kind of unique and a little different from the norm type of products that you usually see in other restaurants.
VELTMAN: So it's one thing for clever chefs like David Murphy to create delicious dishes out of weird fish parts, but not everyone has those skills.
KWONG: But key to all of this, it seems, is customers shifting their buying and eating habits. Do you think it's a sign that customer habits are changing?
VELTMAN: Well, to be honest, there isn't really widespread acceptance of eating less than perfect foods, which food scientist Maddison Gurrola says is because of the norms we've bought into for such a long time.
MADDISON GURROLA: I think it's difficult just based on our consumer habits and how they've been shaped over the last several decades.
VELTMAN: Maddison says most restaurants, and grocery stores too, set high expectations.
GURROLA: Everything has to look identical and perfect, but nature doesn't produce identical. And so if customers see, say, a produce that looks different or a produce that's bruised, there's just the assumption that it's bad because it's not looking like the others where there's nothing wrong with it.
VELTMAN: But sometimes, Maddison says, there is genuinely something wrong with it. Food safety is serious and people can be reluctant to consume, say, milk that smells bad.
GURROLA: So there's also a legitimate concern on your health and, like, are you going to be safe eating this or are there going to be negative outcomes by eating something that can make you sick?
KWONG: OK. That's the balance. Yeah.
VELTMAN: Yeah. So food labeling, you know, those best before and use by and sell by dates are suppose to safeguard people from these problems, but Maddison says there isn't much science behind the labeling and there are no federal rules governing their use.
KWONG: I didn't realize this.
VELTMAN: Yeah, and that's why in May 2023, a bill was introduced to Congress to change that. It hasn't gone anywhere yet. And at one point, John Oliver even made fun of the stickers on his HBO show Last Week Tonight.
JOHN OLIVER: Those dates are decided on by manufacturers. And if I were a food manufacturer, I would make those dates as tight as possible to convince people to buy a new one of my products because unlike Apple, I can't just create a new operating system that suddenly means your old cereal is incompatible with your mouth. The truth is, with the--
VELTMAN: Yeah.
KWONG: OK. So clearly, we should think twice before throwing food out of the pantry or fridge at home just because the packaging tells us to. But back to restaurants, with all of these local and state regulations in place for how a restaurant can operate, their choices are kind of limited compared to ours, right?
VELTMAN: Right. I asked Shuggie's co-owner Kayla Abe, about this. She says it's complicated because of these restaurant regulations. So Shuggie's doesn't currently use expired foods, but she says they're having ongoing conversations with creameries and other food businesses about taking things off their hands that are nearing expiration. She says Shuggie's would still use these products within the stated best buy period, however.
KWONG: I think it's interesting also, just looking at the menu for Shuggie's and restaurants like it, that there's even dairy and meat on the menu. I mean, why, given the climate impact of those industries, why don't these places just serve vegan fare?
VELTMAN: Yeah, that's a great question, Emily. Kayla says they want to bring the meat eaters along instead of alienating them. And she reminded me that Shuggie's doesn't offer prime cuts of meat. They only make dishes using the surplus off cuts, like beef hearts, that can't easily be sold in regular markets and restaurants.
KWONG: Very cool. But Shuggie's, I mean, as pioneering as it is, it is just one restaurant in San Francisco. How much impact can it actually have on food trends around the world?
VELTMAN: Yeah, that's a great question, Emily. I mean, Shuggie's isn't alone. The small, but growing, number of eateries focused on waste reduction include, for example, Lighthouse in Brooklyn, New York, and the Emmer and Rye Group Restaurants in San Antonio and Austin, Texas. Also, there are big food service players, like Bon Appetit in the game. They run restaurants in businesses and universities in 33 states.
KWONG: Wow.
VELTMAN: Yeah, they're very widespread. Terri Brownlee is the company's VP of Food, Education, and Wellness, and she says Bon Appetit wants to reduce food waste across its restaurants by 50% by 2030. In order to do that, all of the company's outlets, she says, have to get on board in three ways.
TERRI BROWNLEE: We want everybody tracking food waste, we want everybody donating food, and we want everybody talking to the guest and educating them about the impact of food waste.
VELTMAN: But it's going to take many more restaurants doing this work, as well as a broader cultural change among customers, to really make a dent in the massive food waste problem.
KWONG: And presumably, that's true both for eating out and eating at home.
VELTMAN: Correct. And if that shift happens, it could mean less food waste in landfills and less planet-warming pollution, which makes reducing food waste a huge climate solution.
KWONG: Chloe, thank you so much for bringing us this story. I hope we can split a wilted green pie at some point.
VELTMAN: Yeah, that would be delicious. I'll look forward to that, Emily.
KWONG: If you care about food and food systems, there are a whole bunch of solutions on npr.org. Check out NPR's Climate solutions weak coverage at the link in our episode notes. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited and fact-checked by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Valentina Rodriguez Sanchez was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our Senior Vice President of Podcasting Strategy. I'm Emily Kwong, and this is Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
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