Yahoo – AFP,
Shaun Tandon, 28 Sep 2015
 |
US chef Dan
Barber takes part in the
presentation of the Basque Culinary
Center, on July
26, 2010, in the northern
Spanish Basque city of San
Sebastian (AFP Photo/Rafa
Rivas)
|
Chefs
cooked up a lunch made entirely of food that would have ended up in garbage
bins, hoping to highlight the extraordinary waste in modern diets and its role
in worsening climate change.
On the menu
for the lunch at the UN headquarters was a vegetable burger made of pulp left
over from juicing, which typically wastes most of the produce.
The burger
came with fries created from starchy corn that would typically go to animal
feed -- which along with biofuels is the end product of the overwhelming
majority of the 90 million acres (36 million hectares) of corn grown in the
United States.
"It's
the prototypical American meal but turned on its head. Instead of the beef,
we're going to eat the corn that feeds the beef," said Dan Barber, a
prominent New York chef who co-owns the Blue Hill restaurant.
"The
challenge is to create something truly delicious out of what we would otherwise
throw away," he told AFP.
Barber
crafted the menu with Sam Kass, the former White House chef who drove the
anti-obesity "Let's Move" campaign of First Lady Michelle Obama.
Kass thought
of the waste-lunch concept as he learned about year-end UN climate negotiations
in Paris, which aim to reach a far-reaching global agreement to tackle the
planet's worsening climate change.
 |
US First
Lady Michelle Obama (C) receives some planting advice from
White House
Assistant Chef Sam Kass (L) while planting vegetables with
children at Bancroft
Elementary School, May 29, 2009, in Washington, DC
(AFP Photo/Paul J. Richards)
|
"Everybody,
unanimously, described it as the most important negotiation of our
lifetime," he said.
But food
waste "was not something that was being discussed at that point, except in
small environmental circles," he said.
Vast
contributor to climate change
Major world
leaders took part in Sunday's lunch that was led by French President Francois
Hollande and Peruvian President Ollanta Humala with an aim of building momentum
for the Paris talks.
Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon, speaking to reporters afterward, said the lunch demonstrated how
food waste was "an often overlooked aspect of climate change."
 |
Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov speaks to the United Nations
Sustainable
Development Summit at the United Nations General Assembly
on September 27, 2015
(AFP Photo/Timothy A. Clary)
|
"That
is shameful when so many people suffer from hunger," Ban said.
According
to UN figures, 28 percent of agricultural lands around the world go to produce
food that is lost or wasted.
The loss
each year is the equivalent of 3.3 billion tonnes of carbon responsible for
climate change -- which would make food waste, if it were a nation, the biggest
emitter after China and the United States.
"It's
just unthinkable, the inefficiency in our system, particularly when you look at
something of this magnitude," Kass said.
'Delicious' social change
Barber
earlier this year ran a pop-up restaurant in New York sourced from food scraps
and is the author of the book "The Third Plate" that has championed a
global approach to his farm-to-table philosophy.
He said
that the elimination of food waste was in fact an ancient rather than modern
idea, as cooks historically would use everything edible at their disposal.
"The
idea of doing a 'waste dinner' would not have existed in the 1700s," he
said.
"The Westernized conception of a plate of food is enormously wasteful because we've been able to afford waste," he said.
 |
White House
Chef Sam Kass (C) serves food to members of the press,
prepared with help from
Zach Strief (R), a member of the 2010 Super Bowl
Champion New Orleans Saints,
at the Briefing Room at the White House in
Washington, DC, August 9, 2010 (AFP
Photo/Saul Loeb)
|
"The Westernized conception of a plate of food is enormously wasteful because we've been able to afford waste," he said.
Food waste
rates are even higher in the United States, which is blessed with vast
agricultural resources.
Barber
expressed hope that events such as the lunch could gradually change food
culture.
"The
long-term goal of this would be not to (be able to) create a waste meal,"
he said.
"You
don't do that by lecturing -- you do it... by making these world leaders have a
delicious meal that will make them think about spreading that message."
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