412 Food Rescue’s reopened kitchen turns food waste into dinner. And so can you.
In a way, chef Greg Austin prepared for December’s reopening event for 412 Food Rescue’s zero-waste kitchen, called the Good Food Project, all of his life.
Growing up in Dubois, he didn’t cook with his family, who often relied on TV dinners. Rather than accepting those habits, he made the decision to learn about food and how to work with it.
As a young adult, he started working at restaurants’ bottom rungs, as a dishwasher and buffet attendant, where he saw firsthand the amount of waste created at the consumer level. He frequented Western Pennsylvania as a traveling musician through his late teens and early 20s when he discovered “a really radical spirit about Pittsburgh” that brought him here to stay in 2010.
He worked on the BRGR side of S&P Group’s East Liberty restaurant space that shared a kitchen with the now-closed Spoon. “For someone just getting into food, getting to watch the well-oiled machine of pretty talented people was massive,” he said of the experience, which preceded moving into elevated roles at the now-closed e2 in Highland Park and Spirit in Lawrenceville.
He found himself in another shared kitchen beginning in May 2020, but this time, he was in charge. Mr. Austin is the head chef and project manager of the Good
Food Project, which shares preparation space with Sprezzatura Cafe at a solar-powered building on East Sherman Street in Millville.
The Good Food Project was an
invention of necessity in 2019 for innovative food waste-reduction nonprofit 412 Food Rescue, which, with a legion of volunteers and staff, “rescues” food that would
otherwise go to waste and connects it with organizations and individuals in need.
“The initial idea came from the realization that there are nonprofit partners who can’t carry the amount of donations or process them,” said operations manager Josh Weiland. “To increase impact, we had to be creative about what we could possibly do.”
To use the abundance of edible donations for which recipients couldn’t be found, 412 Food Rescue brainstormers thought about creating their own commercial kitchen, preparing the foods and plating them into three-compartment containers to be distributed to the community, all at zero food cost. As demand increased, the team took another step toward sustainability by preparing those meals and freezing them, giving each one a six- to seven-month shelf life.
Going into March 2020, the Good Food Project made and distributed 300 meals per week. But as the pandemic further polarized the categories of “rich” and “poor,” demand spiked as did donations, making the June 2021 expansion, funded by Eden Hall Foundation, a necessary next step.
With a new walk-in cooler and freezer and double the original prep space, Mr. Austin’s kitchen aims to produce 100,000 meals per year once fully scaled. Another new facet of the project, the Grocery Bagging Program, will distribute more than 500 bags of food per week, much of which is provided by Gordon Food Service, to Allegheny County Housing Authority locations.
The Good Food Project already has served 22 nonprofit partners and
produced well more than 17,000 meals, but there’s an elephant in the room.
Between 30% and 40% of food produced is wasted, according to the Food and Drug Administration, and more than 10% of American house-holds experienced hunger just lastyear, says the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. While organizations such as 412 Food Rescue do their best to effect change on a larger scale, decisions made by individuals in their home kitchens have a sizable role to play.
While a zero-waste goal might be too tall an order for many households, here’s how to be more intentional about food and waste less, using lessons learned by the Good Food Project.
Culinary flexibility
Leading up to the Dec. 6 post-expansion reopening event, Mr. Austin had a menu in mind, though nothing was final until just days before. That’s because his menu planning is a neverending episode “Chopped.”
As unpredictable as the show’s boxes of mystery ingredients are donations full of rejected foods due to aesthetic standards, sell-by timelines or transit mishaps, which means Mr. Austin must be quick on his feet and creative.
“If we don’t have a better solution to these giant systemsright now, the best thing we can do individually is be a little flexible with what we’re cooking with,” he told the Post-Gazette. “That’s aesthetically. That’s flavor-wise. If we’re all experimental, a lot less gets rejected.”
To the evening’s guest list of VIP and community supporters, Mr. Austin served appetizers composed of would-be garbage, though the menu sounded more like something froma high-end restaurant.
The menu — basil and blue cheese logs with cherries and walnuts, lima bean hummus with seasoned oil
and garam masala, chard stem kimchi with chili aioli and sour cream served on fried capicola “crackers” — modeled how “substituting X for Y” can lead to visually pleasing, nutritious and tasty food, the same kind that goes out to the community through the project’s frozen meals.
“Do you ever have those moments where you’re like, ‘I’m just going to use up everything in my pantry,’ and then you make something that’s actually the best thing you’ve made in a long time? It’s the same thing,” said 412 Food Rescue CEO and cofounder Leah Lizarondo. “Let’s not keep things in our pantry and let them go to waste. Let’s re-create it. That’s what these guys do every day.”
But Mr. Austin’s years of professional culinary experience are not required. For home chefs, waste reduction only requires ingredient flexibility, a little forethought and maybe a big pot.
Sunday soup
Despite some heroic feats at work, Mr. Austin is only human. After a day of cooking for others, he found himself unexcited to cook for himself and his partner, Rebecca, at night.
Noncompostable takeout containers and a habit of letting foods age past their prime made him look in the mirror until he found a solution: Sunday soup.
“I try to make a soup every Sunday out of everything in my fridge that makes sense in a soup,” he said.
By heating the contents to a roiling boil — for various lengths of time depending upon the ingredients — he extends the life of those foods another five days, per food safety dictum. The soup empties his fridge of odds and ends that might otherwise go to waste and gives him a week of nutritious lunches, further preventing the urge to reach for convenient — and oftentimes waste-producing — meals.
Diner flexibility
Ingredient flexibility is only half of the equation: Those eating the meals must be open to new combinations.
Mr. Austin never means to take his meal recipients out of their gustatory comfort zones, but some palate-stretching is a natural consequence of reworking a recipe’s classic ingredients, such as substituting lima beans for chick peas in hummus.
He hopes to make unexpected ingredients work just as well as the originals, he says. But those simple switches do shine a light on a less often discussed notion of accessibility, which has implications for food waste.
“We all have some aspect of food insecurity in our life,” he said. Outside of true food insecurity, personal diet choices, cultural food preferences or even foods typically associated with the “rich” or “poor” that causes the opposite group to shun them create categories of “inaccessible” foods, he explained.
“We could have more access than we’re aware of if we can break down those barriers,” he said. “When I talk about personal flexibility, that’s what I’m talking about, first and foremost.”
Dignity
For a man whose career began by washing away wasted food from plates and buffets, there’s perhaps a unique satisfaction in turning would-be food waste into everything from comforting classics to high-end small bites for everyone from the city’s elite to those just getting by.
Ingredients such as blue cheese, capicola and the occasional batch of scallops dispel the stereotype that wasted food is low-quality food, but the attention Mr. Austin gives those ingredients is a chosen extra step because of what it says to the meals’ recipients.
“That’s where the dignity comes in,” he said. “If I could handanything to to someone in this world, it would be something that preserves their dignity.
“I’m not handing them their dignity. They’re always carrying that with them. But I don’t want to hand them something that takes that away.”
“Do you ever have those moments where you’re like, ‘I’m just going to use up everything in my pantry,’ and then you make something that’s actually the best thing you’ve made in a long time? It’s the same thing.”
412 Food Rescue CEO and co-founder Leah Lizarondo