DON’T THROW IT AWAY
Traditionally tossed produce like broccoli stems and cauliflower leaves deserve a place on your table.
In the beginning, we ate what grew near us. Often, we grew our own vegetables. Then came factory farms, supermarkets and a food system that sometimes seems divorced from the land. Sadly, some of the tastiest stuff never makes it to the plate, supermarkets or even farmer’s markets. Food waste, it seems, is fast becoming a pandemic of a different sort. The sheer scope of America’s food waste problem is stunning. According to a recent analysis by ReFED, a national nonprofit focused on the problem, 35 percent of our food goes uneaten. Food waste is the largest portion of this and is the single largest input to landfills. Here in America, uneaten food was a $408 billion problem in 2019, costing food businesses and consumers alike.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American family of four discards $1,600 a year in produce. Nearly 30 percent of produce grown on farms is left behind after harvest because it is considered “blemished” or deemed unmarketable, even though it is perfectly edible. And the reach of the problem goes even further.
“If food waste was a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world,” says Danielle Nierenberg, president of Food Tank, a food think tank.
Many factors contribute to our food waste issues — some in homes, others on farms and at market. In homes, those problems include premature discarding of foodstuffs, supersize portions, nonuse and misuse.
But it’s homes that are the single largest contributor, according to Geertje Grootenhuis, program director for wasted-food prevention at the San Diego Food System Alliance.
Dana Gunders, ReFED’s executive director, agrees, adding that there are a number of reasons for this. “We have less kitchen skills than we once did and are aspirational in our shopping,” she says.
Those aspirations don’t always pan out. We shop for salad and end up making pasta or getting takeout.
One reason is that we lack confidence in knowing when foodstuffs are good, wholesome and healthful. We rely on “use by,” “enjoy by” or “sell by” dates and assume that, if they’ve passed, the food is spoiled. When we grew our own vegetables, we knew what a good vegetable looked like. If it was slimy or fuzzy, it was probably bad.
“It goes back to common sense,” says Nierenberg.
There is, however, a toolbox full of solutions to household vegetable waste. One trendy solution is composting. That has the virtue of using waste for a beneficial purpose. Another perspective, though, is that composting takes food and turns it into dirt — good dirt, perhaps, but still dirt. And even at that, according to Grootenhuis, San Diego County farms are prohibited by law from transporting food surplus vegetation to central composting facilities, apparently as a protection for the local government’s waste hauling contractors.
Many restaurants take those less-thanbeautiful vegetables and scraps and make wholesome stocks and broths or preserve them by drying them in a dehydrator or oven, or pickle or ferment them using salt or acid. These solutions accomplish more than eliminate waste; they improve those vegetables. And there’s no reason home cooks cannot do the same.
Part of America’s food waste problem lies in excessive portion sizes: Home cooks often end up cooking for four when there are only two, and not using the leftovers. One way to understand the scope of that problem is to collect all uneaten food in a garbage bag and weigh it at the end of the week. Track this for a month to prove that the first week was accurate. The Food Alliance ran an experiment doing just that, which highlighted the issue.
Another prevalent and readily solvable problem is discarding delicious parts of vegetables by home cooks who don’t know how to use them. Take two examples: broccoli stems and carrot tops. The latter can be an intriguing substitute for basil in a pesto or parsley in a gremolata, which includes lemon zest and garlic. The former, one of the tastiest parts of the broccoli plant, can be roasted or used in a Korean banchan, a small side dish.
But much of our food waste occurs before produce even hits the market, because of the myth that cosmetic perfection equals a superior product. That myth contributes very real adverse effects on the food that hits supermarket bins and shelves.
For example, picture the perfect tomato: It’s beautiful, with smooth red skin surrounding a luscious, sweet interior balanced by bright acidic flavors. It’s gorgeous and delicious and what we expect every time.
Supermarkets know it’s that beautiful red color consumers notice first. If a tomato is harvested at the peak of perfection, however, it may arrive at the market bruised, overly soft and bearing little superficial resemblance to that tomato-of-our-dreams. Thus, most supermarket tomatoes are harvested early and green and shipped to distribution centers, where they’re exposed to ethylene gas to achieve red color, regardless of ripeness. That yields a grossly inferior product. Cosmetic perfection? Perhaps. Flavor? Less so.
Often, the best tasting produce is not cosmetically perfect: Some parts may be discolored or bruised, but the whole thing need not be thrown away. One approach is to dehydrate the produce (think oven-dried tomatoes) and use a food processor or spice grinder to turn it into a flavorful powder that can be used as a garnish, for soups, to thicken sauces or add to burgers or muffins. Or take the bag of dried Japanese or arbol chiles turning brown in the pantry, cut off the discolored parts, deseed the chiles and grind them in a spice grinder for a close approximation of gochugaru, Korea’s signature chile powder.
Ironically, some of the most delicious and beautiful foodstuffs never reach market. Take, for example, the leaves of brassicas like cauliflower or broccoli. The flowers of these plants are supermarket staples. Often, though, markets only offer broccoli “crowns,” cutting off and discarding the stems, which are also edible. But perhaps the most flavorful part is the plants’ long, broad, flat leaves. Yet no one seems to want them. Chefs know how good they taste, but supermarkets, it seems, can’t give them away.
So, what becomes of those leaves? As Trish Watlington — owner and farmer of La Mesa’s Two Forks Farm — explains it, the best choices for large commercial farms are to “feed the leaves to the farm’s animals or compost them.” And while that beats adding them to the waste stream, it’s still turning delicious food into dirt. There’s likely not a farmer in the country growing cauliflower or broccoli who does not know that.
But there is one other option: Cook with them! The key problem — for those without their own garden — is finding the leaves, but the solution might be as close as the local farmers market. Find a cauliflower or broccoli vendor, ask if they have leftover leaves lying on the ground and offer to buy some the following week.
Once you have in hand, prepare the brassica leaves as you would any kale, collards or other greens. Braise the leaves or shred and stir-fry them. My favorite, though, is to use them in a stir-fry or as a wrapper, as I would cabbage leaves; think Polish goła b , k a i stuffed cabbage roll.
While the global COVID-19 pandemic has taken much away from us, ironically, it has also given us some gifts. One of these, Nierenberg points out, is that food waste has gone down. With people cooking and eating at home more often, home cooks have been more focused on eating leftovers, using more of what they have, and that means wasting less. But, as Nierenberg asks, “Will that continue after the pandemic is over?”
It can if we want it to. It can if we focus on flavors, not fads, and on common sense, not just convenience. Using ingredients like brassica leaves and not being put off by a cosmetic blemish helps take us back to the soil without having to turn some of the tastiest foodstuffs on the planet into dirt or, worse yet, waste.
Gardiner is a freelance food writer whose first cookbook, “Modern Kosher: Global Flavors, New Traditions,” published in September. He lives in La Mesa.