On “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg,” Adam Kaye, co-founder of Spare Food Company, talks about making the inevitable impossible for food waste. “The idea is to design waste out of the food system,” says Kaye. “Food waste is not inevitable.”
“We’ve been subject to this food manifest destiny—that there’s as much out there as we want, so we take whatever we deem as valuable: that is fine, there will still be more of it. It came a time that we began to cherry-pick what was valuable in the food system,” says Kaye. “From this, we’ve made this culture of waste: completely against what cooking and eating have historically been about.
The Spare Food Company uses culinary innovation to create new products and processes that use leftover food and food scraps to design new meals and menus—the company also wants to redefine what is commonly called food waste to change the way food professionals see, think, plan, and cook with these resources. “So much of this is redirecting the conversation. It is spare food. Nobody wants to eat waste or garbage,” says Kaye.
In 2015, Kaye co-created the wastED pop-up restaurant series in New York and London, boasting menus using forgotten or unwanted parts of food. “We took products that people don’t consider as delicious or coveted, and we created something really pretty out of it,” says Kaye. To create the menu, Kaye reached out to food suppliers like Kelso, Pierless Fish, Baldor, and more, thinking up innovative meals such as fruit pulp burgers and monkfish wings.
Feature Image Courtesy of SpareFood.com: Adam Kaye and Jeremy Kaye
