A Restaurant with No Leftovers
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That’s not exactly a solution to the dives and street food joints that couldn’t operate without some form of disposable containers or cutlery. And more importantly, that’s not a solution to the customers of those dives that can’t afford anything more expensive.
On the other hand, I imagine that a portion of waste reduction can simply be a change in habits and doesn’t necessarily cost anything.
I was once trying to explain this sort of idea to a climate change denying acquaintance. I said, forget the environment or the turtles, even if you don’t believe this is harming our environment, why are we using these devices designed to be immediately thrown away? Why do you need a straw with your water/soda but not with your beer? Where does that habit come from?
I mean, the answer is pretty easy: people have a strong preference for options that help reduce their cognitive load.
People prefer restaurants that provide take out containers rather than require they bring Tupperware.
People prefer grocery stores that provide bags rather than require they bring their own.
This isn't true of everyone - conscientiousness is normally distributed - but it is true for most people most of the time.
The upper middle class and wealthy who already harm the environment more by flying frequently or driving a brand new 25MPG Audi instead of a 40MPG 10 year old Nissan Versa aren’t going to save the planet by going to a zero-waste fancy restaurant, and they might be eating at that restaurant to alleviate their own guilt because they know they’re using more than their fair share in the first place.
For every one of them there’s 15 people working two jobs and eating at a fast food joint with disposable cutlery because there is no other option that fits their schedule or budget. But they might be less wasteful anyway because they don’t have the money to buy a few thousand pounds of jet fuel.
Very US-centric though, people in most european countries eat at home.
OTOH I have some US friends who I am not even sure know how to cook
I'm in the US, and 95% of the time, I cook my own food and eat it at home. So does nearly everyone I know.
I know this is not your substantive point but ...
The extent to which CAFE standards have improved mileage even over the past 10 years should not be ignored, and you should check your assumptions about fuel economy. e.g. 2020 Audi A4 gets basically the same combined mileage as the 2010 Nissan Versa.
https://fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=29866&id=4...
I know the company/cashiers assume it's expected of them, but to me it's like the gallon sized drinks at fast food chains. It aggravates me that anyone thinks it's necessary.
The Amazon packing and boxing situation is a whole other level of annoying.
Definitely cultural, AFAIK most Europeans brings their own bags for groceries and it's just automatic. Otherwise you have to buy a new bag at check-out.
Make people pay for their waste, usually it helps reducing them.
Disposable items (properly disposed of, ie landfilled) can be, and often are, more environmentally friendly than reusable items. Especially if you look at actual real life use, as opposed to projected or design use.
Look at a UK LCA of shopping bags:
A cotton tote needs to be reused ~173 times without being washed to break even with the efficiency of a single use HDPE bag. (Edit: other alternatives, like LDPE, paper or woven plastic, are also listed as low as multiplier of 2x vs HDPE. I didn't intend to mislead.)
If you're not doing a whole load of dishes, it can be more efficient to use plastic or paper plates for a meal, and trash them. The cost of just washing something can be relatively and unreasonably high, environmentally speaking.
The green movement has been over reliant on emotional programming (reuse = always good, plastic = always bad, etc) and needs to invest more in actual education. Landfills have gotten an especially unearned negative connotation.
Hopefully the new generation of college graduates are getting proper training in conducting proper Life Cycle Analysis'.
Not saying reuse is always bad or that we shouldn't be analysing these things, just that they need analysis, and not a collective gut reaction.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
Make them twice as thick. Melt a weight into the seam of each one to prevent flying and floating. You'd still be a magnitude ahead of the alternatives. There are alternatives besides banning.
They have their problems, but people don't realize what a damn miracle of engineering HDPE bags are. And other disposable paper and plastic items, to a lesser extent.
Ocado will pay 5p per bag, even other supermarkets' bags.
Plastic bags in the ocean are an externality, whose cost is hard to measure but is paid in the lives of wild things. The whole point of externalities is that people aren't bearing any cost for them: tax and/or ban is absolutely a reasonable approach to handling them, since it makes people take literal account of the literal downstream effects.
One more thing, on edit: the analysis you're calling for is good to do, but is also prone to the "seeing like a state" problem. The analysis will only include what can be easily measured... Which can leave out a lot of the story.
Re: the tax and ban... Tires and lead batteries in most states in the US is good example of this. You can tax or ban or regulate to put a cap on the problem. But if you want to collect the existing waste already out there, an incentive refund accomplishes much more, in less time.
Well, now a palette of them weighs 2-10 times as much and the energy required to ship them needs to be recalculated.
Here in the states, most grocery stores sell woven poly polypropylene, LDPE resusable bags, not cotton totes. The study you cite says it only takes 4 reuses of an LDPE bag to beat a single use plastic bag, and 11 for the woven PPE kind, an order of magnitude better than cotton. That's only a month or two of grocery trips, and they last for years. I know I've reused the same ones for the past decade.
Yes, I picked cotton because it's considered the luxury choice (given the context) and usually the one sold as the most environmentally friendly. Ie non bleached, organic, sustainably sourced etc that you don't usually see with plastic alternatives. (I did mean to make a point, but not mislead.)
Which is kinda my point... Plastics can fill a proper need and still be the most "green" choice. Same with paper or any "disposable".
But back to HDPE... Most people even reuse these at least once at home. And ignoring that, the nearest competitor is still twice the impact.
I'm not saying alternatives are bad, just that people need to be open to the fact that sometimes the unexpected alternative can be best.
And conversely, the "green" luxury alternative might actually be worst.
Cotton bags are completely irrelevant but are often cherrypicked by those with an agenda to push.
Besides my point is more that plastics have an appropriate place in the environmental scheme of things. Whether you treat them as disposable or reusable.
If you look at numbers, it's also enormously better here than in Asia. Like all of Europe and America are responsible for less than 5% of worldwide river/ocean litter.
Part of the problem is us (western society) shipping bulk "recyclables" overseas, which then get picked through for valuables, and the rest is often left out to be picked up by the next wind or rain.
One of the best things we could do for world wide river ocean litter pollution, is to just landfill low value recyclables domestically, instead of shipping then overseas. (Edit: or at least recycle them domestically, or with a trusted, regulated country)
Also applies somewhat to air quality with burning plastic for electricity.
We have a break room with a sink, reusable dinnerware, and disposable dinnerware. I cringed when I saw people washing a reusable plate in the sink. We're in Southern California. There's no way in which it is better for the environment to use gallons of water in order to keep a paper plate and a plastic fork out of the landfill.
Too often people take Reduce/Reuse/Recycle to heart without taking a broader view of all the resources that they are consuming.
173 is less than 4 years if you shop groceries once a week or so, I already used mine longer than that (aside from a couple that I lost). Never washed them either. They can last another 10 years I think, unless they are lost.
Those bags are bad idea for random shopping, but they work well enough for regular trips. Just keep them in the car.
I expect people waste more cotton on socks and t-shirts, but that's neither here not there.
They are way sturdier then the ones sold now. To replicate them I’d have to make them myself or look on etsy.
Looks like a pretty humble vegetarian bistro to me? Far from fancy.
And I would have thought someone best places to have a huge impact here might be someone like McDonalds, with their supplier clout they could force suppliers to meet high standards and with their scale it could have a huge impact.
E.g., McDonald's shifting to cage-free hens for egg purchases. Regardless of the reasons, that was expected to have a huge impact on egg farming.
That's exactly what governments do all the time. Every regulation on food safety, or pollution standards, etc. came from them. Because left to their own devices most businesses would settle on the same "maximize profits regardless of consequences" path.
P.S. Well you can "ask/demand" anything. But with no authority the process would be painfully slow, if even moving at all. Voting with the wallet works only when we have many good alternatives, which we usually don't.
I know this isn’t New York Expensive but it’s not working class food, either.
Seems exactly like simple working-class food to me - preserved fish and vegetables, pickled eggs, pies, breads.
If a pickled egg if your idea of fancy then I'm perplexed.
$12 glasses of wine seems more than reasonable for NYC, especially since natural wine often comes in at a higher cost than mass produced wine.
My father had a restaurant long ago. He hired a professional and prestigious cooker (the the title "chef" was not so common then) and the first thing he noticed is that everything was used.
There were a thousand tricks to plan the menus so meat not served were reused for broth and so on.
Honestly, its a sign of a great (and often family or locally run) restaurant when I see they are rolling their menu into the next day in a circumspect way - its a sign to me that they understand their menu very well and know the best ways to present it.
In this case, being able to pick and choose suppliers who can accommodate their needs is a luxury, but once the suppliers are tooled for that, it’s easier for others with less clout to follow.
A lot of changes are chicken and egg scenarios, where the market can’t move without the supply chain, and the supply chain can’t move without the demand. If someone has the means to kickstart that, more power to them. For example, 10 years ago smartphones were a luxury - now I know homeless people who use them to access public services. And I don’t see how we could have got to this point, without starting at “luxury”.
Street vendors could dispense into your container or charge you for a disposable one.
Zero waste is impractical. But having a zero waste restaurant showcases possible solutions for more practical waste reduction.
Only from the perspective of a citizen of a wealthy country trapped in a mindset of consumerism. Inhabitants of wealthy countries on average consume multiples of what inhabitants of poorer countries do.¹ The easiest way to lower your climate impact is to simply consume less. This doesn't cost anything, and in fact saves you money.
¹https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Now if you had a lid on the cup similar to car coffee mugs (where the top is indented with a small hole for the liquid to flow through), then that could be a solution for the straws.
I am seeing that more and more, and that's a good thing, but the odds are still good that I'll be served more food than most people can eat in a sitting, and I always feel bad when I see so much leftover food heading for the trash.
2k calories isn't even that much if you are a big, active man. And even if you aren't, as long as you don't eat that every meal, that's fine.
There is no reason to ban large servings, but what could be done is to make smaller, cheaper options mandatory, especially for products that can't be taken home easily (ex: ice cream).
I don't know. I don't do that, though. Mostly because if I'm eating out, it's usually a prelude to night doing other things -- and the last thing I want to do is have to cart around a bag of food.
Also, I used to routinely take leftovers home. It was a habit my parents had, and I just did it unquestioningly. Then one day I noticed that I rarely actually ate the leftovers (they tend to not be terrific the next day) and would throw them away anyhow.
and not sure how your food goes bad, if it's good in the restaurant... usually food doesn't go bad so quickly, but maybe you are one of those people who have some irrational aversion to leftovers (nothing wrong with that, my girlfriend is like that too) even though it's perfectly fine. right now i'm literally having reheated leftover pasta from a fine dining restaurant dinner last night, and i'm thoroughly enjoying it.
So people that go out to eat then go out and do other things that night before going home, unless it's the middle of winter and the car is basically a refrigerator itself, probably shouldn't bother bringing leftovers home with them.
https://www.thekitchn.com/how-long-can-you-leave-cooked-food...
I have the same issue when using home-cooked food as leftovers for lunch the next day. Cube steaks are rarely good warmed over (they dry out), rice ends up losing its stickiness (so it is a wet mess, or dried out crumbs). About the only thing that I can use for lunch the next day is some pasta based dishes, pizza (depending -- again, deep dish goes gross after a few hours), and manwich or tacos is good the next day (gotta keep the meat separated from everything else so it is easier to warm up in the microwave).
I prefer not to have the food stink up my car.
> not sure how your food goes bad, if it's good in the restaurant... usually food doesn't go bad so quickly,
It's not that it goes bad, it's that it's not as good reheated the next day as something that I could just cook up myself, so I'll cook.
This depends a lot on what the dish is, though. Some dishes are OK the next day, but most aren't.
> but maybe you are one of those people who have some irrational aversion to leftovers
No, I have no aversion to leftovers in general, but again, it depends a lot on what the dish is. When I cook at home, I arrange my meal plan so that I can use any leftovers from one meal as an ingredient in the next day's meal.
In any case, most of my restaurant eating is while I'm traveling so I'm mostly not able or not interested to do anything with leftovers.
People also keep suggesting I start a restaurant since the food tastes so good and is so easy to make. I'm waiting to meet the right person with experience starting restaurants.
I'm posting because while everyone who knows the numbers considers the amount of food waste and packaging we create unconscionable, what I don't think people realize is that what the food industry purports to solve -- that industrial food is more convenient or tastes more appealing -- is all wrong compared to once you learn to cook. Then from scratch is faster, cheaper, more delicious, more convenient. The backbone of industrial food is ignorance and lack of skill. In places with tons of fast food restaurants but no farmers markets or fresh produce, the best solution is more cooking from scratch to teach people to demand fresh. The transition is hard, but doable and a great project for enterprising people who want to help people improve their lives and communities. I find it tremendously rewarding.
> You just go to the store, buy food without packaging, and don’t buy food with packaging.
This is kind of a truism and a circular reference. You avoid food packaging by not buying food with packaging. I don't have the option of buying any fluid dairy product (or anything fluid more or less) in anything but a carton or plastic bottle/cup. And that's just an example, many other items simply don't come in a non-packaged form, or it's lower quality when bought in bulk, even if it's cheaper. If it's cheaper and better I think it's a no-brainer that people would go for it.
> the farm I get most of my summer and fall vegetables from [...] how much more flavor they have than what stores sell
It's great if you have this option of buying from a farm but it's not a sustainable one for most. In the countries that could make the biggest difference with food packaging very few have no access to such a farm. And the supply of "wholesome, farm grown, bio" food is limited. Either the price would skyrocket due to the huge demand, or they would be less "wholesome" and more "supermarket".
It's the same as when you hear that "everybody should buy second had stuff because it helps the environment and it's cheaper". There's a bit of hidden paradox in there.
https://treadingmyownpath.com/2017/07/13/plastic-free-milk-y...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroWaste/comments/62kvzi/dairy_pro...
This being said I think using and reusing more durable packaging should be the way forward. Glass in particular is one type that can be reused instead of recycled. I grew up with glass bottles (unbranded 0.5l and 1l) being reused and you'd trade an empty one in to get a full one. Most of the liquid stuff we had around the house was stored in these identical glass bottles instead of 100 different sizes and shapes of bottles.
This is infeasible across the entire supply chain lifecycle. IMHO what is more realistic and feasible is putting an end to our packaging winding up in our landfills, and instead using energy maintaining durable and recyclable packaging. Accounting for the trillions spent on a military umbrella over oil regions and transport modes, the total energy and monetary cost switching to a zero-landfill packaging model would be a lower footprint.
I prefer glass containers with standardized composition, and ground glass joint stopper lids; for larger containers that cannot be held in a circular format that ground glass joints seem to require, I use glass rectangular containers with plastic lids (switching over to glass/stainless with silicone lids when my current containers break, as such options weren't available back when I originally purchased them).
The containers can be any shape, but as long as the type of glass is uniform, they are infinitely recyclable and cheap and easy to re-process (bonus if we use solar thermal-based processes to re-melt the broken glass). There is a one-time shipping cost to obtain the container that is much more expensive than throwaway-thin plastic containers, but it can be refilled endlessly until it breaks by accident; thick, removable neoprene skins can reduce breakage frequency by supplying a more non-slip surface to handle and offering some protection against minor bumps.
The supply chain reconfiguration is a bigger problem, though. Very few zero-waste stores have switched to receiving goods in Intermediate Bulk Containers (IBC). These are cost-efficient to transport because 18 standard 1000l IBC fit in a standard 20 ft. ISO container, and 2 special 820l IBC's can fit in the leftover space in that ISO container. Short of sending the goods in a dedicated ISO container (which only the largest distribution centers could afford to tie up capital in), it is the closest I can think of a large retail location being able to support, and even that is a stretch for some of the smaller stores.
Even so, very few manufacturers will distribute in IBC's. For example, I corresponded by email with Dr. Bronner's, and the largest size they will ship is a 5 gallon carboy they won't refill.
Then there are challenges with refill and re-supply, as well as ensuring the IBC's are made entirely of infinitely recyclable components. We can use stainless steel IBC's, but they're extraordinarily expensive. With many products, filling into customer-supplied containers raises sanitation challenges to resolve.
Another challenge I see is re-configuring the supply chain and consumer behavior will not lead to most of the savings passed onto consumers. That will stillborn any other similar environmentally-friendly but change-intensive infrastructure initiatives we badly need.
If we get to completely-automated fulfillment centers and delivery, then we might be able to solve the sanitation challenges with automated cleaning and disinfection (though that might take upwards of three hours with a cleaning process that follows prion-contamination protocols).
I'm starting at the consumer-end with glass containers and bulk products for now. I cringe when I see the bulk products come in throwaway plastic bags in usually-throwaway cardboard boxes. Baby steps first.
Obviously (and unfortunately) this is not available everywhere.
Sadly, they stopped doing that a number of years ago, and now just use the standard disposable plastic jugs.
She's one of my role models. Sorry I forget which videos cover dairy specifically, but I remember her talking about cheese and her secrets to get workers to put it in containers she brought. I think meat too.
How much time and money do you spend on growing these?
Part of my family participates in a local collective that buys local produce directly from producers in bulk, and in such a way they get cheap produce and can offer good prices to producers (because the middle-man is cut out). You might have something like that where you live.
The rural poor in the US still grow much of their own food. Even the not-so-poor. City dwellers need this super cheap, industrialized food, not the rest of us.
Another thing to consider is that tomatoes are seasonal. You won't have more than 3 months of natural homegrown tomatoes a year.
Is it worth it? IMHO, totally. Tomatoes are one of these products where homegrown is much better than the usual commercial varieties. But if all you want are good tomatoes, and don't enjoy the process, there are probably other, more economical ways of getting them.
No idea why my question made few people upset, since I’m not against homegrown things and only explained how it all doesn’t work locally and interested in economics of those for whom it works.
* blasphemy for US folks, I know, but pretty valid option to not have one in my downtown; everything is cheap to rent and very close to each other.
Here's a video of me making it (to manage expectations, I didn't make it to entertain, just to document): http://joshuaspodek.com/20-minute-vegetable-stew
If you're near Manhattan, contact me and invite yourself over. I host about 20 lunches and dinners a month, partly to share how to do it. I've also done corporate events, for example last Earth Day at Lululemon's flagship store on 5th Avenue.
https://www.treehugger.com/health/overeating-terrible-planet...
As for industrial food, and how it got to be, I strongly recommend this book by Aaron Bobrow-Strain https://www.amazon.com/White-Bread-Social-History-Store-Boug...
Guests have included titans of industry, famous authors, podcasters, a Nobel laureate, and many among my podcast guests.
I know a couple of successful restaurateurs in my area. It's an incredibly difficult business to be in. I would suggest that nobody opens a restaurant unless it's truly their love.
Instead the problem being solved is packaging waste, and they solve it by putting the onus on their vendors (bakers, butchers, etc) to deliver in reusable containers.
Commendable, but isn't the larger problem the amount of food being wasted by kitchen across the country? Sure, they compost any left over food that can be processed, but that food could have fed hungry communities.
I could hit the local market. But that would mean sacrificing lunch hour to go shopping (market hours =biz hours)
Gonna try and make an effort this year anyway
For things that are relatively nonperishable (shelf life of a month or so), I do a single massive shopping trip every month. Then I have an entire month that I don't have to to that.
For the things that have a shorter shelf life (produce, dairy, etc.), I buy on an as-needed basis. This typically means I stop by a store every other day on my way home from work -- but since I'm just buying what I need for a day or two, that shopping trip is very brief.
In reality could operate without any trash pickup translates to compostable waste is composted, non-compostable waste is recycled, other waste is donated. Recycle and compost. Which is great but not really "no leftovers". Is recycling paper worse than composting it? Recycling glass worse than reusing it?
> a dishwashing setup that converts salt into soap
I have to admit I don't understand this one. Converting salt into soap? Are they talking about actual saponification of fats from leftover food or something else?
Maybe offer free refill for customers really hungry (AFTER they're done with their initial serving).
Maybe it depends where one eats. I hear people saying this and I eat out all over the US and Europe and I guess I don't see this large and systematic difference in portion sizes that people claim--especially of the main/protein ingredient.
i honestly don't see how anyone can possibly see your suggestion as a sensible one. by the way, if you cut my portion size in half, you better cut the price in half too, otherwise i'm not coming back. i'm going to that NEW restaurant across the street who offers what you used to. i love big portions because i can bring leftovers home - i don't care that other people who cannot control their appetites finish the whole plate instead and get obese, that's their own problem not mine.
Nah, they just need to shave $1 off and call it tapas. :-)
I'm being mildly snarky. I like tapas for the variety. But, in part, because they mostly don't have the relative filler you have in a typical big dish main, they tend to be relatively pricey.
I'd take that every time -- even if I were charged the same as the full portion (since it doesn't matter in the end, as I'm throwing half of the full portion away anyhow.)
The article did not suggest that the restaurant forces people to eat everything on their plates. They just compost whatever food is left behind and don't throw it away.
The article isn’t really about leftovers from portion sizes - it’s more about suppliers and packaging.