Original subtitles

Okay? Okay.

We are rolling. Speeding?

Speeding, you're speeding?

Yep. Great.

Okay, when you were first approached

about this project what did you think?

Was there a--? Eh...

I hated the whole idea of this movie.

Why? It's so serious.

I don't even know that we deserve to live, honestly.

You know, the super radical environmentalists,

you know, figure, "Look, the sooner

"we choke ourselves off out of existence,

"the sooner the human race has disappeared,

"you know, all those furry happy animals

will regenerate so much more quickly."

Um, look, I don't like the idea

of being an advocate, you know?

I-- I shrink from, you know,

even the appearance of a hashtag, uh, upsets me.

But as a culinary student, as a young cook,

I came up in an old school system

that abhorred waste as a fundamental principle.

Meaning, the whole enterprise was based

on the idea of use everything.

So, along with picking up a knife

for the first time and learning how to use it,

how to scramble an egg, to do all of those basic things,

that principle was pounded deep into my tissue.

Use everything. Waste nothing

In the United States,

40% of the food that we produce is going to waste.

When we look at a world that will have 9 billion people

in a relatively few years

and we've got people that are going to bed hungry,

the idea of wasting food... there's something wrong.

We need to harness the significance

of people's obsession with food right now,

and understand that waste is sinful, criminal,

as well as financially foolish.

Food production is the single biggest cause of deforestation,

the single biggest cause of water extraction,

the single biggest cause of habitat loss

and biodiversity loss.

One-third of all of that impact is going on

to produce food that ends up being wasted.

Numbers are numbers.

800 million people are starving.

1.3 billion tons of food is waste every year.

So, we don't need to produce more.

We need to act different.

I really think people who are connected with their food

learn to respect it.

And there's something sacrilegious

about destroying or wasting something

that you consider valuable and consider important.

Everything that's left over from one part of a process

becomes food for another part of the process,

and I think modern agriculture could take a lesson from nature.

All right, so first thing is, you should taste the stems.

Like any pursuit, artistic or otherwise,

the lack of choices in one's repertoire

usually, uh, inspire a kind of creativity

that you're forced into.

These guys have the most potential.

It's the new baby zucchini.

For myself, it's very hard

to be creative in a way that's inspired

and original when your choices are limitless

and that's what I love about waste because

you really have to look at your farm

and your purveyors

and your kitchen in a different light.

Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner

of Blue Hill in New York City

and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in the Hudson Valley.

You want the black pepper?

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah,

perfect like that. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

In the relentless pursuit of flavor,

Barber challenges not only the farm-to-table movement

but the entire food system in America.

What would a truly sustainable plate of food look like?

Is there such a thing as nose-to-tail farming?

And why does this emmer wheat taste so damn good?

For Barber, all roads lead

to an expanded definition of what waste is.

I think we got it. I mean, we're close.

Every cuisine that has lasted generations,

they all have dishes that would be called wasted,

but in fact are iconic...

cultural dishes, like Bouillabaisse.

Fishermen's wives took the damaged

and unsellable fish and they created

a big stew of all this reject fish

and called it a Bouillabaisse.

Prosciutto di Parma.

That pig is a waste-fed pig,

but you don't call it waste pork.

That's why these dishes become so important

because they're not sold as waste.

They're sold as what they are, which is delicious dishes.

It may help to take a step back...

to look at the food system as a whole,

to identify where waste is actually occurring.

We waste food at every link in the supply chain.

If you start on farms,

entire fields of crops are sometimes being wasted

just because the supermarket has said

that it doesn't look perfect.

Bring it down to restaurants, where, very often,

plates are piled so high with food

that even humans with the biggest appetite

you can imagine cannot eat it all.

Okay, so there is excess food,

from farms, from restaurants, from supermarkets.

Now what?

The Environmental Protection Agency has developed

a "Food Waste Pyramid" to help us upcycle waste

and keep it out of landfills.

Obviously, the first priority with any food

is to ensure that it does actually

reach humans for consumption.

The next best option we say is

to at least feed it to livestock,

so that they can turn it back into food.

If food scraps cannot be upcycled to feed people,

cannot be used to feed livestock,

it can be used to generate energy

through a process called anaerobic digestion.

If food scraps can't be used for energy,

they can be used to create nutrient-rich soil,

and that's composting.

The thing that we should never be doing

is sending food waste into landfill.

In landfills, food waste decomposes

in the absence of oxygen.

It produces methane,

which is 23 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas

than carbon dioxide.

And yet, in the United States,

over 90% of all food scraps are going into landfill.

That is crazy!

Unfortunately, we tend to think

about food waste in like

what's left on a supermarket shelf,

what's ugly and not able to be sold,

what's left on a diner's plate.

And while those-- those ideas are critical...

they are the small ideas compared to the larger ideas

of a whole system of agriculture

that has at its core wastefulness in our diets

and in how food is produced.

There's a surprising amount of waste

created on the farm level.

Currently, we are growing too much of the wrong product.

The right product is not getting

to as many people as it needs to get to.

Particularly in the developing world,

they simply don't have

the storage capacity, the transport capacity,

to grow and maintain food that can get to market.

In the old days,

the farmer didn't even know

if he was gonna get a crop,

so they were out there tasting everything

and trying to, you know, better themselves

every step of the way.

In modern agriculture,

there is little time to stop and taste for flavor.

But for Dan Barber and his farmers and purveyors,

it's about looking deeper and using

more parts of the animals and vegetables they grow.

The cauliflower is a perfect example

of a food where there is a lot of waste

because of the size of the leaves.

None of this typically gets consumed.

That should be very, very delicious.

Yeah. Wow.

So the biomass of a... of a cauliflower plant

is actually 40% cauliflower and 60% leaf?

Something close to that.

You'd think they would have engineered that differently.

So this, in general, gets wasted.

Look at that.

That is impressive.

And the farm is full of this kind of stuff.

Why are we only consuming these plants

in this one small phase of growth,

and also this one small part of the plant?

You're talking about giving the farmer more money

for something that they're already growing

and keeping it out of the landfill.

There just is no downside to this.

So, now we're looking for some of

the immature delicata squash.

This will never actually reach maturity.

This stage, to me,

smacks of being very, very delicious.

This is so great.

Oh, shit.

Nobody ever thinks of a fall squash

as this ...

Not yet. Not yet.

My first job as a chef is to cook tasty food.

My second job as a chef is to introduce diners

to exciting new tastes because that's what diners

increasingly are demanding.

The actual stems are a delicacy in Mexico.

See, a delicacy in Mexico. I didn't even know that.

We can stuff these, too.

Actually what we should do is to serve this

alongside a pasta stuffed with zucchini.

Yeah.

It's the zucchini's fuck you to the wheat.

And so when you look at a whole vegetable,

a whole plant and cook with parts

of the plant that you otherwise wouldn't cook with,

that's exciting.

So it's... it's interesting

just in terms of, like, the waste aspect,

what we're really talking about is,

we gotta get 'em at this size.

'Cause this... this is gonna end up

being composted, right? Right.

Man, I think of, you know, myself as like,

you know, a farm-to-table chef

who gets celebrated actually for taking

about, you know, 50% of your crop

and turning my back on the other 50% of the biomass

and the economic return for you.

That's not...

that's not something to celebrate actually.

All right, so now to garnish

we have preserved immature egg

that would otherwise be thrown away

when the chicken is slaughtered.

We think of nose-to-tail for an animal

and we celebrate utilization of all the animal's parts

out of respect for the animal.

But rarely do we think in that same analog

for a farm ... and why wouldn't we?

Why wouldn't we have the same respect for a landscape?

And why wouldn't we utilize the entirety of the landscape

in the same way that we utilize

the entirety of a carcass of a chicken

or the entirety of a carcass of a lamb?

Same idea.

If you want to start talking about food waste,

you're talking about probably

the most productive farmland in the world,

the heartland of the United States,

that is growing crops that are all essentially

either not being turned into food

or being turned into bad food.

If we were to say "How should our food system look?",

our food system should grow the right food,

respects the people who are growing the food,

stewards the land that is being used to grow the food,

and does this in a way that produces

good food for as many people as possible.

After we've done our best to reduce waste

on the source level, the next step

in the food waste pyramid is to feed people.

You can fight against

food waste for several reasons.

For me, the most important one is feeding the...

the hungry people.

The food that's wasted, that 1.3 billion tons,

could feed all of those people.

Now, I'm not saying

that the solution to this problem is for us

to send our leftovers to sub-Saharan Africa.

Of course not.

But now, it... it really is the case

that we have a global food system

and when we buy food on the world market

and throw it away, we are literally

taking food off the shelves

of the global food marketplace,

and we are taking food out of the mouths of the hungry.

I think food waste has become

an incredibly important subject

for the simple reason that it's inconceivable

that one in five children in America

doesn't have enough to eat.

In the richest time of the richest country's history.

And I think Americans don't even see the face of hunger.

And I think that the face of hunger is the face

of people who work their asses off

to try to put enough food on the table

for their family and aren't very successful.

Can you hold these?

Good job, great job.

And you should get napkins which are in...

I'm already getting... Your sister's passing 'em to you.

Teamwork, right? Here you go.

We have lived in Dorchester and Roxbury.

There wasn't any supermarket

like right in that area, or any kind of shopping area.

A lot of it was just fast food.

I'm thinking about when I was a little girl.

Me and my cousins, we would always go to KFC

and get the barbecue wings,

go to McDonald's and get a milkshake and fries,

or go to the corner store and get chips.

And, now that I'm an adult

and seeing what it did to my body,

it'd be cooler to have something more,

like, healthy and cheaper.

Hi! I'm Doug.

Bryce. Hey, Bryce!

Nice to meet you. Good to meet you!

Having worked in the food industry

for 35 years, knowing that

throughout the system, top to bottom,

there's a lot of food that's being wasted.

If you walk into a supermarket or something,

this is not stuff you'd see on the counter,

but it has the same exact taste.

Then on the other hand,

one in six Americans are food insecure.

They can't buy what they should be buying.

So the idea here was,

what can we do to try to use one problem

to solve the other problem?

Daily Table is a non-profit grocery store

on a mission to sell healthy food at prices

low enough to actually compete with fast food.

All right, so what do you need, George?

I need cabbage. You need cabbage?

Cabbage, corn.

These organic corn tortillas

we'll probably turn into, like, a Mexican lasagna

with some of these vegetables.

Daily Table recovers food

from supermarkets, wholesalers, and growers

that would otherwise end up in the dumpster,

including locally grown fruits and vegetables

from nearby farms and farmer's markets.

Having Daily Table there now,

I feel like it gives them an option

to have healthier food,

other than the fast food restaurants

and the pizza shops and the sub shops.

It's cheaper. It's convenient.

It's on the bus line for people who don't drive.

They have a way to get there.

So, Daily Table is

a major, um, asset to the community.

In case it's not obvious,

this is not the way most supermarkets operate.

The supermarkets are the apex of power

in our food system.

They control the vast majority of grocery sales

that happen in most rich countries.

And they use the power they have

to trigger your impulse to buy,

to encourage you to buy stuff

even if you don't need it.

They put more food on the shelves

than they even think they're ever gonna sell

because what they're doing is creating

that image of infinite abundance.

I'd gone to speak to supermarkets

about their food waste.

They didn't even want to show me.

They were locking it in dumpsters

and sending it off for landfill.

They didn't want anyone to know about

this hidden, dirty secret

around the back of their stores.

A lot of the foods that end up

in the dumpster at a supermarket are shelf-stable items.

These products have "Use by" and "Best by" dates

that are created by the manufacturers

and largely misunderstood by consumers.

All of these quote "expiration codes"

are one of the most confusing things

about the food industry.

There's "Best by," "Sell by," "Best before."

And people assume that that's indicating

that the food is unsafe to eat after that period of time,

and it turns out that's just not true.

Raw meat, raw chicken, things like that,

you have to pay a lot of attention

to "Use by" or code dates.

But even water bottles nowadays have a "Best by."

Honey has a "Best by," and honey's good forever.

So, we've gotten carried away

and we've forgotten that as customers

that this is really for stores to rotate product.

Until people start to trust themselves

and do the smell test, which is really the best way

of telling whether something is safe or not,

we're going to continue to waste

an immense amount of food.

Supermarkets have...

the greatest amount of power.

They could solve a lot of the world's

food waste problems pretty much overnight.

Uh, uh, uh, uh.

What's that? Mango!

Mangoes. Who likes mangoes?

We hit the jackpot!

We hit the jackpot.

I usually go to the Daily Table.

I try to go to at least once a week.

If I can get there twice a week, that's good.

There's, you know, the typical stuff--

I know I can get my milk.

I know I can get eggs. I know I can get cheese.

But I like to go to see what they do--

what they are gonna have that week.

I'm kinda excited like, oh, what are they gonna have.

Like, you know, just to be surprised

about what's on the shelves.

What we got over here? Anything look good?

I'm thinking about the chili.

You thinking about the chili?

Yeah. All right.

We'll get more chili.

I love that prepared area,

because it helps me to grab a couple of things extra

for someone like him who,

when I come home from work,

he really wants to eat right now.

He's been in school all day.

He's been in after school all day,

and he's hungry again.

So, your total is 39.71.

39.71? Mm-hmm.

Take this out. Yup.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Have a good day.

Have a nice day.

All right, how many bags did we get?

One, two, three, four, five...

six! Six!

You're gonna help me cook when we get home?

Sure.

Or are you gonna leave it all up to me?

I'll try and help.

Did you guys get a lot of stuff?

We got some good stuff today, actually.

Did you guys get some for me?

See, if you want something,

you gotta go shopping with us to get it.

I'm taking that bag.

As a single mom, you...

you wanna make sure that your kids have food.

You wanna make sure you got food in your refrigerator

and Daily Table makes it--

it make-- that's attainable.

So, give me your plates

and I can start making plates.

I think for me, I want my children

to know how to eat healthy.

God is great, God is good.

Let us thank him for our food.

By his hand we all are fed.

Give us Lord, our daily bread.

Amen. Amen. Amen.

It's very important for me

to make sure that my children know how

to shop for healthy food,

how to cook healthy food,

what healthy food looks like,

um, that healthy food can taste good.

I need my children to know that

so that they can continue this,

so they can prolong their life.

Food waste is not unique to the U.S.

And all around the world,

what's the food type we all love to waste?

Grain.

In industrialized Asia, rice dominates grain waste,

but in Europe, it's wheat that's wasted the most...

Which should come as no surprise,

considering what was once dubbed

Britain's "biggest contribution to gastronomy."

The sandwich gets its name

from the 18th century Earl of Sandwich.

He was famous for asking his valet

to put a piece of meat between two slices of bread,

so he could carry on playing cards

without getting his hands greasy.

In the Middle Ages,

if you were lucky enough to afford it,

a really good meal was served on a trencher.

A trencher was like a loaf of quite dry bread,

into which you would spoon stew or meat.

And it would get drenched with the gravy.

I guess the trencher is a little bit like

what we now call an open-faced sandwich.

In 1840, America was introduced

to the sandwich by Englishwoman Elizabeth Leslie.

In her cookbook, "Directions for Cookery,"

she included a recipe

for a new main dish called "the ham sandwich."

Back then, every time you wanted a slice of bread,

you had to cut it by hand,

unless you had a servant around to do it for you.

But all that changed in the 1920s,

when Otto Rohwedder of Iowa

invented a bread-slicing machine.

Whole loaves of bread were loaded

into a torture chamber of steel blades

and were spit out the other end

as neat, uniform slices, literally becoming

the greatest thing... sliced bread.

Sandwiches are ubiquitous in Britain.

Grab it, go.

Make it at home, take it in your satchel.

Eat it at school. Eat it in your office.

We love them.

The sandwich-crazy Brits eat a billion sandwiches a month.

That's 364 sandwiches every second.

The part that doesn't get used, the end crusts,

those usually get chucked in the bin.

Oh, if only there was something delicious and nutritious

we could do with the crusts of bread.

Oh, I know something ... beer.

See? It's very sweet.

It's really sweet. Mmm.

It's full of biscuity, malty goodness.

That's it! That's exactly what, I mean,

it feels like food.

Tristram Stuart is considered

the global authority on food waste.

Passionate about stopping environmental destruction,

he founded Toast Ale, which produces

a beer that funds the anti-waste movement.

I've been campaigning on food waste for years,

and bread waste in particular has always bothered me.

You can imagine how excited I was

when I met a Brussels brewer,

the Brussels Beer Project,

making beer out of waste bread.

Couple of sacks in, crushed or whole?

Um, go with the slices to start with.

The slices.

I said to them, "Look...

"how about we globalize

"this solution to bread waste,

"build awareness about the scandal

"of food waste generally,

"find local sources of waste bread,

"tap into the amazing

"collaborative craft brewing movement

"around the world, generate some profits

"for charities that are doing

"great work in this space,

and make this really cool?"

Tackling food waste doesn't need to be depressing.

It's delicious. You can have a party

whilst drinking your way out of this problem.

I don't really understand. How can bread make beer?

The malted barley, it gives the beer

one, its color, and two, the malty-ness,

the backbone flavor of the beer. Yeah.

What we're doing in this brew is we're replacing

a portion of that malted barley

with the toast. Yeah.

We have this big rumor going that if

you eat the crust it gives you curly hair,

so I'm kind of hoping that this might give me curly hair.

And we are basically

reviving a really ancient tradition.

You know the ancient Mesopotamians,

they invented beer to do this job

of using up old grains, old breads.

The basic process of beer is,

boil some grains and make a mash, kind of like oatmeal,

extracting all the sugars.

Strain the mash, add some hops and yeast.

Let it ferment and voila, beer.

Refreshing.

You wouldn't really be able to tell

it was made out of old bread.

So a lot of people think surely, the only bread

that's wasted is stale, moldy bread.

And, of course, these guys are wasting

the crust when it's day fresh.

I mean, I haven't even had breakfast yet actually.

You still hungry?

Really, really cool that they're trying

to fight food waste. It's really yummy.

The yeast has just foamed.

A little bit of a light color to it,

which means it's good yeast.

So the yeast is, essentially,

what stops bread from being wasted

and let's us be wasted instead.

Yes, absolutely right.

Since we launched Toast Ale, there has been

a nonstop flow of people getting in touch,

from Austria, from Iceland,

from Peru, from the U.S., wanting to replicate this,

to create this incredible collaboration between

food waste warriors on the one hand

and craft beer makers and drinkers on the other.

I don't know what to say because I don't--

I don't really drink-- I don't drink beer.

To be honest, I don't really care

that much what it's made out of.

If it tastes nice, then it tastes nice.

Can I take this with me?

Yeah, heck, yeah. Wicked.

But even the brewing process has waste,

in the form of spent grain.

Since this can't be used to feed people,

Toast Ale does the next best thing

and uses the waste to feed animals.

Stuff that we don't necessarily want to be eating,

can be fed to livestock.

Pigs can eat any kind of food scrap that you have.

Right? They don't need

to just be eating corn and soy.

The United Nations estimated that if we fed waste

to pigs instead of using the corn-soy mix,

we could liberate enough food globally

to feed 3 billion people.

Throughout history, humans have used pigs

and chickens for the explicit purpose

of recycling leftover food back into edible food.

it's a tiny island with loads of people on it.

The Japanese government realized

that they had a massive problem

of importing too much corn

and of running out of landfill space.

They introduced the Food Waste Recycling Laws

that said "Look, we're going to prevent

"food waste wherever possible

"but any food that can't be fed to people,

we're gonna recycle it into livestock feed."

Pig farmers all over Japan are creating

"brand-name" labels of pork by being selective and inventive

about what food waste their pigs eat.

So, coming to Japan, I knew there were

over 400 different varieties of pork.

Learning that certain pigs were fed, you know,

rice leftover from the sake-making process,

or certain pigs were being fed like matcha.

Certain pigs were being fed

pineapple scraps, tuna scraps.

The Japanese, they're beginning

to feed specific things to animals

and then tracking, "What does that do

to the flavor profile of that pig?"

What's that going to taste like?

Danny Bowien is the chef and founder of Mission Chinese Food

with restaurants in both San Francisco and New York City.

He's built a cult following by cooking whatever he wants--

Sichuan, Mexican, Vietnamese--

and always asking the question, "What's next?"

I grew up in Oklahoma, and even to this day,

some of my friends that live in Oklahoma,

they won't eat chicken unless it's, like, white meat.

A lot of people I know won't eat chicken on the bone.

I think it's my responsibility as a chef

to ask the question why.

You know, if something sounds off-putting, how can I make that

something that people freak out and want to have?

It's like rectum. Wow.

It's the intestines, last intestine.

Uh-huh. Wow.

This is crazy.

So crazy.

Oh my God.

Oh my...

This is experience.

I don't want it to end.

When he first visited me in San Francisco,

I said, "Dad, let's go eat tacos."

He's like, "okay."

He's like, "Just order me what you want, whatever.

Just make sure you get me beef. Don't get me anything weird."

I was like, okay.

So I got him beef, you know-- tongue-- I got him beef tongue.

And he was eating it, I was like, "This is amazing."

He's like, "Yeah, this is like the best thing I've ever had."

I said, "Oh, it's beef tongue," and he got so angry at me.

You know, he's like, "Why would you do that to me?"

You know, and I said, "Well, Dad, it's like--

is it delicious?" And he's like, "Well, no.

It was delicious before I knew what it was."

"Utinerus?"

Uterus. Yeah, the pork uterus.

When I ate that, had they not have told me

that's what it was-- just like my dad

when I didn't tell my dad that the beef taco he ate

was a beef tongue taco-- it was just delicious.

It's so amazing.

And I think that's all it really distills down to,

is what's delicious.

Boobs.

Oh, it's the-- the breast?

Breasts. The... tits.

Wow, oh. Oh, wow, wow.

Japan has a wealth of technique and knowledge.

With the Japanese approach to cooking,

it's kind of like this pursuit of perfection.

This is like the best thing I've ever had, ever.

This is insane, man.

I grew up rearing pigs

on food waste, and the pork was delicious.

I have not tasted pork like what I grew up on

until I went to Japan.

How long have you been farming?

Six years.

That one is so cute.

At the farm I'm seeing, like, pigs

that are just kind of like roaming freely.

It's kind of like a utopia.

When you came and set up the farm,

were you planning on using this type of feed?

At Tsukayama Farm, pigs are fed eco-feed,

a pig swill made from recovered food waste

that produces some of the most delicious pork in all of Japan.

Should we feed the pigs?

Here?

All right.

You gotta hold it tight.

The pig farmers that I've met in Japan

who are rearing their animals on eco-feed,

they're saving 50% of the costs of feed.

And that is around 30% of the entire cost

of running a farm.

They're really hungry.

I put myself in these situations

because I'm curious and I want to know, I have to know.

Japan as a food culture, Japanese technique,

it just informs so much of what I do as a chef.

To be able to come here and be in it,

it's eye-opening and it's very humbling.

So, in lieu of feeding the animals, like, antibiotics,

they're feeding this naturally-occurring bacteria

that occurs like, you know, when you're making kimchi?

Yeah. Amazing.

It's a whole new way of cooking, right?

You're cooking before you even get the product.

You're changing the flavor profile,

the amount of fat, the marbleization

based on what you're feeding that animal.

Using waste for flavor,

that's something that chefs go crazy about.

Wow, gosh!

So, this one is from the farm we visited today.

Mm... oh, man.

It's a lot more buttery, it's a lot more rich.

I thought it would taste leaner because of the...

It's really buttery.

I was expecting it to taste

more like grass-fed beef in the U.S.

And what I tasted was the exact opposite.

It was like the kind of pork that people

in the U.S. want to eat.

It was just that very rounded, fatty, unctuous...

I was really taken aback because it was so flavorful,

so delicious.

Today, I feel like I'm tasting pork for the first time.

In a Western world, we like pretty food.

We don't like bones, we don't like heads,

we don't like skin.

I came up at a time when if you tried to serve

a whole roasted fish like they do

in much of the rest of the world,

the customer would be horrified.

It would come back with an outraged complaint, "Ugh!"

They don't want their food looking at them!

This creates a tremendous, tremendous, tremendous

amount of waste.

People believe that you're going to have shrimps

and fish for all of your life. That is not true.

There are places in the world where you can no longer fish

or have access to what you used to,

because humans have consumed it all.

You always read stories about how when Europeans

first came to North America, how you could walk

across the rivers on the backs of the salmon.

But now salmon, wild Atlantic salmon is close to extinct.

There's a lot of different ways to fish.

The classic way is to take a string, put a worm on it,

and drop it in the water and wait for it to get bit.

Then, there's a net, then there's a big net,

then there's a long line, there's a big giant net,

then there's a trawl, then there's a dredge.

Effectively, all of them work.

The further you get away from the one string

with the one piece of bait,

the more stuff you're likely to bring in

that you weren't looking for.

Where we catch and burn most of the fish

is in the extra or by-catch fish

of looking for the primary fish.

All right.

So, we have porgy crudo, sashimi style.

We have tartufo di mare, blood clams.

And here, we have a little bit of the skirt from the scallop.

Dave Pasternack is chef at Esca,

a seafood restaurant in Manhattan

that's part of the Mario Batali empire.

As a lifelong fisherman,

he knows firsthand what comes out of the water,

what gets used, overused, and what gets tossed.

So, in the large picture,

the biggest issue is the fisherman.

They bring in a lot of catch that they throw away.

How do you stop that?

You have to create the market.

They have to understand that there is a value to it.

There's hardly anything in the sea that we catch,

that if we're killing them, we shouldn't be eating them.

So, Americans like basically four categories of fish--

salmon, tuna, shrimp and cod.

And those are the ones that they will recognize on a menu.

Trash fish is a word that everyone uses

to say that this was the fish that nobody

wanted to spend a lot of money for.

I think that trash fish

diminishes the value of trash fish,

because it makes it seem like we're picking

through the garbage.

I think more like exotica, or hard to find,

or rarely tasted fish might be a way to go.

Lobster-- we used to feed it to prisoners!

Toothfish got renamed Chilean sea bass,

even though it's not even a sea bass.

And that uni you're paying through the nose for

at the sushi bar?

They used to call it whore's eggs.

As chefs and as cooks, we see how the same thing

that everybody told us was shit last year

and wouldn't pay for it, would turn their nose up,

suddenly, you know, every man-bun neck-beard

in the world is paying, you know, $29.95 for.

Tuna! Remember when tuna--

you bring blue fish into the dock

and the cat food buyers were there.

People who cook food and spend time with food,

they know what the good stuff is.

Those dumbasses out in the dining room

may not know, but we know.

We know. We always knew.

All right, so these are clearly ugly.

They're called blood clams because they can't contain

the natural variety of hemoglobin.

I mean, like that right there, what is that piece?

That's its, uh, it's the innards.

The flavor is amazing, right?

Fantastic. Tastes like the sea.

Tastes a little bit more intense than the sea.

How was the fishing?

It was good.

What-- what are we catching these days?

Today, we got some nice jumbo scup for ya.

Great. Nice quality product.

Nice, look at the size of that, huh? Clean scales.

Beautiful. Clean red gills, clear eyes.

Would you rather have that right there

or a piece of salmon? Come on, now.

I'd rather have that. Exactly.

It's not even an argument.

Porgy. It's the cheapest catch fish of all time.

Is there a billion of them? There's a billion of them.

Who eats them? We do.

I know, but like, you don't sell porgies

at the Four Seasons.

No, but they should.

I know, but like, why don't they?

I mean, this is fucking awesome.

I think people think it's a garbage fish

and they don't really-- they don't really necessarily

understand its diversity.

How do you sell it?

I put it on the menu as Orata Americana

'cause basically-- Orata Americana?

Yes. So you lie, you make up a name.

I don't call it lying.

I just call it stretching the truth.

Really?

You should work in Trump's office.

Often enough what you have to do

to entice someone to try something new,

which will eventually reduce all waste,

is give it to them.

I made a quick little brodo

with a fish that's like a sea robin.

So, it's not even a sea robin.

You're lying to me right now.

Now one of the tricky parts

of commerce is, is giving someone something bad business?

And I just do a little... And what's the brodo?

A little white wine? A little white wine,

a little cherry tomato, a little chili.

And in fact, as you can tell,

by dealing with any of the people

who have ever invented addictive drug sales,

like cocaine or crack, the only way to get the kids

in the neighborhood to try it is to give it to them first.

Nobody is jonesing for crack until you give them some.

This is delicious.

I would buy the shit out of this stuff.

Same with a good sardine or some odd snail.

You give them one the first time, the next time

they come in, they see it's on the menu, are like,

"Can I have some of those snails too?"

And you're like "Yeah, of course you can.

Now they're 19 bucks, motherfucker."

Taking fish out of the seas

without concern for how quickly

they're able to replenish their numbers

is the same as taking energy out of the Earth

without considering how much is there to be taken out.

So, energy use needs to be managed

and fisheries need to be managed.

Wasted food is wasted money,

man hours, resources, wasted water,

wasted transportation, electricity, energy.

Today, more and more people

are concerned about climate change.

And when they think about their carbon footprint,

they think about biking to work instead of taking their car.

What they're not thinking about

is that one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases

is actually the food that they're throwing away.

When food is breaking down

and it doesn't have access to oxygen,

it releases methane.

Now, this methane, if it's in a landfill area,

is going to be released into the atmosphere.

It's going to harm the environment.

But if it's captured through anaerobic digesters,

that energy and that methane could be powering our cities,

and powering our homes, and powering our cars.

People do rely on electricity.

It's-- it is a necessity of life.

When the power goes off,

people just don't know what to do with themselves.

You know, we're so reliant

on that power always being there.

In today's world, you know,

people are much more in tune to the environment.

They really are looking for those renewable resources,

to create the electricity from.

And you know, here in Tennessee,

we don't have sun like you would in California,

we don't have the winds like you do across the Plains

but we do have a lot of waste.

With traditional yogurt, one gallon of milk

makes one gallon of yogurt.

But with Greek, it takes three gallons of milk

to make one gallon of yogurt.

And those other two gallons become a waste stream

that we have to deal with.

So, our solution was to build the anaerobic digester

and consume the whey on site.

The wasted whey leftover from making Greek yogurt

gets pumped into this giant tank.

Add some bacteria to consume the whey and other milk solids,

and in the process, methane gas is released.

Since it's a closed tank, the methane can be captured,

compressed and contained.

It is then used to run a generator

that creates electricity.

It's a closed loop system,

with the plant using their own electricity

to power the filling and packing machinery,

and as a result, pulling much less electricity

off the Murfreesboro grid.

You know, when I tell people that you can, you know,

take yogurt and turn it into electricity,

they kinda give me that look like, "How's that possible?

You know, what are they doing out there?"

I'm trying to get people to realize

that electricity is so much more

than just turning on that light switch.

You know, the sky's the limit today

with what we can do with the technology,

and I think that the digester that General Mills is doing

is just the tipping point, it's just the beginning of that.

You're taking a product nobody wants

and you're turning it into a product that everybody needs.

By far, the biggest global impact of food waste

is the impact it has on land use change.

40% of our Earth is now being used to produce food.

With it comes the loss of rainforests,

trees and animal species.

Humans have converted the face of the Earth

from wild spaces like forests into fields.

The current food system necessitates

that certain farmers plant the same commodity crop

on the same plot of land, over and over and over again.

But that's not how nature works.

Nature requires a crop rotation.

Every crop is going to take something from the soil

and give something back to the soil.

The chef of the future would know more about soil

and the farmers of the future,

they would know more about taste.

This is-- this is something important.

This is what I consider a very healthy soil.

Like a chef would look at a chocolate cake

or a loaf of bread.

It's a rich earthy smell called Geosmin.

I've heard that psychologists actually tell us that that smell

and those gases coming off healthy soil

make us feel happier, and I've noticed

that my employees are happy when they're in a good field

and they come back grumpy when they're in a bad field.

We're in a field of dark red kidney beans.

This field last year was corn.

This-- in March, we seeded yellow mustard here,

and then we turned the yellow mustard in

and planted the kidney beans in June.

Now, this field will be immediately followed

with spelt as a winter cover.

So, each crop makes the soil a better place

for the one that follows it.

We've observed that when you have a healthy soil system,

the food that grows in it actually tastes better.

We can-- we can tell the difference.

Healthy soil equals healthy food.

Not a particularly new idea.

While using wasted food for energy

may seem far off for many people,

turning food waste into compost

is something literally everyone can do to make a difference.

Composting really is, in many ways,

facilitating the circle of life.

You are allowing that plant to turn back into soil

that is going to fuel the growing

of another new plant.

When we talk about how bigger change could happen,

I think composting's a real opportunity.

One! Two! One, two, three, and!

Tell 'em what vegetable we're cutting up.

We're cutting up a...

Broccoli. Broccoli.

This broccoli's pretty old.

It's been growing for a while.

But we don't want to throw it away.

So, instead of throwing it away, what do we do with it?

Compost. Reuse it.

Reuse it, compost it.

When we eat something here, we eat,

and then we make sure after we--

after we eat something, do we throw it away?

No! What do we do with it?

Compost.

Compost it, and instead of throwing away nutrients,

let's feed those nutrients.

All right, feed it back into the soil,

so the plants can have it.

Samuel J. Green is a Pre-K through 8th grade school

with one of the best garden education programs

in the country.

Eat. Eat.

Compost. Compost.

Rebuild. Rebuild.

School kids are of course notorious

for eating a few bites of their lunch

and dumping the rest in the trash,

creating a ridiculous amount of food waste.

But at Green, they use the waste to create more food.

We're gonna see some worms.

We're gonna see some worms along the way, mm-hmm.

And you can check 'em out, but make sure you're very gentle

and put them back in their homes,

'cause they do help make, what?

Soil. Soil.

So, it starts in the cafeteria

where every table there has that small green bucket.

And it starts with breakfast, of kids having a banana

and putting that banana peel into the bucket.

Kindergarteners wanted to just put stuff in the bucket,

drop it out, keep on moving.

Second grade wanted to put something in the bucket,

bring it outside.

It was a no-brainer for fifth graders.

They decided-- not me-- they decided to create

the compost captains, where they wanted to come out

every single week and help build the pile.

Compost pile only works when you have heat,

water, food and air.

So when we're doing it correctly and we're flipping it properly,

you'll smell a good smell,

because we're cooking the vegetables.

Does anybody remember the layering?

What do we start with?

We start with all the crushed up fruit.

So, it can go fruits and vegetables...

Then it's the coffee, right?

Coffee.

Then the sawdust.

And then it repeats and repeats and repeats.

It's a layering.

Composting is the process of breaking down organic matter,

transforming it into nutrient-rich soil.

Carbon-rich material, like wood shavings

or dry leaves, and nitrogen-rich material,

like vegetable trimmings or coffee grounds,

are turned and aerated over and over again

to encourage microbial activity.

With the addition of a little water and some time,

what was once organic waste destined for the landfill

is now nutrient-rich fertilizer.

This is what's considered the 13th Ward.

It was highly impoverished and this was a family school.

I went here, my mom went here, grandma went here,

and it was kind of hard, it was harsh.

It was not an inviting space.

In New Orleans after Katrina, you know, it was destroyed,

and people saw it as an opportunity

for people to come together and build something

out of the destruction.

And this is one of the examples of what they built.

A way to really make people understand

the value of food product

is to actually labor at it and grow at it.

And I think the Edible Schoolyard is exactly that.

First of all, it helps diminish kids say,

"I don't wanna eat that."

Of course you're gonna eat it, you just grew it.

Would you like broccoli, collard greens?

Would you like radish?

Before we had a garden, it was mainly potato chips

that they were eating, and candy and cold drinks.

They snacked horribly.

But if you give a kid a seed,

then they plant their seed, they'll take ownership of it.

It becomes their plant, and when it's their plant,

they'll eat it, and they'll eat a lot of it.

I want broccoli and carrots.

Broccoli and carrots. Broccoli and carrots.

You want it all!

For most of our students, this is their first experience

of growing food, of ever seeing an outdoor space

used to produce food.

Come back. Nice.

Whoa. Whoaaaaaa!!!

Use your hand and rinse off the soil.

When you've seen how much energy

the world, the planet itself,

the sun, the nutrients, the water, the effort,

the weeding, all of that goes into growing something.

And then to harvest it, and then to clean it

and then to prep it,

that will make so-- people so disinclined

to throw anything away.

That-- that's one of the future parts

of the educational program, is to understand that.

For kids, it's understanding the purpose of life,

that if I feed this life, life will come back to me.

If I feed this Earth,

the Earth will come back and take care of me.

So, it just looks-- when it's finished,

it just looks like soil, right? We're gonna mix it in.

Who remembers how we mix it in or turn it?

I know. What do you do, Trey?

Our students will undoubtedly have a better understanding

of what happens after they finish their apple,

and they have an apple core in their hand.

They understand that the core in their hand,

the peel in their hand has a value.

What we consider waste actually has value,

and actually can produce life again.

What color did I say was in the middle?

Red! Red.

They are spicy.

If you want more, you can have more.

You don't just change a child,

you change a family, which changes a community,

which changes a city.

Enough of cities could change this nation,

and a nation could change the planet.

You know, I've actually never thought about what happens

to my food when I throw it away.

Think it's just going into the landfills,

and I probably hope in the back of my head

that it is biodegradable.

The thing that we should never be doing

is sending food waste into landfills.

In landfills, food waste decomposes

in the absence of oxygen, it produces methane,

which is 23 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas

than carbon dioxide.

A head of lettuce to decompose in the garbage,

I would say about...

Probably take a week or two, yeah?

Maybe two to three weeks?

A month, maybe? Maybe, you know, yeah.

It depends on the weather.

Six months.

Oh my God!

Stop it!

A head of lettuce?

Oh no.

Wow... that's insane.

There's no way for, like, me to just know this information

because no one's telling us this at all.

Ever.

We definitely need to come up with a way to do better.

Keeping food waste out of landfills

has become a top priority in places like Germany,

Sweden and South Korea.

It really does come down to culture now.

It comes down to what are our values as a society.

In some cultures, wasting food is quite literally a taboo.

With a landmass roughly the size of the state of Indiana

and a population that has doubled since 1960,

the South Korean government had to figure out

what to do with their food waste.

In 2013, they rolled out a revolutionary new system.

Residents use electronic ID cards

to open automated bins, which weigh their food waste.

Like an electric bill, a fee is charged

at the end of the month based on how much food

a given household has thrown away.

So, if you teach people,

"Take all your trash, put it in the bag,

it goes to a landfill,"

and then after 100 years of municipal trash pickup,

you teach people, "Oh, actually, if you take

"the paper over here and the bottles over here,

"and the cans over here, we can make some progress

in reusing that stuff."

If then 20 or 30 years later, you say to people,

"Oh, and by the way, if we separate out our food,

"we can turn that food into food for the soil,

and we can produce renewable energy."

That's of course a winning situation.

I think our biggest problem

is that we haven't used one of our greatest assets,

the capitalist system, to make this work.

In all industrialized countries,

the financial losses due to food waste

are about 680 billion dollars.

That is more than the net value

of Facebook and Google put together.

And excitingly, there's a lot of new startups

that are working in this space, that are trying

to take food scraps and turn it into something.

That's a colossal opportunity.

If I were a businessman,

I could be a billionaire in years.

In South Korea, private companies

have seen millions of dollars in profit

by transforming food waste into a wide variety of products,

like compost, fertilizer, animal feed and biogas.

What does a chef do? What does a cook do?

A cook transforms food.

They take something that's ugly

and tough and not so great,

and by using skill and techniques,

transform it into something wonderful.

When peasants were figuring this stuff out,

they were forced into the kind of creativity

that to this day lives on

in different cultures and cuisines.

Anybody can take the filet and make it into something.

But who can use the second third of the intestine

and render it tasty?

People think chefs have it all figured out,

and actually, we're learning.

You know, we learn from our past.

We learn from that resourcefulness

of doing something out of necessity.

So, what Lidia was talking about,

sharing in 18 people, one chicken,

cutting the chicken in so-- in very small pieces,

but with a lot of sauce, based with onion, and tomato.

Once we didn't have anything.

And so, everything we had was extremely good.

Chef Massimo Bottura runs Osteria Francescana,

one of the best restaurants in the world.

I think I am a chef

who compress into edible bites my passion.

Music, art, food,

sitting on thousands of years of history,

and everything filtered by a contemporary mind.

By looking back to the past,

questioning what came before,

Massimo elevates food to art

and creates something entirely new.

For Massimo, no dish is too low in origin

or too humble to be reinvented.

Culture, knowledge, consciousness,

sense of responsibility.

What-- what-- what can I ask, uh, to-- from my life?

I had everything and I'm totally satisfied.

So, it's the time to give back.

In 2015, Massimo Bottura

created Refettorio Ambrosiano,

a new model of soup kitchen, using the 15 tons of food waste

generated by the Milan Expo.

Massimo invited some of the best chefs in the world

to cook alongside him at the Refettorio

using their considerable talents to transform food waste

into inspired dishes.

This whole project about waste and fighting waste

came out from a reflection, very simple.

I thought about my grandmother.

And I thought about my favorite meal

going to bed in the night.

My favorite meal was a warm cup of milk

with bread crumbs, a little bit of sugar...

and it's just something that is so symbolic.

And you go back to your childhood.

How can I do that?

Involving the most influential chefs in the world

and asking them to transplant for one day

the brain and the acting of my grandmother?

Refettorio Ambrosiano is still running today

with Massimo and his team recovering food

from markets across Milan.

They never know what they're gonna collect,

and the menu changes daily.

After the universal exposition,

two of the major cuisine in the world--

the France and Italy-- they change the law

and they passed the law against waste.

It's something amazing.

There's been a lot of attention,

global attention to the laws that have been passed in France,

and now also in Italy to tackle food waste.

These laws are saying our society

no longer regards wasting food in this way as acceptable.

A lot of people in the U.S. still believe that it's illegal

to donate food from restaurants or from shops.

The fact is The Good Samaritan Act

protects companies from liability

in the case that they donate food

and somebody gets sick.

The interesting other fact related to that

is that there has not been a single case of any company

being sued anywhere, ever,

for giving up food to a charity.

Tonight, we're gonna make passatelli.

We collect the bread Tuesday, Wednesday,

and in two days we have enough bread for everyone.

You have to ask to the product the right question.

If you ask a piece of bread, "What you can do for me?"

At the first day, to revitalize the bread,

you can slice it and make it crunchy on the grill,

and you make bruschetta!

But on the other side, the third day,

you can grate it and bread can be bread crumbs.

It's all about the life--

life of people, life of...

Ingredients. Ingredients.

And you have to-- to know that.

Today, the bread will get new life

as passatelli in brodo--

the classic poor man's dish of Emilia-Romagna--

pasta made with leftover bread, eggs and cheese,

served in a broth of everything.

So, my grandmother, she was always making the broth

with parmigiano reggiano crust.

She didn't know anything about umami

or stuff like that.

But she knew that the crust of parmigiano

with one finger of cheese in

was just good, that's it.

Massimo's Refettorio idea

spread first to other cities in Italy,

then across the globe to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

I think this is a core theme with the Refettorio,

is taking something that is apparently bruised,

damaged, ugly, abandoned, that has no worth,

which could be food, people, neighborhood,

and sort of demonstrate that with a little bit of work,

a little bit of love, with some good design,

and architecture, and collaboration,

and very creative and experienced chefs,

that you can turn that into something

quite beautiful and magical.

I think the major point of this project

is rebuild the dignity of the people.

Treat them like king and queens.

Around the table, everything happens,

they create a family around that table.

Massimo hopes to take the Refettorio

all around the world.

He currently has plans for Paris, London,

the Bronx, Detroit and Los Angeles.

I want to show everyone that impossible is nothing.

We can do it.

Yeah, why should you care?

Look, that's a really hard question.

There's a lot of ugly shit going on in this world

that people are asking you to care about,

and I guess...

you know, you either have empathy or you don't.

I guess-- I would guess that the more you travel

and the more you've seen of the world,

how people live, how hard they fight every day to live,

what people are willing to do to feed their families...

you know, maybe it becomes more personal.

But the fact is we are in a position to do something.

It will have a tangible beneficial effect on the planet.

So it's not a lot to ask, I think.

And one can enjoy the smug self-satisfaction

of doing the right thing.

How often do you get to do that?

Food waste is something that each of us

can do something about individually.

In the way we buy,

in thinking before we throw things away.

You can't-- you can't be for food waste.

I do think the first two rules are eat real food,

and it's easy to identify real food

'cause most of it doesn't need a label.

The second is learning how to cook.

Cooks tend not to waste food.

The question is, where do the creative ideas

for solutions to food waste, where are they gonna come from?

I mean, look at Greek yogurt, look at quinoa, look at kale,

They start out with chefs, because we found

all these things different and delicious.

And yes, they got adopted and they made their way

into mainstream culture, actually very fast.

I think if people are a little bit more open

with what they're eating, that will definitely have

a direct effect on food waste.

If I can just continue to be excited about food

and turn people on to things I'm excited about,

hopefully that can help with the problems that we face.

One of the things that excites me most about food waste

is how accessible it is.

Everyone can participate.

It doesn't matter where you are,

it doesn't matter how much money you have,

you can reduce the amount of food waste.

What that means is you can put more money

back into your own pocket.

What it means is you can reduce your own carbon footprint.

The first step in reducing food waste

for every single individual is simply to buy less food.

Number two, care about food.

If we care, we'll stop wasting it.

Number three, be an active citizen,

because we collectively have the power

to demand change from the food industry.

Unless we shout about it, they'll never change.

One of the most important subjects

of this big cultural thing,

it's you, that you communicate these kind of ideas,

because we have to spread the words

and explain to the world what we are doing.

I would have made this movie a lot darker.

Would have really made people just feel

just horrified and guilty,

and you know, the more people who watch this film

and went immediately and hung themselves in the shower

out of guilt, the happier I'd be.

Just, I mean instinctively,

I don't actually want you to go hang yourself.

I believe it's perfectly okay

to, you know, just scare the living shit out of people.

Um... I'm much more of a scream at the top of my lungs,

"We're fucking doomed.

"You got five more years, people.

"You're gonna drown in your own shit.

"You're gonna be chased down the street

"with, like, radioactive stray dogs

chewing on your nut sack if you don't stop wasting chicken."

Maybe you should look at it like this.

I'm a completely self-interested aesthete

who's worked with expensive ingredients their whole life,

who's traveled around the world, who understands

what's delicious and what's not so delicious.

And my entire argument in participation in this film

is probably based on that.

I'm a terrible person,

but you should listen to me anyway.

♪ Oh, I love trash ♪

♪ Anything dirty or dingy or dusty ♪

♪ Anything ragged or rotten or rusty ♪

♪ Yes, I love trash ♪

♪ If you really wanna see something trashy, look at this ♪

♪ I have here a sneaker that's tattered and worn ♪

♪ It's all full of holes and the laces are torn ♪

♪ A gift from my mother the day I was born ♪

♪ I love it because it's trash ♪

♪ Oh, I love trash ♪

♪ Anything dirty or dingy or dusty ♪

♪ Anything ragged or rotten or rusty ♪

♪ Yes, I love trash ♪

♪ Here's some more rotten stuff! ♪

♪ I have here some newspaper 13 months old ♪

♪ I've wrapped fish inside it, it's smelly and old ♪

♪ But I wouldn't trade it for a big pot of gold ♪

♪ I love it because it's trash ♪

♪ Yes, I love trash ♪

♪ Anything dirty or dingy or dusty ♪

♪ Anything ragged or rotten or rusty ♪

♪ Yes, I love trash ♪

♪ Now, look at this-- rest of this junk ♪

♪ I've a clock that won't work and an old telephone ♪

♪ A broken umbrella, a rusty trombone ♪

♪ And I am delighted to call 'em my own ♪

♪ I love 'em because they're trash ♪

♪ Oh, I love trash ♪

♪ Anything dirty or dingy or dusty ♪

♪ Anything ragged or rotten or rusty ♪

♪ Yes, I love, I love ♪

♪ I... ♪

♪ Love trash *♪