Page 17 - foodservice news magazine Nov-Dec 2018

FOOD WASTE
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Camperdown Commons.
We service about 2,500 people a week and we’ve centred our menus and our ethos around farm produce from Pocket City Farms, a not-for-profit farm organisation, that runs a really beautiful farm out the front. Our menus are written on a daily and weekly basis
to emphasise what's fresh and what is getting the least land miles. What we can't source from Pocket City, we source from local suppliers and producers. We really try to make ourselves as sustainable as possible in a big commercial and restaurant environment.
“I think a lot of chefs strive for that perfect plate of food. That naturally brings on huge amounts of waste because they’re demanding say perfect-sized carrots from their suppliers. An awful lot of produce that’s not good enough is then left to one side in search of that perfect plate.”
TONY PANETTA: ICC Sydney is a big establishment. We can do up to 100,000 meals a week. Accordingly, ICC Sydney formed a food philosophy that flows around food and its miles. We have direct relationships with suppliers and while we're able to obtain rescued foods, so to speak,
we are constantly looking to minimise our waste.
AC: Why do commercial kitchens waste so much food in general?
TP: If we knew the answer to that question, we wouldn't be here, but I think there's a lot of things that need to be taken in consideration. Probably one of the biggest things is management. Our business here at ICC is event-based. We know who is coming and how many are coming. Because of that, we can control a lot more of our waste. But smaller operations often don't have that option.
GH: I think a lot of chefs strive
for that perfect plate of food.
That naturally brings on huge amounts of waste because they're demanding say perfect-sized carrots from their suppliers. An awful lot of produce that's not good enough is then left to one side in search of that perfect plate. We use a different approach. We design recipes that accommodate effectively ugly fruit and vegetables or utilise the whole fruit or veg from the root to the tip so we're not wasting anything. We carry that idea through to the proteins in nose-to-tail dining. It takes
a little bit more work or cost to produce that type of food but, inevitably, it's putting far less strain on the environment.
AC: What are some lesser known issues regarding food waste? KB: We’re throwing away so much product. One such
example would be the 23
tonnes of cream cheese in retail packaging recently destined for export. On the actual packaging, one of the Chinese characters was incorrect so it could not be exported. Of course, it couldn't be sold here because it didn't meet Australian labelling standards. It was to be buried
in its packaging, ‘deep burial’, straight from the manufacturer's facility. Fortunately, we intercepted that product and brought it to cheesecake and dip manufacturers at a fraction of the price it would normally
be on the open market.
JB: I think it's actually as fundamental as survival of our species because of what we've done in the last 70 years, we’ve mined our soils, grown food,
and then, discarded the waste, whether into a landfill or into
a sewage farm. I think a lot of
the issues that we have today is because our food is not a complete food and it's not nourishing us anymore. Synthetic fertilisers, created from fossil fuels, generate nitrogen, phosphorous and a
little bit of calcium, allow plush, green, supposedly healthy- looking crops to grow. But there's another 97 elements that are missing, magnesium, manganese, selenium, silicon, aluminium, iron, all these elements that we are deficient in. We can't fix
Left to right: Joost Bakker (sustainability activist); Katy Barfield ( founder, Yume Food Australia); Mark LaBrooy (co-owner and chef, Three Blue Ducks); Gareth Howard (executive chef, Acre); Tony Panetta (executive chef, ICC Sydney); and Anita Connors (editor, foodservice).