Your 2X-matched donation today will go straight to NRDC's litigation team, giving it the urgently needed resources to defend our environment from the Trump administration. On our farms, in our stores, and at our dining tables, aesthetics and efficiency are at war. Everybody loses. Last summer I asked Tamar Adler —the only professionally trained chef I know well enough to invite over to my house—to come help me clean out my fridge.
I had reached a point where my kitchen was full of decrepit leftovers and castaways. Unruffled, she chopped the browned bits off the lettuce and gamely sampled a leaf. She peeled root hairs from the carrots. To both these ingredients she added some frost-burned leek scraps and a scraggly spring onion, then flooded this garden of salvage with some chicken broth to make a fragrant, flavorful lettuce soup. A handful of aging walnuts, some limp herbs, a few scoops of old rice, the juice of a shriveled lemon, and a jumble of zucchini matchsticks became a festive-looking salad.
Bacon fat dressed up the tortillas quite nicely: Simmered in chicken stock and the tail end of a tomato-paste tube, they were transfigured into chilaquiles. Had this truly been an Iron Chef competition, the chilaquiles would have won, hands down. Had it been up to me, I probably would have taken one look at the wrinkled, the molded, and the shriveled, and tossed it all in the trash. The language of locavore chefs, the tradition of food writing, and even contemporary food television all tend toward the rhapsodic.
We want only the perfect peach, the just-caught flounder, the newly laid egg. Forty percent of the food produced in the United States gets tossed in the trash. Much of it is perfectly edible, though little of it is beautiful to look at. The waste begins in the fields, where farmers—fully aware that their shipments could be refused by buyers if their products fail to meet size or color expectations—begin the culling process.
From there it journeys to individual supermarkets, whose marketing strategies rely on presenting an image of abundance and perfection. The result: more culling. As my fridge proved, people whose eyes are bigger than their stomachs—or whose actual dinner-making schedules are tighter than their imagined ones—waste plenty, too.
