THE VILLAINS OF?climate change?tend be what we put out: carbon-spewing cars, soot-emitting power plants, farting cows. So it follows that we might make a dent in the problem by focusing on what we take in. Like, what if we ate trash?
That’s the premise behind?Shuggie’s Trash Pie and Natural Wine, a restaurant that opened this spring in San Francisco‘s Mission District specializing in ingredients otherwise destined for the dump?这家餐厅专门经营原本要被扔进垃圾堆的食材?. Cofounder Kayla Abe and her team rescue bruised peppers, unwanted fish heads, and excess dough crumbs and repurpose them into gourmet “grandma style” pizzas, snacks, and shareables, all with the goal of helping slow climate change.
Food waste is a major contributor to the problem—the US alone discards $218 billion worth of food each year. Producing these discarded morsels eats up a lot of energy: Each year, the equivalent of 37 million cars’ annual greenhouse gas emissions and 21 percent of US water use all go down the drain.?食物浪费是造成这一问题的主要原因——仅美国每年就丢弃价值2180亿美元的食物。生产这些被丢弃的食物消耗了大量的能源:每年，相当于3700万辆汽车的温室气体排放量和美国21%的用水量都流入了下水道。
“Time is the greatest enemy of perfectly good food.”
Abe and her Shuggie’s cofounder David Murphy (the duo also runs an upcycled pickle brand called?Ugly Pickle Co.) felt compelled to do something about the problem. “So we made the fairly obvious choice of opening a restaurant and putting all this trash on pizza,” she says.
Food waste has many culprits besides forgetting one’s to-go box in the back of the fridge (although that plays no small role; consumers generate over 40 percent of food waste). Sometimes picky shoppers snub their noses at cosmetically unappealing yet perfectly edible produce 有时挑剔的消费者会对那些外表不好看但完全可以食用的农产品嗤之以鼻. Other times, beautiful food gets tossed for reasons that have nothing to do with desirability.
“Time is the greatest enemy of perfectly good food,” says Abe. A lack of labor or cold storage plus time constraints can spell doom for comestibles. Recently, one of Shuggies’ suppliers approached them with an excess of summer squash. The squash was in perfect shape, but due to the farmers’ limited labor supply, he prioritized picking tomatoes, a higher value crop. So Shuggie’s salvaged the vegetables and Hawt Squash was born: a trash pie topped with thin-sliced deep-roasted squash, melty cheese, fresh tomatillo, chimichurri, fried excess onions, and serrano chili. The farmer’s “annual headache ended up turning into our best-selling pizza,” says Abe.
In an effort to use up every last crumb, Shuggie’s upcycles food byproducts. Its pizza crust substitutes water for whey, a byproduct of Shuggie’s house made cheese—and incidentally, a water polluter—and it gets its texture from oat flour left over from oat milk.
Shuggie’s also aims to break down cultural stigmas against certain foods. It serves no prime cuts of meat, only “livers, gizzards, hearts, and chicken feet.” If that grosses you out, Abe implores you to examine your biases. Shuggie还旨在打破对某些食物的文化偏见。它不供应上等肉，只供应“肝、胗、心和鸡爪”。如果这让你感到恶心，Abe?恳请你审视一下自己的偏见。
“Offcuts 边角料? are truly a cultural construct,” she says. “There is a delicious world outside of chicken breast, I swear.” To prove the point, she invites you to try a dish of beefheart meatballs with a wilty green emulsion made from spotty, sun-drenched, unsellable greens; harissa; and mint. “Solving food waste really does mean eating adventurously,” she adds.
Rescuing unloved food takes work, and the Shuggie’s team spends considerable time talking with suppliers, ferreting out where along their supply chains edible food is falling through the cracks. 拯救不受欢迎的食物需要付出努力，Shuggie的团队花了相当多的时间与供应商交谈，找出他们供应链上哪些地方的可食用食品被遗漏了。
To have a measurable impact on the planet, Abe acknowledges that one restaurant can’t do it alone. “Our bigger mission is looping others into this battle,” she says. “Instead of scaring people into change, we need to celebrate environmentalism, and make an otherwise terrifying topic exciting and delicious.”?为了对地球产生可衡量的影响，Abe?承认，一家餐厅无法单独做到这一点。她说:“我们更大的任务是让其他人加入这场战斗?！薄拔颐遣挥Ω每窒湃嗣亲龀龈谋?，而应该颂扬环保主义，让一个原本可怕的话题变得兴奋和美味?！?/p>
