Philadelphia—Take an onion, Jonathan Deutsch explained. Spend some time with it, thinking carefully what you could do with it. Or with fish bones. Or broccoli stems.
“Think about the potentiality of every item,” Deutsch said.
This is not a culinary Zen exercise. It’s a start to handling your household food waste in a more environmentally sustainable manner.
For Deutsch, a chef, professor, and founding director of the Drexel Food Lab, this is how the home cook should start dealing with our country’s burgeoning plate to trash can problem—one food item at a time.
The Drexel Food Lab has been awarded an EPA grant for almost $740,000 to develop educational videos for home cooks focused on preventing and minimizing food waste, and measure their impact.
Over the next three years Deutsch and his staff will work with 100 households hosting community-based education sessions featuring a series of eight videos on how to reduce household food waste throughout the food prep cycle including meal planning, shopping, consuming, storing, and disposing.
Assistant administrator Chris Frey, of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, said that the grants “will help us identify successful strategies to empower communities to reduce food waste while improving food security.”
