Credit: Huff Post Good News, UN Spokesperson’s twitter
Curious about what a landfill salad consists of? Apparently
it’s made with vegetable scraps, rejected apples and pears, and chickpea water.
Together with the ‘burger and fries’ made with off-grade vegetables, repurposed
bread bun, bruised beet ketchup, picked cucumber scraps, and cow corn fries, the
landfill salad was served to Ban Ki-moon – yes, the United Nations
Secretary-General, and about 30 world leaders including French President
Francois Hollande, at a high-level working lunch at the United Nations’
headquarters in New York last month.
The menu was the brainchild of award-winning chef Dan
Barber, and former executive director of first lady Michelle Obama’s
anti-obesity campaign, Sam Kass. The menu was so designed to hammer home the
point of food waste as an ‘overlooked aspect of climate change’, with food
manufacturing, distribution, consumption and disposal consuming an exponential
amount of energy, mostly derived from fossil fuels, which is the largest source
of greenhouse gas emissions.
If you ask me, I think similar food waste menus should be
served to all and not just world leaders to cultivate the habit of sustainable
food consumption, as well as raising awareness of the sheer amount of food we
dump into the landfill on a daily basis. Here’s the thing: most of the foods
that are dumped are still perfectly good to eat, and just as nutritious as their
better-looking counterparts; they’re dumped because advertisers and marketers
tell us that the foods are too ugly to be presentable. But that doesn’t make
sense, especially if you come to think of the time, energy and effort put into
growing food.
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