World leaders meet and ate food scraps
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and 30 world leaders met for a Sunday lunch prepared by world famous chefs Dan Barber and Sam Kass. The menu, though, features leftovers in every course.
For appetizers, there’s landfill salad made of vegetable scraps and rejected apples and pears.
The vegetable burger is made of repurposed bread buns and leftover pulp from juicing. The burger is best paired with cow corn fries—the kind made of starchy corn used for animal feed.
Chickpea water, the available beverage, is exactly what it sounds—water drained from a can of chickpeas.
“Our lunch was produced from food that would otherwise end up in landfills, emitting methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Food production and agriculture contribute as much to climate change as transportation. Yet, more than a third of all food produced worldwide — over 1 billion tons of edible food each year — goes to waste. That is shameful when so many people suffer from hunger.” said Ban Ki-moon
“It’s the prototypical American meal but turned on its head,” Barber told AFP. “Instead of the beef, we’re going to eat the corn that feeds the beef. The challenge is to create something truly delicious out of what we would otherwise throw away.”
Kass came up with the meal idea inspired by the Climate Change Conference taking place in Paris in November and December. “It’s just unthinkable, the inefficiency in our system, particularly when you look at something of this magnitude,” Kass told the AFP.
United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that one-third of food produced for human consumption worldwide is annually lost or wasted between the time it’s grown and ends up in kitchens, restaurants and markets around the world.
