By Melissa Hart
While helping cook supper for 45 guests at the local homeless shelter on a freezing night in January, I thought of Iron Chef. You know the show: Two renowned chefs in kitchens on stage receive boxes of ingredients they must use to create a gourmet, multicourse meal. Right before the timer starts, they’re given a surprise ingredient on which to base their dinner. Salmon cheeks? Kohlrabi? Sea eels? No problem.
But in the shelter’s kitchen alongside the lead cook, I had to admit potential defeat. Our surprise ingredient turned out to be carrots. Enough for 10 carrot cakes -- if we had flour and baking powder. We examined a giant bag of brown-tipped lettuce, a cabbage, half-rotten pears, seemingly-impenetrable Red Delicious apples, a giant block of cheddar cheese and several pounds of limp broccoli.
Once a month, my grandmother used to excavate wilted vegetables from her refrigerator drawers and fry them in tempura batter. I ate them, because even an old shoe would be delicious tempura-fried with soy-ginger dipping sauce. But a new fire code in the shelter’s kitchen prohibited us from frying anything. Ditto sautéing and grilling.
As I got to work chopping a mountain of carrots, I knew we could do better by the people we were scheduled to serve that evening.
By the time perishables donated to a food bank make their way to a homeless shelter, they’re often suitable only for soup. Meanwhile, at the grocery store last month, I asked my favorite produce clerk if he had any carrot tops for my daughter’s rabbit. “Check with the cashiers,” he told me. “And there’s always the dumpster outside.”
Then, he told me the market’s dirty little secret, which I’m sure is shared by most grocery stores across the country. I already knew it, of course. You know it, too: Supermarkets throw out pounds and pounds of perfectly good food every day.
More than half a million people in the United States are identified as homeless on any given night. Almost 2,000 live in my county, many of them children and veterans. Most who arrived at the shelter that night as we scrambled to concoct a decent dinner didn’t care about gourmet food. They craved a hot meal. But they deserved better than what we had to give them. They deserved the fresh produce festooning the top of the dumpster outside my market.
Intrigued by the promise of free rabbit snacks, my daughter and husband had investigated the dumpster. They found a college kid eating hours-old pizza from a plastic bag. An older woman hauled out a sack of giant muffins. My kid came home with a mango, an eggplant and a tomato, each marred by a single nickel-sized bruise.
“Organic?” I asked.
“Organic,” she replied.
Perhaps you’ve heard Tristram Stuart’s Ted Talk on how he’s made it his life’s work to feed needy people with food that would otherwise go to waste. He founded a company that brews beer out of leftover bread, and he once fed 5,000 people in Trafalgar Square a meal of curry and smoothies from thrown-away vegetables.
Or maybe you’ve seen the late Anthony Bourdain’s 2017 documentary “Wasted,” about the 1.3 billion tons of food tossed away each year and the ways in which people rescue it to feed the hungry.
My produce clerk confessed that he takes vegetables out of the grocery store’s garbage if supervisors allow it. He also looks the other way if people are scavenging. “It’s good food,” he reasoned.
I’m not above scavenging to help feed my city’s neediest residents. But it turns out dumpster-diving’s a tricky business. Technically, it’s illegal. If someone gets hurt climbing in or out, they can sue the property owner. Some grocers balk at donating perishable food, lest they inadvertently spread E. coli or salmonella.
One supermarket chain in Oregon donates produce to a landscape materials company where it’s turned into compost. At the nursery, I buy bags of “Love Food not Waste” compost made from produce donated by local markets. But how much more effective would those discarded tomatoes and eggplant be as ratatouille served on a freezing winter night with fresh mango smoothies for dessert?
In the end, the shelter’s chef and I made a decent meal. We thickened carrot soup with pureed canned garbanzo beans and canned pumpkin. We sliced donated canned ham and tucked it between pieces of sandwich bread, topping it with shredded cheese. We made apple-pear sauce.
It was challenging to make something out of almost nothing, even fun. But how much more fun -- how much more gratifying and respectful of both servers and those being served -- to make something out of something.
Melissa Hart is the author of “Better with Books: 500 Diverse Books to Ignite Empathy and Inspire Self-Acceptance in Tweens and Teens(Penguin/Random House, 2019).” She lives in Eugene.