Eat the Damn Grapes
Last night was spent catching up on Game of Thrones with a friend on the Upper East Side. We had some wine, some sushi, and a good long sit (necessary after trekking from Brooklyn to get there).
Between episodes, my friend went into the fridge for some grapes. She brought them over but to our dismay, a singular rogue operator was threatening to bring the bunch to its knees; it was covered in a blue fuzzy mold. We both exclaimed our angst in a fashion possibly too dramatic for the situation at hand, in retrospect. But then I shrugged and said, “the rest are still good, just give them a rinse.”
But my question is this, how often to Americans actually just give the grapes a rinse? How often to they throw out the bunch despite the majority of healthy grapes? Or the deformed gourd because “how the hell do you peel this thing? It’s bent at a right angle!” or the bell pepper because “it’s got a spot!”
Last year I came across a project called the Salvage Supperclub. A graduate of the School of Visual Arts created it as a way to draw attention to, and even celebrate, “expired” food. The Supperclub consisted of a prix-fixe menu prepared by a gourmet chef using only ingredients that have been discarded by restaurants for their expiration date or imperfections. The events took place in a long table placed in a hollowed-out dumpster in Brooklyn, to really put some icing on this salvaged cake.
That project got me thinking about sell-by dates. What are they? Why are they? And what’s with throwing out fruits that don’t look photogenic?
Always at the forefront of cuisine standards, France has unsurprisingly remained at the forefront of addressing these questions and redefining food standards. A recent amendment to one of France’s economic equality laws prevents supermarkets from throwing out or purposefully destroying foods that are approaching their expiration dates in order to make room for fresher product. Instead of being destroyed and discarded, these foods are now required by law to be donated to charity.
One ad campaign for French supermarket chain Intermarché celebrates the imperfections of “ugly” produce. The purpose of the campaign is to bring character and humor to what shoppers consider strange and disgusting. The result is an increase in the purchase of such produce, and thereby a decrease in waste.
France and Brooklyn aren’t the only places where such extensive initiatives are being taken. (Let’s be honest, we’d kind of expect it from both of them. Throw in a private liberal arts university too, why don’t you.) Chef and Restaurateur, Mario Batali, has brought green initiatives to all of his restaurants. His restaurants surpass a focus on food waste, seeing that as one cog in the larger machine of sustainability. Batali’s restaurants have banned not only food waste, but bottled water and non-compostable/recyclable products. They’ve considered everything from the energy efficiency of their buildings (LEED certified), to the type of toilet paper supplied in bathrooms (recycled paper). Ingredients used aren’t just locally sourced, some of them are grown in-house. Some of these house-grown ingredients also double as walls. That’s what I call a zero-excess business plan.
It’s easy and instinctual, as we are not scavengers, to instinctually throw out the bunch of grapes with the one moldy dark horse. It’s easy and instinctual, when looking at a bin of one hundred apples, to look past the dented one. It’s easy to rationalize buying a bottle of water when you’re thirsty because you don’t have your glass bottle with you.
All I’m saying is that those grapes were effing delicious and they could have ended up contributing to a larger landfill. (Yea, I know they’re just grapes) but think about how many people don’t give it a second thought. Billions of us. Billions. A professor of astronomy once told me that if you tried to count to one billion, you would be dead before you finished no matter how long of a life you attempted to have. One billion is a large number. The European Union alone throws away about 300 million tons of food each year. TONS. And their stereotype isn’t even waste and excess, that’s our job as Americans!
Long story short, give the damn grapes a rinse.