Fwd: Would you eat trash?

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Loretta Lohman

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Jan 10, 2026, 4:46:11 PM (8 days ago) Jan 10

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It’s been a big week for food, with the Trump administration releasing new dietary guidelines. Not included in the recommendations? Trash.

But high-end restaurants are increasingly putting scraps on menus and cocktail lists. Today’s newsletter looks at the push to cut waste, which can save money and reduce carbon emissions. Plus, your weekend read and listen. Grab a beanless coffee (yes, it’s a thing) and read on.

Want to stay up-to-date on the latest culinary news? Subscribe to the weekly Business of Food newsletter to see how the world feeds itself in a changing economy and warming climate.

Taste the waste

By Emma Court

One morning last fall at the restaurant HAGS in New York’s East Village, chef and co-owner Telly Justice was busy at the stove, toasting mushroom powder made from stems and trimmings. She then whisked in grits and a simmering broth, itself made from discarded summer squash scraps.

Justice spooned the cooked grits over a mousse featuring leftover truffle bits, then topped the plate with chestnut and maitake mushrooms grown nearby with help from the restaurant’s compost. Nearly every component of the dish incorporated ingredients that might otherwise have been tossed — though customers would hardly know it from the price of the multicourse menu, which can run up to $160 for an “omnivore” version that includes wagyu short rib and scallops courses.

Mushroom grits at HAGS in New York City. Photographer: Mill/Melanie Landsman

Everything on HAGS’ menu aims to be zero-waste, Justice says. Her team takes the pulp left over from a tomato-cucumber water, roasts it and then folds it into vegan butter to serve with bread. Tempeh scraps get fermented into shoyu.

“We just want people eating waste,” says Justice, who calls discarded food a failure of imagination. She concedes that “it’s hard work. You have to choose to do it over something else. And we choose to do it.”

As food prices continue to climb in 2026, driven by everything from tariffs to climate change, economic factors have become key to making restaurants take a second look at the considerable waste in their trash bins.

More than 1 billion tons of food get tossed around the world each year in homes, retail stores and the food-service sector. Venues such as restaurants, cafes and cafeterias contribute about 30% of that total, according to a United Nations Environment Programme 2024 report.

A surprising amount of food waste also comes from usable ingredient parts and trim that simply get tossed. The vast majority of that can be consumed, says Vojtech Vegh. Through his company, Surplus Food Studio, he works with restaurants to rescue salvageable foods, from cauliflower leaves to carrot tops and even the white portion of watermelon rinds. If restaurants were ever to get sustainability rankings, Vegh says, 90% “would be labeled ‘wasteful.’”

Restaurants often don’t systematically track their waste and don’t realize the full extent of what they’re throwing away, says Marc Zornes. His 13-year-old company, Winnow Solutions Ltd., works to change that with a proprietary device that records the contents of restaurant kitchens’ trash bins, then analyzes it using a form of artificial intelligence. He says Winnow saves hotels $25,000 a year on average.

“You don’t even have to care about the environmental case for this to make sense,” says Zornes. “The economics of this are there.”

Fine-dining restaurants are often guilty of food waste because the expectation of an elevated experience fosters a culture of excessive trimming. Only the best part of an ingredient — a few perfect wagyu filet slices; the ideal sliver of poulet de Bresse — makes the cut, so to speak.

“The higher the [restaurant’s] quality, the higher the degree of waste,” says Douglas McMaster, the owner of Silo in London, billed as the world’s first zero-waste dining room. “Waste is scaled with excellence.”

One waste-reduced drink doesn’t do a lot to minimize refuse, and greenwashing is a constant refrain in the hospitality industry. Since 2020, the Michelin Guide has bestowed Green Stars. But they rely on restaurants’ self-reporting and are broadly focused on general sustainability, notes Chris Locke, the head of fermentation at Baldío, which bills itself as Mexico’s first zero-waste eatery.

Serving scraps can also be off-putting to diners. For more operators to get on board with waste reduction, it’ll take flexibility from both restaurants and diners, who don’t always like being told how to eat, says HAGS’ Justice.

“What we do is only permitted by what diners are willing to let us do,” she says. To change the culture, “we have to get creative.”

Read the full story, including how Baldío conceives of its dishes to cut waste from the start.

This is heavy

80 billion

The number of pounds of food waste generated by US schools, hospitals, restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses annually.

Another consideration

"Where you live can influence what the environmental impacts of your meat consumption are."

Benjamin Goldstein

Assistant professor, University of Michigan

Goldstein authored a recent study showing widespread differences in greenhouse gas emissions depending on what city you're eating a burger in.

A data center deal

By Michelle Ma, Shirin Ghaffary, and Brian Eckhouse

OpenAI and SoftBank Group Corp. have jointly invested $1 billion in SB Energy, an infrastructure company that’s working with the tech firms on a massive US buildout of data centers to power artificial intelligence.

OpenAI and SoftBank will each invest $500 million in SB Energy to support the energy firm’s growth as a data center developer and operator, the companies said in a statement Friday. OpenAI also said it has selected SB Energy to build and operate its 1.2 gigawatt data center in Milam County, Texas. A single gigawatt is enough to power roughly 750,000 US homes at any given moment.

The SoftBank logo at the company's headquarters, in Tokyo. Photographer: Toru Hanai/Bloomberg

The need for power is leading some tech firms to invest in suppliers or plants, or line up their own energy sources. Meta Platforms Inc. on Friday said it has agreed to deals that could ultimately total more than 6 gigawatts of nuclear power.

SB Energy, which has long been backed by SoftBank, was founded as a renewable and storage developer, but has in recent years expanded into developing, owning and operating data centers. The new funding follows SB Energy lining up $800 million last year from Ares Infrastructure Opportunities funds.

The tie-up with SoftBank and OpenAI adds to a growing web of interconnected deals between tech companies that are helping to prop up the AI sector and raising concerns about the possible fallout if demand for artificial intelligence falls short of expectations. SoftBank is one of OpenAI’s largest investors.

Read the full story.

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Your weekend listen

President Donald Trump wants US companies to rebuild Venezuela’s oil fields after the capture of Nicolas Maduro. This week on Zero, US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse joins Akshat Rathi to discuss why the US is acting like a petro bully, how countries can resist an increasingly aggressive Trump administration and why Democrats are making a mistake by shying away from talking about climate action.

Listen now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.

Your weekend read

Venezuela isn’t the only place being bullied by Trump. The US president has also honed in on Greenland, saying “we have to have it.” He escalated his rhetoric on Friday, saying that “we are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not,” adding that “if we don't do it the easy way, we're going to do it the hard way.” Trump’s administration has also considered sending money to Greenlanders, according to Reuters, an idea that lawmakers have rejected.

The intense interest in the island nation is being driven by national security concerns as well as accessing Greenland’s vast resources. The reason those two issues are on the radar? A warming world is making the Arctic more accessible.

Your weekend read comes from Andrea Palasciano, Sanne Wass, and Kirsi Heikel, who break down what’s happening in Greenland and how Europe is weighing its response to the US. For more reporting on the growing geopolitical tensions around the island, please subscribe to Bloomberg News.

The Greenland coastline Photographer: Odd Andersen/Getty Images

In this new era of bare-knuckle politics, Greenland is the perfect prey for Trump.

The island is in a resource-rich and strategically crucial Arctic region, where both Russia and China have growing ambitions. It also has a special relationship with the US via a 1951 defense agreement allowing the US to build military bases on the island.

Greenland — as large as Texas and California combined but with just under 60,000 inhabitants — has no standing army of its own, and Copenhagen controls its security and foreign policy. However, the territory is self-governing and controls most internal affairs, and has not been a Danish colony since 1953.

In recent years, the Arctic has become a geopolitical hotspot.

Russia has been flexing its muscles in the region, banking on the melting ice to develop a new, shorter shipping route along its northern edge. China, one of Russia’s main supporters in its invasion of Ukraine, is similarly eyeing the routes and showing its own Arctic ambitions.

NATO has taken notice, starting to develop more cohesive Arctic security efforts. But not fast enough for everyone.

Trump also loves to defy his naysayers, and achieving something his predecessors didn’t would offer him the kind of grand, historic gesture he relishes.

Crucially, Greenland falls into a political gray zone. The territory is technically not an EU or NATO member, even though it theoretically enjoys many of the organization’s protections. That makes Greenland a relatively soft target for Trump, whose team has openly stated that no one would fight the US over the remote land.

“What we’re asking our European friends to do is to take the security of that land mass more seriously,” Vance said on Thursday. “Because if they're not, the United States is going to have to do something about it. What that is, I'll leave that to the president.”

European officials are now furiously working the phones, trying to grasp at whatever levers they can find. US NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker was hounded with calls throughout the week as flummoxed diplomats tried to determine the severity of Trump’s comments.

Read the full story to find out how European diplomats are scenario planning.