Wastrels

A chef on telly bins a load of food and people go nuts. People are stupid. The chef has been hired by a restaurant because he is a northerner with previous Michelin form and the Manchester tourist board want a Michelin Star for their city as the icing on the cake of a "food resurgence" they felt it necessary to engineer in the race to drive money into Manchester. Why have the BBC helped? Because now the BBC is based in Manchester it would prefer Manchester to be good.

Hence, Aiden Byrne is engaged in the business - and if you think it's anything but a business or has anything to do with feeding people you are a naive fool - of winning a Michelin Star. Do you think for a minute that any restaurant with a £3m investment and a cook the fat white man likes isn't going to have lobbed mountains of food in the bin by the time it opens? Recipes must be tested. Who eats the tests? Suppliers must be assessed. Who eats the useless product? Chefs must be trained. Who eats their cock ups? Food must be small and fiddly. What happens to the rest of it? The answer is landfill. Landfill eats the waste that is an inescapable part of operating a restaurant whose high-investment business model encompasses the need to win one or more Michelin Stars.

Eugénie Brazier was a stickler for waste. She scraped the scraps from her customers' plates and fed them to her pigs. All parts of an animal were used and used in the most cost-effective way while peelings and bones went into the stock pot. This was The System. An idea, long practiced by independent French restaurants held in high esteem by Le Guide Michelin, that chucking anything away was fundamentally wrong. But Brazier personally owned both the restaurants at which she won 3 Michelin Stars and had an incentive to economise. She wasn't working for a cash-rich leisure group who were themselves in cahoots with a state-funded media conglomerate and the local tourist board. She didn't do tastings, she made food that people wanted to eat and flogged it for a profit. She didn't try to invent a dish based on Acid House because it would have been really, really embarrassingly stupid to do so. And, if she had, Michelin would have ignored her because they were yet to routinely commend food so fiddly, so disparate from nature, so meddled and messed with that to produce it without considerable waste would be impossible.

Of course some restaurants run on a shoestring by their industrious owners, who probably either cook or serve in them personally, do manage to win Michelin stars, but these same kitchen slaves will never be the Adria, the Rocas or the Atxa of their day. They will be forgotten chefs in backwater restaurants who ran profitable operations serving nice food at the price it cost them to produce. They should be superstars but, because pundits favour artistry, trends, innovation and award ceremonies over simply eating well for a fair price, they never will be.

You cannot, in one breath, bemoan food waste, and in the other spend obscene amounts of your seemingly bottomless cash pit on food endorsed by Michelin because the businesses that sell you this food are not in a position to concern themselves with food waste if their goal is to feed you the fiddly little morsels of widely-fêted culinary art you routinely commend.

Let us imagine a kitchen in a large hotel. Perhaps it has two stars from Ms Burr and her semi-anonymous chums. One of its dishes features tuna. On the plate this tuna comes as a small disc. In the kitchen, to create this disc, the sous chef cuts cylinders from a bright pink slab of tuna, rolls each cylinder in cling film to shape, freezes, then breaks out the £3k meat slicer for his pretty little discs. Then he throws the 30% of tuna leftover in the bin. Why not use it to make a tartar on the lunch menu? Because this kitchen has a budget to win the two Michelin stars its guests expect it to have and that budget factors in waste.There is no requirement and no time to make money back at lunchtime so it doesn't try to.

Venison is bought on the bone to ensure uniform cylinders can be cut from each loin. Some deer are big, some deer are small; Michelin only like deer that are the same, hence, Chef buys the whole thing and whittles it down. Half the meat and all the bones are fried in 50% of their weight in butter and go in a sauce.

The quail dish only uses breasts. The legs go in the bin. They can't go for stock as the dish doesn't feature stock and they would taint the flavor of any non-quail stock.

The kitchen buys in cavolo nero but only uses the tiny heart as the leaves are too big and can't be cut into a suitably delicate shape. Bin.

Field mushrooms are in several stocks but the gills would discolour them so rather than take any chances 50% of each mushroom goes to our old friend Mr Bin.

And on the subject of stocks ten new sauces are made each day, 70% of which Chef knows he will never use but, hey,  those are the recipes and its all in budget!

He's got 20 portions of decent turbot in and wants to do it with a nice vin juane sauce but the recipe makes twice as much as the dishes need. Well, he's not taking a punt on scaling it down - the inspector could be in! - so his brigade make the normal amount and bin the rest. And who cares about that molehill when the 50+ recipes used across six canapes are all for different quantities so it's a routine part of the canape-making operation to sling at least 40% of what's made away.

He bakes five types of bread but can't predict which one customers will grab and bread doesn't keep after a day so 70% of it goes in the bin. No wonder the waiters can be so bloody generous with it.

Customers love their duck breast and, guess what, it's cheaper to buy whole ducks than the butchered breasts. But with no confit on the menu... yep, you guessed it. 


And, oh those bloody veggies. Twice a week the kitchen slaves over ten portions of a seven-course vegetarian tasting menu then chucks the lot away. Well, can you imagine what would happen if a veggie turned up and they couldn't feed them? Not that any of them ever bloody do turn up. The wastrels.

Waste in corporate-owned, high-end restaurants is endemic for two reasons. First because you visit them when they get a Michelin star because you like to eat Michelin stars more than you like to eat food so they try to get Michelin stars, and second because you are an over-monied brat who believes the customer is always right despite not understanding what's involved in allowing the customer to always be right

The customer is not always right. In fact, as you can see based on how these restaurants must think about food in order to please her, she is utterly and routinely wrong. Particularly when she condemns food waste with one corner of her mouth while filling the other with a foie gras parfait that saw a hell of a lot of corn shoved down the gullet of a duck that didn't need to eat it and that duck's legs, skin and carcass chucked in the bin because only its liver and magret had any commercial value.