Don’t be a loser—fight food waste with friends
A special guest post!
Welcome back to Every Corner, my monthly-ish newsletter about eating and restaurants in Toronto. Today, a special treat: a guest post from my friend and great writer Rachel Chen. Rachel, someone I dine with frequently, writes about fighting food waste through your social circles. As someone who tries to pawn off food to my friends every time I see them, I loved this essay. I know you will too.
I have always loved the story of Stone Soup—where hungry tramps or soldiers, depending on what version you read, tell villagers that they can make soup from a stone. At first, no one believes them but as cooking begins, an onion is asked for and then a potato, and little by little, everyone from the village is bringing an ingredient and they end up with a massive pot of stew to share.
More recently, I followed Annie Rauwerda’s real life stone soup story on TikTok, where the Wikipedia influencer decided to start her own “perpetual stew” after reading a Wikipedia page on the concept. The idea has medieval roots, where stew was cooked and then the pot was never fully emptied as ingredients were added regularly. Rauwerda began to share the stew with her neighbours in Bushwick as a community-building idea, and strangers brought their own ingredients to cook so long as they were vegan (to keep the stew accessible to all).
Today, we live in a time of individual excess and societal loneliness. Canadian households throw away an average of $1,300 away in food waste per year and 1 in 10 Canadians say they are always or often lonely. Depressing how this lonely abundance leads to waste. The simple solution to both, is honestly to invite people over to eat. Get over sharing leftovers, and you will find friends.
Before I go on, because media literacy has declined to the point that people have forgotten to ask themselves, “who is the intended audience of what I am about to consume?” This advice is obviously for those who often find themselves with food waste and not those regularly facing food insecurity where having someone over would truly break the bank. To be clear, you do not need to be wealthy to be drowning in too much food. As pointed out in The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A guide to spending less while enjoying everything more, the average daily consumption of North Americans today outweighs anything even a king could consume in the past.
We cannot pretend that we have no agency in this business. Henry Dimbleby writes in Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and Our Planet Into Shape, on average, “Food has become much cheaper, as a proportion of average household income. We have stopped thinking of food as a precious commodity, and grown accustomed to buying and discarding it without too much anxiety.” The obvious response is to only buy what we know we will eat, but so many of us continue to struggle with this. We have created a wasteland from our excess.
That said, this is not all our fault. There is the singles tax to consider, in that food is regularly sold in bulk to meet economies of scale (and who benefits from that but corporations and perhaps families of five like the one I grew up with, but a rarer occurrence as birth rates decrease globally?) We have mostly eliminated the kind of neighbourhoods where buying fresh food daily is the norm and we have perverted our food systems.
“Food waste is used as a justification for refrigeration, but refrigeration also seems to encourage waste,” writes Nicola Twilley, in her book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. “Part of the reason for that is that refrigeration was implemented for the most part in order to optimize markets rather than human and environmental health.”
And the more we automate, the more hours we spend working and the less time we have for daily shopping where you meet who your food came from, let alone time to cook and process the food we buy in bulk because we think it is cheaper. Society has also chosen to deprioritize cooking skills and creativity, making people less equipped to avoid food waste with clever cooking and more likely to antisocially order takeout or eat out at fast-food restaurants.
What then? We are left with more food than we can eat and we are lonely because we have been taught to value convenience over making time for life—and then the same companies selling us convenience and waste (because they don’t care if the food they sell is eaten, only if more is sold than last year) sell us answers, writes Chris van Tulleken in his book Ultra-Processed People:Why We Can’t Stop Eating Food That Isn’t Food.
Tech titans have spent the last few decades funnelling us into scrolling solitude and now apps like Timeleft and 222 are trying to sell algorithmic friendship back to us with limited results. Corporations are selling us ultra-processed food and then selling us Ozempic. Ridiculous—we must make our own solutions.
You could pay for a fancy dinner with strangers you owe nothing to, knowing you’ll never have to see them again. Or you could pay for a hobby—sorry, I mean a six-week class—and hope that everyone will eventually become close enough that you can all go out together.
Or, the next time you open your fridge and realize you have too much or too little to eat, you could simply invite someone over for dinner.
In Robert Putnam’s seminal work Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, he found stats showing that in the 80s, about 40 per cent of Americans hosted friends at their homes but in the 2000s, this number had dropped to less than 20 per cent. Fortunately, there has been a rise in the desire to host friends at home — but let’s keep the consumerism to a minimum, you don’t have to be Martha Stewart.
If you only have one friend, great. Make it a potluck so everyone can clean out their fridge and tell them to invite one of their friends and so on. You don’t even have to clean your house first, not that much anyway. Then after sharing a meal, go for a walk together. You will be happy to have avoided food waste, and you will get to meet people you will actually see again.
You’ll see, you can make a whole pot of soup from a stone.
Three bites I can’t stop thinking about:
🍅: We might be firmly out of peak tomato season, but I recently attended a special coffee-themed dinner put on at Trinity Market where the chef, also named Rachel, served up a unique take on a caprese salad: poached tomatoes, coffee-ish balsamic glaze, micro greens, bocconcini and topped with melon for a sweet crunch.
🍜: Jerk chicken chow mein from Patois ($29). I have had this a million times and it just hits every time. Flavourful and juicy chicken meets crispy egg noodles for one of the best bites in the city.
🦞: Spaghetti alla Chitarra con Sugo all’Astice from Toca ($68). A nearly $70 pasta better be good and this lobster bisque pasta served with half a Nova Scotia lobster is… very good. Not TOTALLY sure if it’s worth the price, but the tomato sauce gets a really umami-ish boost from the lobster bisque which is a pleasant and very welcome surprise.