Five Foods Made From Trash

At least 30 percent of food ends up in landfills each year in the United States. Thanks to these five noshes—all made from castoffs—the trash piles are a little smaller.

1

The REPUBLIC OF TEA‘s new line of Sonoma Teas is made from grape skins discarded by Northern California wineries.

2

Elizabeth Bennett, collects wayward apples from under the trees of local orchards, dries them, and turns them into her Handcrafted and Hopeful Cinnamon Apple Chips,

 which are simply dusted with cinnamon. Bennett believes that humans, too, deserve another shot, so she partners with local nonprofits to hire homeless or formerly incarcerated women.

3

Dan Kurzrock was a UCLA student and an avid home brewer when he noticed an inefficiency in the process: Craft brewers need lots of grain to make small batches of beer, and leftovers often end up in the dumpster. Kurzrock co-founded REGRAINED to repurpose that spent grain into granola bars, working with breweries to create the Honey Almond IPA Bar.

4


In 2011, whiskey maker Colin Spoelman was touring a chocolate factory near his KINGS COUNTY DISTILLERY in Brooklyn when he spotted a box of cocoa husks—a fragrant but inedible byproduct of chocolate making—headed for the compost heap. Spoelman suspected that the fibrous stuff still had potential. After some tinkering, he produced a husk-infused Chocolate Whiskey.

5

Zoe Wong, a co-founder of REVIVE FOODS, grew up in Hong Kong, which imports most of its produce. When she moved to California, she was delighted by the abundance of fruit but troubled by the mounds of leftovers, so she began preserving what she could glean from neighborhood trees. Wong’s company now gets its raw materials from a market that happily donates excess produce.

Source: Sierra Club

Excerpted from a piece by Chelsea Leu