One Solution to the Food Waste Problem: Eat Your Garbage

Carbon-spewing cars, soot- emitting power plants, and farting cows are the villains of climate change. We may be able to make a difference by focusing on what we take in. What if we ate garbage?

Shuggie's Trash Pie and Natural Wine is a restaurant that opened this spring in San Francisco's Mission District that specializes in ingredients that are not destined for the dump. With the goal of helping slow climate change, the founder and her team rescue bruised peppers, unwanted fish heads, and excess dough crumbs and turn them into gourmet pizzas, snacks, and shareables.

The US discards over $200 billion of food each year. Each year, the equivalent of 37 million cars' greenhouse gas emissions and 21 percent of US water use go down the drain, as a result of being produced.

It's the greatest enemy of good food.

The co-owner of Shuggie's Trash Pie is Kayla Abe.

Abe and David Murphy decided to take action about the problem. We decided to open a restaurant and put all this trash on pizza.

The to-go box in the back of the fridge is one of the main culprits of food waste. Sometimes picky shoppers don't like the look of the produce Sometimes beautiful food is thrown away for reasons other than desirability.

Abe believes that time is the greatest enemy of good food. Time constraints and a lack of cold storage can make comestibles doomed. Shuggies received an excess of summer squash from a supplier. Due to the farmers' limited labor supply, he prioritised picking tomatoes, a higher value crop. The trash pie with thin-sliced deep- roasted squash, melty cheese, fresh tomatillo, chimichurri, fried excess onions, and serrano chili was created by Shuggie's. Abe says that the farmer's headaches turned into their best-selling pizza.