Chef Loretta Keller at Seaglass restaurant in the Exploratorium. The restaurant has begun serving cosmetically challenged produce that would otherwise go to waste. Photo: John Storey/The Chronicle
Apples with scars that make them unsellable in the supermarket.
Brutti Ma Buoni — “ugly but good” — is the name for lumpy, beige Italian almond cookies that don’t look pretty, but taste great.
That phrase also describes a lot of the produce grown in this country, except unlike the cookies, it rarely gets eaten. We waste 40 percent of our food, and the National Resources Defense Council reports that 20 percent of produce is wasted at the farm. Fruit and vegetables that don’t meet strict supermarket standards for size and appearance usually go to waste. Or, if the value of a crop suddenly drops and it costs more for the farmer to harvest it than to sell it, it rots in the field.
Palo Alto’s Bon Appetit Management Co. has now started a program that could make a dent on some of this waste on the farm, since it feeds vast numbers of people at the corporate, university and museum cafeterias it runs across the country, including at Google locations.
Odd-sized fingerling potatoes
Called Imperfectly Delicious Produce, the program connects with produce aggregators and farmers to bring items like just-barely scarred apples and broccoli fines (loose broccoli florets) into Bon Appetit kitchens.
Since launching in May, Bon Appetit’s Northern and Southern California sites have purchased 35,000 pounds of produce that might have otherwise been thrown out.
The chef at Dominican University of California in San Rafael, Joseph DeBono, uses those aforementioned apples in chutney and those tiny broccoli florets in soups.
Here in San Francisco, Loretta Keller — the chef at Seaglass restaurant in the Exploratorium — serves odd-size fingerling potatoes with the porchetta. At the same restaurant, scarred butternut squash from Coke Farms is roasted and seasoned with dukkah.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles chef Robert Egger is launching L.A. Kitchen. It’s a nonprofit that’s totally unrelated to Bon Appetit but will forge a similar path by buying both cosmetically challenged and undervalued produce to serve meals to low-income seniors.
Not ugly. Just good.
