Every Saturday, people crowd around a long, wooden table at La Soupe’s Walnut Hills kitchen. They’re here learning how to cook, but not by following a recipe.
The nonprofit hosts “cooking improv” classes to help bridge the gap between food insecurity and food waste.
Students experiment with spices, knife skills and a hodgepodge of rescued ingredients donated to La Soupe by grocery stores or distributors that would have otherwise thrown the items away.
Culinary Education Director Corinna Asbury says the rescued food is different every weekend — it could be pallets of onions a grocer couldn’t sell before the next shipment came in, or a bag of apples that have a few bruises. Often, they look like items people have in their kitchens at home.
“What we do is we work with the students, show them how to cut off bad parts and how to use the rest of the food so that they can make … healthy food for themselves to eat,” Asbury said.
Asbury says the cooking improv skills don’t only empower people to feed themselves, they also encourage students to cut down on planet-warming food waste by using what’s available — even if it’s not perfect.
RELATED: Got a free half hour? You could help rescue food from landfills
Food produces a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, which are major contributors to climate change, according to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research. That figure includes impacts of the food system from agricultural production to packaging to human consumption.
The last step is where people can have an immediate impact by making choices about how and what to eat.
Phillip Walker attended a cooking improv class two years ago. He says it changed the way he uses food.
Walker was previously a line cook. When he’d come across something like a bruised Brussel sprout in a bag, he’d have to throw the whole thing in the trash.
“That doesn't fly here,” Walker said. “We end up going through each individual Brussel sprout and being like, ‘Oh, no, this one's good. Oh, this one's bad.’ ”
Walker is now a chef at La Soupe, transforming rescued ingredients into meals that are distributed to agencies that help people experiencing food insecurity.
Walker says he tries to keep everything he can out of the landfill.
He recommends everyone get creative with food to prolong its use. Walker uses pickling to preserve food before it goes bad, cooks with “ugly” fruits, and makes “catch-all soups” to use leftovers at the end of the week.
“I think the most important thing is just starting to do it, like finding whatever little thing you can do and just make that incremental change,” Walker said.
Change so incremental, it can start with a single bruised Brussel sprout.