what dietitian Jackie Newgent calls "vintage cuisine" waiting to be morphed into something delicious.
It's not just wasting the food, although Americans do a good job of that: anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of all the food the nation produces is wasted. But when we allow good food to make penicillin in the fridge, we also are wasting trillions of liters of water that went into its production, plus untold dollars in energy and transportation used to get it to our plates. Not to mention all the methane it produces once in a landfill. Let's leave that to the cows.
This isn't a guilt trip, though. Leftovers are tasty. In just two pages of her book, Newgent describes how to turn pizza into an omelet, cooked vegetables into hummus, steak into canapés, cooked rice into a better burger, turkey into tacos and salad with dressing into "pesto."
It's not just wasting the food, although Americans do a good job of that: anywhere from 25 to 40 percent of all the food the nation produces is wasted. But when we allow good food to make penicillin in the fridge, we also are wasting trillions of liters of water that went into its production, plus untold dollars in energy and transportation used to get it to our plates. Not to mention all the methane it produces once in a landfill. Let's leave that to the cows.
This isn't a guilt trip, though. Leftovers are tasty. In just two pages of her book, Newgent describes how to turn pizza into an omelet, cooked vegetables into hummus, steak into canapés, cooked rice into a better burger, turkey into tacos and salad with dressing into "pesto."
